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Comment by phendrenad2 | Hacker News Reader

"The internet" doesn't really exist, now, now does it? 99% of users are living in an AOL-style world, where they live within walled gardens. Why leave twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit? There's nothing out there but a wasteland of crumbling has-been sites. Sometimes you'll find yourself on a blog or news article, but you just click/tap the back button to go back to the walled garden. Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed. And what really did this is mobile devices. And it isn't necessarily a bad thing, although I do miss the old vbulletin discussion days.

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There's lots of good content out there, but the problem is finding it. A Google replacement wouldn't be any better, because everyone's attention would be directed into optimizing new replacement site.

It frustrates me when people say "Google should search reddit by default." The reason reddit is still halfway decent is there isn't as much money in gaming it, but there would be if the entire world was sent to it.

I think the best path to a "Google replacement" is probably to reinvent Yahoo or dmoz. You'd still have to human curate the worthwhile sites through a ton of SEO spam and, if you go the dmoz route of volunteer curators, that's an attack vector for spammers but I think it'd be much more manageable than trying to build an index of the entire web and search it. A new general purpose web directory would also help mitigate probably the biggest harm that Google's algorithm has caused to the web: the death of the "links" page as a standard part of a web site due to sites trying to increase their pagerank by reducing outbound links.

That kind of web directory would work if it were just used by a small group of adherents.

But it would encounter the same problems typical to big tech once any "real" money started flowing in.

The only way to make a better replacement is to make a 100 competing replacements each with substantial market share. They don't even have to be better implemented than Google, getting rid of market dominance alone would improve results because SEO assholes wouldn't have time to optimize for all 100.

Your perception is how the vast majority of people see the web. But you're completely wrong about "nothing out there" and "Nobody is subscribing to your RSS feed." Just because you're trapped in the gardens doesn't mean there aren't communities of people who never went in them in the first place.

Yes, there's a thick layer of for-profit walled garden crap on top but the actual web of websites (not applications) is still out there and it's bigger than ever despite being proportionally much smaller compared to the smartphone/megacorp users.

Showing up on the internet and subscribing isn't enough to scratch the itch.

Games are the place to go and 'show up'.

The internet is no longer used for sharing relatable information. It saturated and walled off valuable information a decade ago.

I wish your site would have an RSS feed. In our days you have to build your own scrapper

>twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/reddit

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