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Comment by aksss | Hacker News Reader

The internet can still be joyful.

Pay DO a pittance, make and tend a website, creating part of the internet you wish existed.

Work at ignoring more of the major sites on a daily basis.

Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions, just do you. Share what you’re passionate about, tend that garden for its own awesomeness (and back it up;).

Build connections to others with shared interest, and who are also contributing to the Internet you wish existed.

The internet kind of sucks now because everything must be huge or die, if it doesn’t “hit” it’s considered a waste of time. That is not the Internet I was captivated by in the nineties.

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That easy to say, but it needs to be understood that nowadays, contrary to how it worked 20-25 years ago, if you don’t actively and continuously promote your content in some social media, no one, not a single person will ever find it. Google will never direct traffic to small websites unless you’re extremely specific. You might as well publish it in a HTML file on your hard drive.

You can still build tiny communities. I joined several discord servers when interested to certain topics in the past, with anonymous people still sharing about them. And a couple of phpbb forums with < 300 subscribers. I'm sure if I were into even more niche stuff I would find people interested in writing and reading about the topic. Also youtube is quite good for certain stuffs.

Then don't rely on Google to "direct traffic" to you. In fact, don't worry about traffic at all! Hence, OP's advice:

> Don’t look at the bar of success as being visitors and impressions

This is the root of what sucks about everything on the Internet these days: Everyone measures the success of whatever they are doing using engagement crap like "number of likes" and "daily active users" and "number of GitHub stars." Junk metrics. Stop worrying about building an audience. Stop worrying about your follower count. Stop obsessing over pointless things like clout and karma. And, most of all, never use the word "monetize." Just tend your little garden, and if people happen to visit, great.

Counters used to be a standard feature on personal websites. Also, the fact that there were far fewer, and that they one typically discovered other sites through shared weird interests or sheer luck changed the whole dynamic.

this isn't new, we had to make efforts back then too.

the efforts were different, sign up for webrings, word of mouth, whatever -- but it was still effort.

but as parent said : lack of an audience shouldn't be a reason to avoid doing a thing. Not every thing needs to find a market.

As an early teenager, in late 90s, I built a crappy non-English website on a topic that was covered by only a few other sites in that language. It received a healthy amount of traffic for a few years, as anyone researching that topic was bound to end up visiting. As you say, I did add it to a few catalogues and exchanged a few banners, but that was it.

And hey, I’m not angry about it. Anyone visiting Wikipedia nowadays is MUCH better served. But the vibe of being a “webmaster” has definitely changed.

Thats's correct, part of the reason the Internet feels low quality is because it is. Garbage content abounds because you need to put something out every day, or at least every week, so that the Gooogle/FB algos don't drop you from their discoverability index.

Even the biggest TV shows did not put out more than 24 episodes in a season. A solo blogger/artist is required to put out twice that many pieces of content in a year. Can't expect the quality of that to be very good.

Very much this. Also, connect directly with others, share honestly, be kind, and try to be helpful.

Social media had a built in feedback mechanism that personal websites don't. We can't even have a 'sign my guestbook' feature without having to deal with spam moderation.

Start a blog (on your own domain).

Write an essay.

Stop doomscrolling.

Provide RSS.

Wean yourself from the news.

Share your discoveries.

Be weird.

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