Downside of being a one man show is I only have so much attention to spend on tasks, so sometimes quality tuning gets a bit neglected.
I have a keyboard shortcut that opens moonjump.app/jump, which will redirect to a random site
I'm not sure what went wrong with StumbleUpon; it worked well from the user end of things.
It gives me that control that I want, and I don't have to worry about Meta, etc trying to monetize it. Plus I get to unplug from those "n liked your post" dopamine hits.
People would like to find genuine ones instead of just cash grabs.
Of course, if you have no interest in sharing your passions, don't do it. Your free time is valuable and you should only use it for things that you value.
I love sharing those with friends and family. But I hate the opaque algorithms on social media sites that are tuned to prioritize engagement & time spent on the service. I find that these algos are rewarding rage bait due to their engagement farming.
Sharing with those that I want to share with, in an environment free of algorithms and capitalistic intentions provides that validation. And having a random site visitor here and there who enjoys what I have to say is just icing on the cake.
As I get older, I realize that we were never meant to have 10,000 people looking at what we ate for lunch, or the mess our cat made while we were at work. Interactions like that back in the 1500s would have made us more influential than Kings. A close-knit community that cherishes the expression of all our oddities, curiosities, and hobbies is something that just can't be replicated in current social media.
It's surprising* that rolling your own on the web has gotten harder, not easier, in the last 20 years. But it has.
*Surprising in the narrow sense that technology usually improves. I know all too well why lone sites don't do well on the web.
So what do they do instead? They type <granddaughter's name> into their browser, and then call me asking if they should buy McAfee because the computer says they have a virus.
I agree that search engines are not the only way to reach content on the web (web != social networks). But for most people today, they are.
And I made the site simple and contrary to current Web on purpose: plain HTML, no JS, no popups, only graphics are photos and diagrams.
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|may I please have points, too sir?
Jimi Hendrix "If 6 was 9", 1967: "If all the hippies cut off all their hair I don't care, I don't care... White collar Windows users, flashin down the street pointing their plastic finger at me, hoping soon my kind will drop and die: I'm gonna wave my freak flag high!"
That's a missing piece of the puzzle for the distributed web; curation and recommendation are ad-hoc and don't scale.
It feels like a chicken and egg problem to me -- realistically you need to meet people where they're at and appeal to the current channels' algorithms to get your content discovered, but in doing so you also reinforce the strength of the walled garden itself and participate in the diminishment of both search and the "wild" internet at large.
Something durable, censorship-resistant, network-agnostic, optionally trust-based. Maybe a bit of IPFS + i2p + content-adressable, composable, cross-linkable, multimedia documents + federated services? I feel the components already mostly exist actually...
When I would say: This is a terrible idea, they just want to control and own the content. a gif you own, a gif you can download and so what ever you wanted, etc. boy was I down voted into oblivion.
One of the reasons for this is many posts aren't on hacker news by accident, they are hidden advertisements. Chances are, you got the karma to downvote people. Just starting off at -1 is a disadvantage.
You can try it too: just disagree with what an article says in the comments, 99% of the time you will be downvoted. Agree and you get free karma. This is not always the case, but generally is.
obligatory https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
For example, host your own mail.
Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
IRC? muds?
The rise of smartphones made "computing" accessible to everyone, but people can't actually compute.
Computers used to come with a language. You could write your own programs and run them from the getgo. You didn't have to ask permission to digitally sign your own program and run it.
Ugh, yeah, good luck on this one. You can get by quite well using one of the major providers as an (outbound-only, if desired) gateway though.
> Do people host their own webservers anymore? (is a VPS is good enough?)
Yes and yes but mostly it's Docker hell
> IRC? muds?
They're both still around, albeit a shadow of their former selves. IRC is better than ever, use a client like The Lounge and it's basically(*) a modern chat app.
(* Okay, stuff like multi-line and message editing are still effectively missing, but you get embeds and whatnot)
https://www.paulmorellimusic.com/notes-on-chicago-transit-au...
I made this discovery after going to post a novel solution for getting into the hood with a seized hood release in hopes that it might spare someone else some trouble in the future.
All things are not in the moment. Sometimes it's good to learn from the past.
Note, that isn't the same as an ambitious fully federated mesh network or anything, but being limited in certain ways makes it efficient and easier in others.
Any millennial or nerdy Xer with a good memory would tell you what the deal is. We were the first ones who came of age online, and saw what the Internet was like when it came to prominence. Now, our libraries, town halls, and weird gardens are all ash. Try to surf like you did in 2010 and all you'll see is spam; the filters work in reverse now. Log in to what "social media" is these days (after filling in your phone number and uploading your driver's license) and it's just cable TV with some extra widgets.
At least Wikipedia is still there.
On the one hand, I prefer the old open web. On the other, I can’t deny the existence and value of these walled gardens. The wall doesn’t erase the value, even if I strongly prefer there wasn’t a wall to begin with.
To your point, discord comes with downsides, and does raise questions about the longevity of the content. Most of the old web disappeared too.
I think that in order to have any hope of returning to something more open and public on a wider scale, it’s necessary to understand why these communities are thriving on discord. I don’t have the answer to that question, but I suspect that the wall is actually a benefit to some.
This is always multiply determined, but part of the answer is that Discord and these other walled gardens are subsidized by VC funding with the expectation that at some point they'll turn on the garbage compactor and squeeze out the juicy value.
"Internet never forgets" is one of these naive fairytales we told ourselves when we were young and internet was new, along with "information wants to be free", "censorship on the internet is impossible", and "easy access to information helps democracy".
I prefer open web for sentimental reasons, but I don't think it's naturally better at preserving the information than walled gardens.
Some will disappear. Others are maintained, sometimes by third parties. Many of them are on web.archive.org. Yes, we should build better solutions to retain random personal webpages but the sitations isn't really that dire.
> "Internet never forgets"
This has alwasy been in the context of things you want the internet to forget and it still holds true.
> "information wants to be free"
And it does - once something leaks it is hard to put it back into the bag.
> "censorship on the internet is impossible"
I don't recall this claim but depending on how you look at things isn't really wrong: Is there any kind of information that you can't find on the internet because someone wants to hide it? Yes, some parts of the web are censored but remember the internet is not just the web and even on the web highly controversial websites can cling to life.
> "easy access to information helps democracy"
It does. Most people do not have easy access to information, at best they have a highly curated selection that the media wants them to see. They could avail themselves to the full picture but are conditioned not to.
So you just put out 10 different lies for every truth you want to cover. Most people won't be bothered to check what is actually true. Human attention span is the limiting factor of modern world, not the access to information. Lying to people is easier than ever before in history, so democracy is in fact getting worse over time.
Seeing this now makes me wonder if it’s more to do with life in general.
It has no interest in offering you exactly what you want, it wants to maximize your time “hoping” the next video will be very good, which eventually happens (if you sunk enough time).