Where Have All the Websites Gone?
fromjason.xyz
fromjason.xyz
One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather than type URLs or manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard.
The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on websites?
EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd see today, where most content follows the same patterns to achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could not be successful today.
I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often wonder why. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don't have any solutions to:
- Engagement: SU lived and died on it's users, a paragon of the crowdsourced model. For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting people from the mire to function
- Gaming the system: One of the things that made SU great was that there wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there. If you 'stumbled' on a thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or otherwise *actually valuable*. These days, I can't imagine a successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO vultures.The same SEO mindset/paradigm is used to make sure someone's spam surfaces on any variety of platforms, not just Google Search. We can argue about the specific semantics of "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) not being the right word to use for gaming TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat algorithms. Perhaps a different word is needed.
But the above poster's sentiment is not flawed, even if you think it's overreaching within a specific meaning of "SEO".
Here is one I found with a 5 second search: https://cloudhiker.net/
It works great. It's fun. Hopefully people will enjoy it. But I dont think we need to make excuses for why its not more popular.
Which was a great post and now I understand more than I did about how air filters work...more complicated than I'd thought.
Maybe I should give cloudhiker a try.
when you block a vacuum cleaner the motor spins faster and uses less electricity, it just sounds like it's "working harder" but if there's less stuff (air) there to create friction then it's working less hard. So the heavier filter material using less electricity makes sense, especially when you take into account the lower "CADR" - wtf-ever that is.
Furthermore , all of my "DIY" air filters do a remarkable job, and they move very little air compared to the fans they're duct taped to, but they still turn black if i don't clean them every month or two.
Five Tips to Make Meditation Easy and Enjoyable - Video Five questions that beginning meditators…
Not exactly what I was hoping for.
It worked better, didn't require an extension like CH and then at some point they changed and all the content on the site went downhill. As others in the thread have mentioned, it was starting to become SEO'd.
In my hubris I assumed there wasn't anything comparable that was live, but this is pretty awesome. Glad to have egg on my face here.
For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A modern SU would often send you to the major social media sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!" banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I could just stay in one app and see so much of the same content?
May I suggest inclusion of the following snippet in the <head> section of every page on such a site:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">
I doubt it is even that, or close, if you take any average reading.
> I don’t understand why some of these small blogs on niche topics even have ads.
I think in many cases they have the ads there just in case one day they randomly get mentioned in a high-profile place, get a pile of traffic, and that makes them an amount in ad revenue worth caring about. Of course, they probably underestimate the effect of such a glut of traffic, most likely their site will grind to a halt long before much ad revenue is totted up, and their “15 minutes” will be over before it is back up again.
In some cases it is simply that they've chosen to host somewhere “free” where they have little or no control over the ad content, and probably never see a penny of any revenue from it (the host takes that in exchange for the “free” services).
It seems a bit wild if those two could make any difference in costs. I mean, if you have one visit a month and pay per megabyte then sure, Google would maybe show up in stats, but otherwise?
This effect was apparent back before smartphones became ubiquitous, where desktop users (especially more casual/less technical) were spending disproportionate amounts of time on Facebook and YouTube. It's where we first started seeing people sourcing their news exclusively from social media.
Some qualities of apps may bolster this effect, but the root problem lies in the addictiveness, convenience, endlessness, and network effects of large platforms.
These major platforms offer a much more streamlined UX for passively consuming content than a web browser, and most people seem to prefer that simpler UX.
The thing is though, with the amounts of money involved even small improvements in engagement and retention justify considerable expenditures. Their willingness to spend on things like native apps is not necessarily representative of the impact of those things.
I'd also note that if you want to just, say, consume from YouTube, spam sites are no longer in the picture.
Google is in large part to blame for this, if not the main reason.
Many years ago, Google started updating their search algorithm to heavily prefer specific domains like govs, edus, or handpicked ones like Reuters or Microsoft.
I used to run my own blog and forum, and it used to be on the top of the search results for the niche it occupied. After the changes, it fell off the front pages and I'd often see the top search result being a link to a random reddit comment mentioning the search phrase and no other content.
It was at that point I realized that there was no point in running your own website to create "content". You can't compete with domains whitelisted by Google unless you have a lot of money to spend on SEO.
Some people point to the "Panda" update as when this all started happening.
What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.
That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.
Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.
It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".
People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.
But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees.
But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead.
> But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.)
4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them.
Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states:
You will not post any of the following outside /b/:
[...]
b. Racism
[...]
Please refrain from personal insults. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/ users is "/b/tards".
In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned upon in this day and age.
That's a bold claim. It requires a single counter-example to disprove. I take it seriously, so your statement is empirically wrong. Please retract it.
Perhaps you have some kind of impairment that prevents you from understanding subtleties of informal speech, but I think it's more likely you're just taking a piss.
> I take it seriously
Then you should check out the text under the title on /b/ :)
The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.What evidence would it take to change your mind?
EDIT: you changed your reply to make it less obnoxious, but I won't come back to this discussion regardless.
What are you trying to achieve here, exactly? Did something trigger you to start behaving in this way?
It's a proxy for "Does your response to this topic involve trapped-priors?" Most people aren't willing to reveal or acknowledge they have trapped-priors and so it jumps to the end of the conversation where they simply leave. It's saves my time discussing topics by avoiding interactions with close-minded people.
It, like every other community, has an aggregate identity built from the contributions of the individuals within the community.
> Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states [racism is only allowed in /b/]
If you honestly believe that /b/ is the only place on 4chan where you will find racist sentiment you need to have your head examined.
I suppose the rules are trying to say that you should avoid such characterizations, but that’s a dubious rule.
Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well. Not all arguments are as clear cut as 1+1=2, and there are other criteria by which arguments can be evaluated.
> Would it be ok to praise the quality of the argument? If so, it should be ok to criticize it as well.
Why would the former imply the latter? It is ok to give gifts to people, but not to steal from them.
It’s a claim about the nature of an argument. Do you believe it’s not possible for an argument to be idiotic?
> Why would the former imply the latter?
Because restricting speech that’s critical leads to a degradation of the quality of dialog.
Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?
No, I believe that an argument is either valid or invalid. Any other characteristic is meaningless in pursuit of truth.
Consider the meaning of the term "idiotic": something that only an idiot would say. Therefore, "that is idiotic" means "that is something that only an idiot would say", which in turn implies that the person saying it is an idiot.
> Idiotic arguments exist. So do spurious arguments, disingenuous arguments, bad arguments, pointless arguments, dishonest arguments, and so on. Which of those adjectives would you like to ban when discussing the quality of an argument?
The only one I'd like to ban is "idiotic", since it's the only one that insults the person. "Dishonest" is a little tricky, since it's hard to prove someone's intentions or honesty, but depending on the context it might be okay. All the other adjectives are only describing the quality of the argument, without insulting the person - and while meaningless by themselves (what does "bad argument" mean?), I'd consider them fine to be used, as long as further elaboration is included.
Some examples of other adjectives I'd ban are "retarded", "stupid", "foolish", "lazy", "malicious", since they all insult a person or imply bad motivations, without providing any information.
>created: August 16, 2012
>karma: 16769
Dude, you need to take a hard look at yourself. Looking at your last comments, it seems that you've been drinking your own kool-aid and truly believe you have the objective truth about everything. It's either that or you're a keyboard warrior in desperate need for an ego boost.
I'm not sure what "most opinionated" would mean or how'd you determine relative levels, but I would bet whatever metric you chose wouldn't find the most opinionated people on 4chan. Also just because people say things online doesn't mean they actually hold that opinion.
> I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved
Oh, ok, you weren't actually responding to the parent comment at all.
And then they came up with QAnon, not out of any sincere concern for "the children," but just as a shitpost that took off because it was too on the nose, and now legitimate efforts to curb child abuse are being hamstrung by this insane obsession they've bred into the zeitgeist to see trans people as "groomers" and secret pedo conspiracies everywhere.
And yet, even though they'll gladly take credit for it, none of them saw Epstein coming. Sure, one anon posted about Epstein's death before it hit the news. That's about all they can legitimately take credit for, but overall they've done more harm than good.
> they got
> they wanted
> they equate
> and then they
> they'll gladly take credit
4chan is not a person, or even a coherent population.
You want the world to be simple, but it's not, even if, apparently, you never had in your life to face the fact.
If only you’d considered this yourself before posting.
It is sad that the popularity of internet has reached such proportions that people are no longer responsible for what they read by their own choice, but rather people seem to be responsible for what they write, regardless of the fact that anyone can choose not to read it.
Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be.
Between death threats and insults directed at real people - and a fictionary book, there is usually a difference, even though books can be bad as well, if they are directed against certain people (e.g. Mein Kampf).
There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
1. National law
2. Facebook TOS
3. Group rules
Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then.
At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected.
That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere.
Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.
It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content. The quality of content on the web now is higher than its ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a skull playing a trumpet in a site header.
And that's never going away.
Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.
I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).
It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.
It's just sad.
Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.
I love it. Though FaceTokGram rolls off the tongue easier.
Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.
Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.
For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax machines. They are an elite organization and didn’t care about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later, they do care a lot about what’s on the internet.
Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad
I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.
I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.
One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.
IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.
Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.
without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark
I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed.
It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ for this.
I'd love to see more of these.
Link blogs are different though: posting to those genuinely takes a couple of minutes per link. I've maintained my link blog happily while having a full-time job.
Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed that boat, but that was my impression.
> I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline.
Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that "websites" started declining as social media platforms took off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a reaction to and rejection of those platforms.
Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back in the day people would login to AIM after school or something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one activity that your friend group would do among other things (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the limits of their friend group or were always online, but I think the experience was far less common than it is today. For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone line, rather than the central forum for all communication and interaction.
> Does that timeline for that theory make sense?
That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old web". However I do think that coziness was present in early social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of socialness?
edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness" is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the chatroom/messaging paradigm.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
Dunno if it's actually useful, we'll have to see. I'm not one to shy away from feature creep though, and a lot of people are requesting these sorts of things...
This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.
Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.
Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)
The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.
But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.
As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.
Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
1. (1) pastime, interest, pursuit -- (a diversion that occupies
one's time and thoughts (usually pleasantly);
Interesting take
Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.
And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3, way too late, and still with little support. The reason a lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm not accusing you of that attitude! I'm commenting on others I've seen many times over the years)
In a business selling software, if you're willing to take some sales loss/mad customers, you can just say in software 2.0, you're going to protocol 2.0.
On the open web/OSS the rest of the world can tell you to screw off... or they can just not upgrade and your software that's a step ahead breaks. Then you also have commercial interests that shove FOSS/1.0 on some device and want to change users to upgrade the firmware so users stay on the old stuff forever.
Commercial software tended to get more features because the software was based on monopolies they had full control of.
What monopolies?
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great websites therefore have a start and an end. We should be archiving these websites, not telling people to "just post anyway" so that the site doesn't disappear from Google Search.
For a Gen Z parallel to this, look to any Reddit thread about how some Youtuber they worshipped a decade ago has either disappeared or is making low-quality content to pump affilliate links. We wouldn't want that happening to our favorite writers of yesteryear. There's no shame in calling time on something.
20 years ago, maddox.xmission.com was my go-to place for rants and laughs. The site is still around, but I've changed, so my interests are elsewhere. Similarly, I can't expect the site's author to still be playing the same character that made me bookmark the site all those years ago.
I have taken a look at hyperview and tried it out. That's probably the only way I'll ever do another mobile app.
* Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard
* Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers
* Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.
I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
And then everybody started using that to add trackers and push ads.
Web3 as a brand is probably dead having been tarnished by association with the cryptoscam community, but there is some hint that the zeitgeists is for both creators and consumers wanting a more direct relationship that can only really come via more decentralization of control.
Yes, it is. It's only superficially similar (technically "user-generated" content). It's a qualitative difference. The fundamental difference is human-curated vs algorithmic. You go on youtube or instagram or tiktok and all you see is what the algorithm pushes: usually the shittiest most junk content imaginable. It's a qualitative difference from having your blogs and following links and etc.
The other main difference is of course that it's now all commercial. Everything everywhere, be it a google search for "best blender" to a youtube frontpage, is trying to sell you stuff or to make you click on ads. It contaminates everything.
Web 2.0 was all about networks and sharing. Heck, one of the biggest ideas at the time was "mashups". If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) got its start there. Yahoo! Pipes was a thing. Websites would freely provide RSS feeds you could not only subscribe to in your Reader but also use to create your own news feed in your dashboard that also showed you the latest issue of your favorite webcomic, the weather forecast and a stock ticker. Everything was beta. Most of it was free. Much of it could be fed into other things. Scraping was for hobbyists, not startups.
If anything, the walled gardens were Web 2.1. When companies realized that keeping data inside the platform rather than sharing it makes it easier to monetize.
I think if we're going with version numbers it also makes sense to describe the dot-com bubble as Web 1.0 as the biggest change that led to it was the massive increase in the number of people with Internet access making the Web commercially interesting (or viable). What some HNers fondly remember as the old Web is either the late pre-Web 2.0 days with webrings, Geocities and personal hobby websites (the latter eventually being supplanted by blogs, tumblr, livejournal and so on) or the pre-Web 1.0 days when most websites were hyperspecific hobby projects written by technophiles and hosted on Internet connected potatos or their university's web server.
Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.
Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.
But it's been talked about this way a lot. Think of the ... in Rust posts but replace it with ... on the blockchain.
Btw where are the ... in Rust posts? They've been replaced by ... with AI?
Then Web 3.0 was coined by a bunch of crypto grifters who tried to inherit credibility by extending the x.0 numbering scheme.
It's all rather meaningless. See also: Industry 4.0.
/rant
It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.
Of course excessive advertising and counter measures are always a cat and mouse game but this is once instance where I can blissfully ignore it as a user very easily.
Everything online reads like a magazine.
Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.
A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard.
The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system.
Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.
Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.
Web blogging was fragmented across independent web sites, Blogger and walled gardens like Tumblr, Medium and Twitter and it couldn't thrive on all of them and at the end it didn't thrive on any of them. The best solution is open web and that is independent web sites. Open web provides you freedom to customize whatever you want and you can play with Atom, RSS, comments section etc. Some people are not tech savvy enough to blog but Blogger seems like a good solution because it is easy to use and it is open but unfortunately Google didn't invest in it for years and will probably shut it down sooner or later.
There's no technical reason apps can't be designed to connect you more meaningfully to individuals that you resonate with. The problem for them is once that starts to happen, you don't need the platform as much and your engagement with it drops. It requires a company that focuses on that, and not engagement / pure revenue, as a focus. I'd wager the main reason those companies haven't taken off is people like money. If you are good enough to build such a platform, you're also good enough to make 250k+ _today_. If you are currently making 80k, it is a very hard thing to turn down.
Same goes with old phpbb forums - everyone sits on various discords, and places-pockets of knowledge dies one by one, recently lot of 3d-design related people mourned closure of cgsociety forum.
I used to like giving CDs to friends and family at Christmas: here is some music that you might like that you probably don't know about. I'm sure it was a frog in a boiling pot phenomenon, but it seemed to happen all at once: the recipients all said, "Thanks, but I don't have a CD player."
The same thing with app development -- people want to click a link and immediately start interacting and not need to install anything. I've written a few emulators for old computers that weren't popular to begin with, which already limits the audience to a handful of people who care at all. Even among that narrow selection of people who visit my sites, probably 95% of them can't be bothered to download and install an emulator, and I get it. It would be a fun exercise rewriting them to be web apps, but the inability to seamlessly save/restore disk images to the user's space really harms the experience.
Anyway, I have to attend to my guestbooks and curate a webring.
For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points | 6 months ago | 1960 comments)
“What blogs did you post to in the last month?”
Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com. You don't have to install and constantly update desktop apps because you can load an always-up-to-date webpage in 500 milliseconds. PWAs have access to desktop notifications, serial ports, your local filesystem, etc. They can do everything desktop apps can. With WASM, they can even handle high-performance workloads. The web is just a better way to distribute software.
IMO, operating systems should go all-in on web apps. ChromeOS basically does that. The capyloon project [1] aims to do that for mobile devices. There should be no downloadable apps. "App stores" should just be CDNs. Browser caching can enable offline use. There's no technical reason why the web can't be just as user-friendly as downloadable apps. It's just culture.
And, hopefully making the web more usable would also soften the power of the platform silos.
The web was designed for documents and form. Everything else feels like rudimentary solutions which barely get to what native desktop UI is capable of. And the latter is better designed. Web apps are ok if you want a good enough solution (good for business, I guess) but worse for customers.
Most people use only a handful of tools, and only on few devices. Trying to build something to work for everyone result in something that is worse than a solution crafted for that particular platform.
So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to.
The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.
And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.
For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out).
I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.
There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks relatively speaking.
> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift
on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered failures because the definition of success has radically changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in your domain then your site is failure.
Another angle is Google's algo making people too scared to link out to other sites which was happening around the early 00's.
I tried to sign up for Facebook to make a business page and was instantly banned for no reason. My appeal was denied after uploading a picture of myself. It just doesn't make sense from a consumer or SMB perspective to continue to promote this path but most can't afford not to participate.
Funnily enough though, on New Years Eve 2023 I was talking to a few people about a website that I'd made. The only criticism that I received was that there was no app... it is a one-time-use experience that takes less than 5 minutes, then you never have to use it again except to check order status.
But -- going back to "most can't afford not to participate" -- as I write this I figure that I might as well relent, make the app and start checking into the possibilities with social commerce as to not be left behind screaming about an open internet.
We’ve gone.
Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.
A lot of people here are still thinking with a pre-internet mindset, where because pop culture was mediated by the distribution of physical media or broadcasts at specific times, awareness of certain genres of music and pop-cultural touchstones was strictly gatekept by time, and trends were distinctly linear and generational.
But now all of that is discoverable at the same time. "the kids these days" aren't limited to what's trendy now, and it isn't more difficult to find 80's music than it is the latest tik-tok. And faux-nostalgia (neostalgia?) seems to be a constant pop human culture (indeed, much of it is manufactured by the corporations that control pop culture.) There are whole genres of new music like vaporwave and aesthetic movements that incorporate (at least a vague idea of) the 80s. People watch old shows from the 80s and 90s on Youtube. They look back on a time they never participated in as if it were a golden age of low-tech simplicity.
Of course, the general rule is things become cool again after 20 years to now I guess that would be... the millennium?
As far as personal websites go, the biggest reason the aren't likely to make a comeback is simply that hand-coding HTML and running a webserver has no utility for most people. Even considering all of the negatives of social media and centralization (which, let's be honest, is the fault of many of the people now complaining that the web is no longer cool) the model of software as a service allows people to publish to the web far more easily.
And who knows? "the kids these days" are as aware of the dangers of social media as anyone, that's why they won't be caught dead on Facebook or Twitter, they're all on Discord now or wherever. Maybe personal websites will catch on too just because of retro nostalgia as well.
Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.
I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was Thursday, January 1st, 2009.
Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least.
It is hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in college.
I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything, "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we did.
At my dayjob we do women’s health, actual clinics with real doctors. Many of our users come from Instagram and TikTok ads. Because yes people will in fact choose their doctor based on a good Instagram/TikTok presence. In fact any time I mention the brand to female friends who live in our target markets they go ”Oh yeah! I’ve seen your ads on Instagram”. It’s never search, or a billboard, or a blog, or youtube, or even me telling them about it. They recognize us from Instagram and Tok.
It’s a wild world out there my friend. Makes me wanna yell at clouds every day.
Because an entire generation of new American adults does not use web browsers, like much at all.
Want a burger? You probably open Chrome, go to Google or Kagi and type “Burger $myCity”
People under 25 use TikTok and Instagram and just look for “burger” and are blasted by 300 10s videos of real people munching and smiling. Like a perfect commercial and entirely crowdsourced.
That’s the new internet. The kids only know ‘content’. They don’t know what the fuck an HTML file is.
Do people really just perpetually not know where to get something they want in the place they live?
No but a) people travel and b) the young post-college demographic is usually new to the area. By virtue of being young and freshly out of college. They really don’t know the city yet!
Personally when I travel my search for burgers goes straight to Apple Maps.
You have to take the serious consideration that winning customers from tiktok is going to be a wildly different persona than from google.
Churn and burn practices are for folks who've not seen the 5th year of their used to be sustainable market crash when arbitrary platform dynamics change and they don't realize they've been working with the wrong type of client that whole time.
I work in Healthcare as well. It's just a giant farm so folks will take anyone who is alive and insured. I could see TokTik do well there.
For a proof of concept try https://wiby.me/ -- which seems to be curated more like Yahoo's catalog of yore.
You can find traditional web content we just need more applications that index it properly.
The Google index is dominated by SEO-optimized [sic] clickbait and social media content is well understood to be low bar.
I am lucky I found one in my own language recently. We are a small community, like 250 active users. Most of it is joking, having a blast, and insulting. It's very funny.
For me forums are the best of internet. I don't consider reddit a forum because it has an opaque algorithm. Hackernews is great, but it's threads are very short lived, and it's to big to be a functional traditional forum.
They're not completely dead but there are fewer than there were. And newer forum software like Discourse that tries to mimic Reddit or StackOverflow is not the same.
Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...
The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form underneat
It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
Not just spam.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.
https://deadvey.com https://deadvey.com/blog/index.html https://deadvey.com/blog/feed.xml
First impression of that site: WTF?! Trying to scroll, have a bright red scroll-bar. WADDYA DOIN' WIFF MY BROWSA, DUDE?!
Trying to make sense of the text, having to squint. Switching off uBlock (benefit of doubt, etc.), to see if it messes with some JS/CSS. No joy.
Don't care.
Tab closed.
Done.
https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/
"Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain."
RIP, AB.
In the short term user interests align with platform interests because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature social media platform still around. They turn themselves to poison.
I think it's cause there's no good Content Management system, there's wordpress, it's still very popular, but kind of bloated and hard so manage.
I haven't found any Headless CMS, that I could just self host and attach the data to my website :/
It’s a garden, a stream, a worry board, a playground. It runs on WordPress, now Jekyll, now Hugo, now Ghost. No no, now it’s “handcrafted” HTML and CSS like the old days.
It's the same psychosis that prevents people from shutting up about their note taking system, their ideal journal setup, whether they should use a Moleskine or Leuchtturm, yellow or white paper, ruled or blank.
I don’t see a “cozy” or “small” web of independent minds on the Internet. I see a group of anxious and nervous and restless people trying in vain to assemble a Self and grasping for meaning where there is none.
If you’ve got a personal website, just leave it the fuck alone.
I'm worn down by this kind of chatter, by the hyper-focus on the platforms and the tools instead of the message. It's the same thing with designer portfolio pages. They can't get off the treadmill and they're constantly tweaking their portfolio instead of settling on a good layout and letting their work speak for itself.
There's this endless frenetic energy that pushes people to search for phrases, labels, names, categories, definitions that allow them to rationalize their behavior and justify how they're spending time online.
Listen, I'm the OCD type and I'm guilty of this sort of thing, too. And every now and then I find myself obsessing over tools in a way that's unproductive and I have to stop and pull myself out of that headspace. There's an instant feedback loop to editing themes, messing with fonts, publishing a blog post (that no one will read) and so it's easy to keep going. And it's easy to waste a fuck load of time doing this sort non-work.
Anyway, I feel like I'm watching the progression of a most chronic illness that keeps people tinkering in an anxious state of mind, and that makes me sad. It seems unhealthy to me, but you can do whatever you want!
I still think something like Emacs or Leo is the way forward, the UI/UX just needs to be massively improved.
It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.
Writing as a mode of communication requires effort on both the creator and consumer sides. That effort has many positive side effects, which is why some people still favor it [EDIT: and will favor it for a long time in the future, until something genuinely better shows up]. The problem is that, no matter what, effort is still effort, and people generally don't like to exhaust themselves. Gyms would be chock-full, and we'd have no obesity problem if it weren't so.
Your "century from now" estimate is extremely optimistic, to the point of being completely divorced from reality. If I had to bet, I'd say we will lose most textual content from mainstream consumption in the next 5 to 10 years. My guess is that writing will become the equivalent of today's HTML and JavaScript: a source code to be interpreted by the machine to produce a visual representation that people will consume. It'll disappear into the background and will only be touched by professionals.
This is a very baffling thing to say. Its like saying "I don't think fish gills are an effective form of breathing for fish, but it just happened to evolve like that." Reading and writing is an amazing way to communicate things that need to span time. Street signs, postcards, books, literally everything around you that is man made likely has some form of writing on it.
Reading/writing obviously has limitations...like it is difficult to interpret tone in many of these HN comments...but that is hardly a nail in the coffin of the form of communication.
Writing is more durable than it is desirable, and as its durability is matched by video and digital devices, I expect its presence to lessen.
Plenty of people like lots of bad things because we have monkey brains, stop thinking that just because a group likes something, it is good. I watch the behavior day in and day out...people watch HOURS of content per day, and at the end they have synthesized almost none of it. A majority of social video and audio is just a way for people to entertain themselves and a buffer against being alone with their thoughts. I wholeheartedly agree that audio and video can be great learning and communication tools. To say that is what is happening on a majority of social media is extremely misguided.
Adding to that: the critique of writing has a long history going back all the way to Plato. This is not a new topic.
Like I actually can't understand how your argument is: "people are watching more videos, therefore reading is bad". Did you even think that through?
And in case this isn’t already crystal clear (and apparently it isn’t for you): I like books. I like reading. I have studied the history of the printing press and the book much, much more you have, I assure you. I find the transition of technology fascinating and think the internet and video is a similar revolution to the printing press. That is what my comment is about, not your puerile attempt to make me seem like I don’t like reading.
It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.
And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it doesn't really matter if reading is better than watching a video if people prefer to watch videos.
I also specifically said it's not an issue of impatience, but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.
And maybe mass literacy hasn't been around for millenia, but written form of communication and story telling certainly has.
Seems like you may be a lost cause already.
Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I'm describing what I perceive to be a societal shift, not my personal thoughts on whether I think it's good or bad.
I guess it "wouldn't matter" if in 50 years everyone is just a mush brain on their couch scrolling TikTok getting fed through a brain tube. Yeah...hard to see how it "wouldn't matter".
It is just that video content generate so much more monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.
Similar things go to many things that would clearly be superior as text, but there simply isn't that much money in something user will quickly skim over. Instead of forced pre-roll adds and sponsorships.
Anybody tell me what are the other realistic options?
Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then were saying much the same then just with books as their example of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I also remember reading some claim that most people back then were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs too.
[0] right before Harry Potter came out.
[1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New Testament.
What "kids these days" do and don't do has always been a subject of parental concern, but the reality is that people aren't a homogenous group, and being an adult makes you more aware of people who grow up differently than you did.
Just as my mum was concerned about my reading habits (she probably saw a headline about it), so too are you concerned about the current generation's.
My generation was all over the place, and so is today's. The top readers of my generation read widely, most adults when I was a kid didn't read more than the headline; The top readers of the current generation read widely, most adults today don't read more than the headline… and even here, we get comments where people clearly comment without having read the link.
Link and everyone can look, but I sure 'ain't gonna search for this "reliable data" and then try to figure out if what I find is or isn't, in fact, reliable.
If you want to make it permanent for that domain, you click the Reader icon -> Web page settings -> Disable automatic reader view.
Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it! Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social media virality dead, but they can still work out better than trying to fight ad blocking.
Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention and bring you to their shop. It's not really about doomscrolling from there on.
So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily better.
With search engines operated by advertising companies, or companies that profit from advertising. there is an incentive to actively prevent discovery and hide what is not profitable.
Search "too fast" on Google and draw a ban. Even when this is public information being searched; it does not belong to Google.
Facilitating discovery by web users is against Big Tech interests.
Big Tech will do the "discovery"; relax and consume what is presented. Want to go deep into results. Not so fast.
According to Big Tech, what's actually online is not your business. Only what Big Tech wants to show you matters.
What's actually online beyond this might be mostly garbage,^1 but the public is actively prevented from discovering that fact.
At least, they won't discover it via Big Tech intermediation.
Maybe it's not all garbage. But how would anyone know. The advertising company sits in the middle, controlling what can and cannot be discovered.
1. Not advertising garbage but another kind that has no utility for advertising.
Don't believe me. Read some zone files, starting with the com.zone. There are milllions of websites that have become all but impossible to discover via Big Tech intermediation of the web.
Speaking of "Where Have All the Websites Gone?", they are most likely dead. There are millions of dead websites that no longer exist on the WWW. I didn't do any formal research or data mining project but my assumption is that there are more dead websites than there are alive websites or in another words websites that exist today on the web. Since history is a passion of my, I think I and others should do more to explore and perhaps revive those websites for the sake of information and knowledge preservation and retrieval.
Yes, the users are on the big tech apps, but the great majority of these users aren’t interested in niche websites. Many of them began using the Internet for leisure/socializing when they created their first social media app sometime in the mid 2010s. The lack of potential interested users in this space could even be a good thing early on.
For those who want to become a link curator, it would be more in the spirit of the cause to not use a something like Linktree, but rather to self host a minimal site with good discoverability. This barrier of entry, though small, may be too much for most people however
Yes, we vanished, because algorithmic curation is overall a lot more effective. We may be nostalgic of the craftsmanship that came with old school curation, but it's not coming back any more than we moving out of cities to return to a agrarian life.
EXCEPT MAYBE that algorithmic curation is expensive, and advertising revenue can only cover a certain amount before turning people off. High interest rates as well as growth slowdown will cause a reckoning, in the next few years, of these costs - and I expect that in some areas we will see a return to traditional curation.
I curate this site manually. Source is on Github, in case people want to contribute.
Instead, it's all about job applications, swiping right, scrolling the algos, etc. Nobody thinks in terms of people.
My list isn't even websites. It's people, and whatever ways I can follow or contact them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Just go to these places and from there you can find many more sites from people who are on sdf.
gemini://gem.sdf.org/
gemini://sdf.org/
In a decade, i never see any actual useful Ads results to worth it.
If you want to show ads, make a dedicated Ads page, and i'll go there to browse your Ads, right ?
I go to your search page to search, to save my time, not to waste my time to ignore those useless Ads.
this was probably sometime around 2012 when the first big hacking scandals on the web that were causing mainstream media to focus on them and those places were routinely pointing out using basic search modifiers in Google to find. Google pulled all the useful operations and neutered their search functionality. Then they worked with a variety of different interest groups to steer the discussions and search results online for optics and political reasons and actively started to monitor and change search queries and inject not just ads but additional content based on various factors.
Internet is ad bisness right now. Anything that is not monetized, falls into obscurity. You will not have the scale, budget, readers, followers without big money.
It is not a hostile "elite takeover", but it is organic result of big corporations entering the game.
You cannot moderate Internet for disinformation. Big brother cannot easily ban "words" "extremism" on the Internet, and cannot control speech. Social media platforms can moderate their contents, can ban people, and control what is being said, what is true, and what is not true. This produce a nice coherent version of world seen by big corporations, but is not entirely true. I think it is beneficial for corporations, elite, big brother to channel all communication through social platforms.
Internet cannot be personal and private any more. No corporation will have any incentive for that. It is impossible at personal level to have search engine. It requires corporation, or organization.
There are millions, and millions of the lost Internet. Google does not rank it, as it has difficulty to say what is important anymore. Most of the traffic is beyond scope of Google. Does Google knows what exactly goes through TikTok, discord? Probably it has some idea.
People themselves have changed. Most of the traffic goes to celebrity photos at Instagram, memes, logan paul videos. Nobody is interested in any form of writing/reading. Most of the Internet users are too dumb to comprehend anything what would interest 'us'.
Google creates a Internet bubble for everyone. It is really difficult to find anything interesting. It often leads to mainstream links. Maybe because it is more reliable, less chance of disinformation. Not sure.
Internet is a shopping mall right now, more than a place to find Interesting places. Corporations built roads toward their own shops. This starved creative people out of their small nests.
Google rolls out EEAT for SEO. What could any blog do to be relevant in EEAT? I think it can do nothing.
Internet is dead. Google is potemkin village.
> Secure Connection Failed
> An error occurred during a connection to www.fromjason.xyz. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
In Firefox on Windows.
Oh, the irony.
100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
we only have a handful of users, feel free to join us.
I think it's hard for people to stick around since there are no alerts, subscriptions, notifications, etc. You have to come back to the website and check.
it's an anonymous imageboard with fairly uncontroversial topics. what's your threat model such that https would make you feel safer on 13channel?
fwiw i agree, we're gonna implement it soon just as a matter of principle, but it does seem a bit silly - what are you worried about happening? what is there to "secure"?
I love this guy.
Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them.
Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they publish to be as inaccessible (from outside their silo) as possible.
Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe every month.
For a blog do you really need more?
Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the same price but for the average user generating your own content has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"
I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name registration?
Honestly though someone asked me about developing a website, I pointed them at a local provider and they had a custom domain + email + a template driven website up in literally 5 minutes... They needed to know how to use a credit card and a web browser.
Pretty sure there are similar experiences all over, I can't really speak for other countries to be fair and I am not those places target market. I pay for a VPS and deploy whatever I want on it vs the guy that asked me for a website who doesn't even know what a domain name is.
There are products for both of us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
While it was conceived a while ago, the internet does seem to be going that way. I recently visited a popular C programming forum I used to frequent a decade ago, and was surprised to see a huge increase in bots, and almost no organic discussions or content.
To no one's surprise they were essentially all dead. Curiously the only one that worked was to a Pixies (the band) site.
I'd just say most people here are near death and can't learn the new way.
The same as some felt lost when the magazines disappeared to websites.
The old modeling (miniature) magazines and computer mags were awesome, but we moved on. Some great things were lost, more was gained.
Anthony Bourdain website now is Martin Shkreli's TikTok (which is really interesting)
Adapt or die.