The Revenge of the Home Page | Hacker News Reader

The Revenge of the Home Page

newyorker.com

60 pointstysone32 comments

Internet was still an alien thing to a lot of people throughout the 2000s, and if you think about it - that’s only 14 years ago! And look at this article - it’s reflecting on the good old days as though it happened thousands of years ago.

Yes, the problem definitely lies in social media and its evil attention-grabbing algorithms, but the fact that people never got to experience the old-school Internet also plays a role in this. People just don’t know any better!

For a lot of folks, the web is merely a source of news, a means to pay bills, and to engage in mindless short-form entertainment.

I am all for bringing back individual sites and communities back tho!

Is money the real root problem of this? Not just from an advertising perspective but also from the perspective of a person.

Fundamentally, the Internet provides freedom of communication with the entire world, but these days we can hardly engage with that world because the ability to support oneself financially comes first. As such, you either don’t spend a lot of time online, or you spend your entire time online chasing the cheddar…

> I am all for bringing back individual sites and communities back tho!

And if you do find a community you like, make sure you support it financially. Hosting isn't free and banner ads don't pay like they used to.

Now if RSS would just make a comeback it would be a new Golden Age.

It never went away.

Most blog sites don't have an RSS link any more. Of course the protocol still exists and is usable to track sites that allow it.

The issue with RSS is it is tied to the "long form" blog model* where a post requires a subject line. Most RSS readers do not do a great job displaying posts with no title. They also don't typically do anything with inline hash tags (inside the body content). With Facebook/Twitter/Etc (short form content) there's a very informal text box. Hash tags get processed inline with the body. It makes posting something incredibly low friction. A blog post that will actually show up correctly in an RSS reader has much higher friction. Boosting a blog post (reTweet or equivalent) is also high friction.

Blogging never went away and blog hosts exist but "Social Media" style short form content exploded because it's low formality and low friction. Other features like direct messaging or posting picture and video are done online in the apps.

A lot of early effort with that sort of stuff on blogs died early because it requires not just support in the blogging engine, but moderation/administration done by the owner of the blog and support inside the RSS software.

* long form might only be a sentence

> It makes posting something incredibly low friction.

Yes, that is what makes places like TwiXXer and the like such cesspools, the fact that they invite anyone to post whatever lies on the tip of their fingers at any moment without thinking it over for more than a few seconds. This may be fine if you're just 'talking shit' but it has the side effect of turning every conversation into 'talking shit'. If RSS does 'force' people to put more effort in to post their thoughts I say more power to RSS, the 'net is not just for 'talking shit' after all.

Sorry for the pedantry. I agree wholeheartedly with the thought of your comment but your timeline rubs me off.

> Internet was still an alien thing to a lot of people throughout the 2000s

I agree but...

> and if you think about it - that’s only 14 years ago

14 years ago is 2010 which is no longer 2000s. It could be the end of 2000s, but that's pushing it.

And it bothers me because by 2010 I don't think the Internet was "new" or "alien" at the time to anyone other than business bureaucrats or out-of-touch politicians[1]. The algorithmic news feed has been recognized as a problem by then[2].

I'd say 2010 was the time when the Internet was starting to become ubiquitous, the transition period between the good old days and the age of walled-garden platforms we have to day. For more context, the iPhone---whose form factor, at least, put the Internet in everyone's pockets---was released in 2007 and in 2010 Google released the Nexus line for Android.

[1] In 2013, Angela Merkel was ridiculed for calling the Internet "uncharted territory".

[2] https://archive.is/m8pjM Article written in 2017 but the pertinent part is "Facebook says its own researchers have been studying the filter bubble since 2010".

While message boards and irc still exist and could be considered "echo chambers", social media began kicking off in mid-2000s with their algorhythmic echo chambers.

Also around this time period was growth in blogging, further pulling people away from homepages to "personal pages". Even in the days of Geocities, many people would hit a homepage prior to potentially visiting their own site.

And while smart phones did play a role in the trend, changes to web browsers on PC devices with their own "start pages" with news/content operating as pseudo-homepages further contributed to the shift for non-smartphone users.

I went the opposite way and put my personal websites behind a login. It's the only way I could think of to protect my sites from being scraped and used to train LLMs.

I hope a better solution comes around, though. I want to have my sites available again.

"it’s reflecting on the good old days as though it happened thousands of years ago."

Internet time is different than real time

Early social media (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) was a free alternative to paying someone to run, patch, and scale your own website/blog. It gave a lot of people opportunity to create their own communities and engage with them in a more convenient and immediate way than blogs or forums. The fun lasted for as long as free VC money was there and when that ran out they all went downhill. I am removing my social media posts, closing accounts, and going back to a website with a blog. Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of them are the new MySpace near its end days, they can run on fake accounts and bullshit content for a while, but advertisers will eventually learn that the audiences have gone elsewhere. That other place won't be another social media network, because spammers, bot devs, and mass-manufacturers of crap content are so well prepared that they can start flooding any new platform with their digital manure almost immediately.

The fun lasted for as long as free VC money was there and when that ran out they all went downhill.

I feel that’s where we are with ai at the moment. I guess at some point they will answer withs ads

Yes. It will go downhill even faster, because AI has a problem of not providing anything of value that would generate a network effect to attract users and keep them on site. With social media there was peer pressure to join and stay, with AI there is none of that.

>Early social media (MySpace, Twitter, Facebook) was a free alternative to paying someone to run, patch, and scale your own website/blog. It gave a lot of people opportunity to create their own communities and engage with them in a more convenient and immediate way than blogs or forums.

Exactly, it brought the complexity down dramatically for discovering and connecting with people online.

>I am removing my social media posts, closing accounts, and going back to a website with a blog. Instagram, Twitter, and the rest of them are the new MySpace near its end days, they can run on fake accounts and bullshit content for a while, but advertisers will eventually learn that the audiences have gone elsewhere.

I think a good idea would be; if somebody could make vanilla Facebook which was meant to connect you with friends and family but more privacy focused. Everything you do on Facebook is logged and fed into some kind of social graph and algorithm and eventually sold to advertisers.

We already have more streamlined and privacy focused email and search engine alternatives but we don't have a private social network equivalent of Facebook. I think paying a few bucks for a monthly subscription in exchange for smaller, more secure and privacy focused version of Facebook wouldn't be a problem for people who want to stay private and off the Big Tech's grid.

https://archive.is/PkwVY

Thanks!

> instead of passively waiting for social feeds to serve you what to read, you can seek out reading materials

or even use RSS to get the best of both worlds?

Lagniappe: https://search.marginalia.nu

Uh, thanks, but how did you know I was gonna be reading this?

I presume they mean "by way of good measure", not tagging your username.

TIL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagniappe

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40220793

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40210065

I was surprised the article didn't mention Reddit.

The issue with platforms lies in how quality contents are rewarded. Social media algorithms can be "hacked" to distribute unhelpful contents. The democratic voting system used by Reddit and HN solved this problem by quantifying helpfulness. The great thing is this mechanism incentivizes publishers to improve their contents, which is exactly what they are doing with their home pages, as mentioned in this article.

You say it solved that issue, and, on the by and large, I'm inclined to agree with you. That said, it also had the effect of promoting an echo chamber that punishes anything truly outside the norm which causes damage of another type.

Indeed. The same way that video shorts are forcing every creator to use the same way of speaking, tonality, cadence. Reddit etc. are forcing you to write and think a certain way to generate upvotes.

Reddit upvotes karma system is incredibly, incredibly easily gamed and it’s happening on a mass scale. Most content is pure utter rubbish.

Most content is crust level depth at best. Absolutely nothing deeper makes it to the front page.

Why? Because modern humans have no attention span, and it’s like a herd of sheep.

In fact, the best “social” media for me would be a site like reddit/hacker news where it can’t be gamed at all.

I just want to see my interests and hobbies and articles on them. Maybe some barrier that prevents the masses from getting in. An IQ test? A programming puzzle that you must solve in a short time frame?

Give me a walled garden utopia

I’ve deleted everything. All I have now is HackerNews.

The “home page” is the digital version of the “front page” from newspapers, or the magazine format. It worked then, and it will keep working.

In contrast, Twitter and the like is the equivalent to random people shouting on the street.

> Then Twitter imploded

What does imploded mean here?

In context, this means “self-inflicted harm”.

Yeah I understand why you are confused but the article is alternative history fiction, just wasn't labelled as such.

Sucked up too much content from the bucket and causing itself to leak.

Twitter needs a purge, like a sponge needs a squeeze.

twitter imploded? that’s news to me…

It is wishful thinking by those who were used to having it 'all to themselves' and were dismayed when Musk took off the ideological blinders. It was a cesspit before and remains a cesspit after but now at least there is some diversity in opinion to be found there.

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