Hacker News Reader

I miss stumbleupon quite a bit. There are similar services but the web itself just doesn't seem to function the same so the websites don't quite hit the same.

Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.

>It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.

I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.

Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.

>> lots of slick looking 3D renders

one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!