Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ravenstine | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I see there being two related but distinct issues:

- The desire for a simpler, quaint looking Web

- The desire for discoverability on the Web that isn't so driven by algorithms

I love what the Web once was, aesthetically speaking, but to me the real problem is that of discoverability.

There was a time where, if you built it, the audience would come. Today that is not so much the case, especially for written content which has become so heavily devalued. I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content. I don't want to churn anything out. One can churn out snippets, which is effectively what one does on sites like X, but then your writing has to either by pithy truisms or cringey drama. Besides, more and more people just want to consume content passively through audio and video. But then now I have to essentially put on a big production just to get my ideas out there, and for an audience that is probably less intellectually curious than those who would actually read an article.

The classic Web isn't coming back until something changes about the way people discover new things. The web is no longer a place where one goes to seek information; it's where information comes to you through word-of-mouth and so-called algorithms putting content in front of you.

Golden-era web was great. Now I'd just rather do my job, comment on HN, and go fishing. Actually trying to bring back the old web is like trying to bring back Jazz clubs hoping everyone will come to their senses and dance the Charleston again. No, it will always be a niche thing.

> I would never write a blog today (especially one that is self-hosted) because I know I would spend most of my time begging for scraps. If you really want a large enough audience that your creative efforts are worthwhile, you have to churn out content.

Why assume you need to seek an audience at all? I have been periodically writing blog posts for about 15 years about whatever I feel like. I may only post a few times a year. I don't have comments turned on. I still enjoy going back periodically to see what I was up to in 2015, and occasionally I get a really nice email from someone who stumbled on a post they found worthwhile.

To each their own. At that point, I'd rather just write to myself without publishing so that I can be 110% candid, which I already do by journaling.

My blog is essentially my journal; no one else reads it. However, knowing someone else _might_ read it is making me spend the effort to write in better style, to watch my language, so I would not be embarrassed by myself. That's the value of blog over journal for me.

It sounds like the presumption that you would do this for money is the problem here—you don't have to "beg for scraps" if it's just a hobby done for fun.

...which is probably the most succinct way of describing where our dear Old Net has gone: swallowed up by the razor-thin margins of the professional creative economy.

I don't think that discovery without algorithms is possible, because the Web is essentially unstructured. Any means of discovery needs a way to organize all of that information, and then present it in a relevant way. People forget that Google was actually good at this.

The problem isn't algorithms per se, but how those algorithms are implemented. Unfortunately, people coming up with alternatives tend to lean too far in the other direction - we have alternative search engines designed to exclude all sites using Javascript, for instance, which cater to people who don't want to interact with any part of the modern web, but we don't have an alternative that does what Google used to do before search became big business and simply attempt to catalog the entire web (including the parts that HN hates) and display relevant results to the end user.

How about hyperlinks?

Hyperlinks alone don't work for discovery as a general problem, and on a smaller scale they just push the problem up a level because you still need to discover the hyperlink. The web is just too vast and complex and they don't contain necessary semantic information. This is why the "web portal" failed and gave way to search engines, which were objectively better for the task.

You need another level of abstraction over the web to make discovery work, as you do with any application to make data useful. It's little different than making queries in a database.

I find that hyperlinks work very well currently. You read something of interest on one page, and discover more information through hyperlinks to other pages. That also works great for books. Almost every book I read mentions other related books within the content, and from there you discover more and more.

Hyperlinks don't help for discovering that page to begin with, or related material not specifically being linked to from that page.

Given that you're on Hacker News, it's likely your use case for the web isn't typical.

Well how would you discover Google? Everybody starts somewhere

It's much easier to discover Google once and let it do the rest of the work than it is to discover an arbitrary page and manually follow an arbitrary chain of hyperlinks across an arbitrary set of other pages hoping they just happen to lead to what you want.

Yes, but I understood the discussion about discoverability to be in the perspective of the webmaster. And in those cases, if you have published good information, other websites can link to you for discoverability. That's how an old fashioned web can be built: Pages linking to other good pages. I see it all the time.

And let's not forget that if you have high quality content and submit your pages to Google, they will put you very high in the organic search results.

>Yes, but I understood the discussion about discoverability to be in the perspective of the webmaster.

Fair enough, but I think the problem is the same regardless of the perspective. You as a webmaster wanting to be discovered and me as a user wanting to discover you implies an optimal interface between the two to facilitate that discovery.

Unfortunately, the web is no longer old fashioned. Most links are being posted to social media platforms or link aggregators like HN and Reddit. Most pages only link to other pages if it helps their SEO.

And unfortunately Google no longer ranks content based on quality because they sell rank space and because search is no longer about discovery so much as it is advertising. Which is why I think we do need search engines and algorithms, but we need the kind of search engines and algorithms we had when Google started and before they monetized search and before SEO ate everything when it actually did surface relevant content based on organic links.

I'm not arguing that hyperlinks don't solve the problem of discovery, just that they only solve it at a small scale, and we need a larger scale solution as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com