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Comment by hamdingers | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Kagi search/assistant user and advocate but the "small web" product is a frustrating misnomer.

To me the small web is any little website that was created to be interesting rather than to sell me something. That includes stuff like neocities, "shrine" type sites, single purpose sites, fandom portals, web experiments, etc.

Unfortunately Kagi's definition of "small web" is: blog or webcomic. You must have an RSS feed and it must have recent posts. That rules out so much interesting stuff I don't understand the point.

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Same feeling here

Heavy Kagi user and the idea behind small web was appealing; but how its implemented don't click with me

Their rules excludes an absolute gem like https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ which is, to me, the essence of what we could call the "small web".

Each times the topic pops up, I try a few random ones and never found anything interesting.

Expert/auteur websites like Sheldon Brown's (or, one of my favorites, Ask Aaron https://runamok.tech/AskAaron/FAQ.html) are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web. Today this kind of info ends up in an ad-ridden hosted wiki or locked away in an unsearchable discord.

There's also novelties like https://www.howmanypeopleareinspacerightnow.com/, this probably hasn't been updated in a decade but that makes it no less interesting.

Then there's exceptionally cool demos like https://thelongestyard.link/q3a-demo/. This sort of thing just doesn't fit in a "blog" format unless you're writing a blog about how you built it and linking out to it.

If anyone knows of a directory of sites like these (preferably with a shuffle option) I'd love to hear about it (and contribute)!

Sheldon Brown's content is great, but is it ironic that the first thing you see on his site is a Google banner ad?

Understandably, he'd like to earn money on his content and I see no problem with that. But for me to visit his site and have Google add yet another tracking event to their "interest pile" about me (I guess i'm in the market for bikes now?) is a bit off putting.

He can't be making more than a few bucks a month through that single ad, right?

I truly had no idea, I guess I've always had an ad blocker.

He's been dead since 2008, so I assume the banner ad keeps the lights on in the absence of his income and input.

He died about ten years ago.

As the author is dead, I'm sure the money goes towards site hosting fees.

I assume nobody removed it and the revenue is just added to some Google Adsense balance sheet, and reports go to some Gmail account that will expire one day.

> are the pinnacle of what's possible with the small web

if this is the pinnacle then I want nothing to do with it.

This website is the small web - self contained. It's a really good example of the Internet we had and apparently some still want. I think of it like computer graphics where you're definition of space can get bigger as you add a bunch of resources each with their own model space into the relative context of world space. The small web should define how we do that and discover things, not what or how we build within each specific model space.

Well, thanks. That small web just taught me in a very concise way a thing or two about bicicle braking technique!

I am looking for something that would filter for sites that rarely post but have good content. The number one problem with most of these systems is that everything favours frequent posting. Even if I do it manually, I cannot keep the tabs over many rarely posting sites - this is an obvious example of a problem that we delegate to computers. Favouring frequent posters creates incentives to do that even if quality worsens.

The perverse thing here is that's exactly the opposite of how we've traditionally valued resources!

because we don't value them at all, literally. It's a tragedy of the commons, internet pollution is like air pollution, the polluters don't pay and there's no cost associated with overusing other people's attention.

I'd be fascinated on the economics of this from Google's perspective: specifically the unit economics on generating updated-once-a-year results to queried-once-in-a-million searches.

Tl;dr: I feel like the long-tail web (90s) was better, but economics pushed high-update-frequency more-centralized results.

Not only that, I just clicked "Next Post" more than a hundred times, and over 90% of posts I got were about LLMs and coding agents.

This is a fairly recent phenomenon: I'm a longtime Small Web user and even I struggle with this massive influx of AI posts. I'm hopeful it will be addressed.

I could definitely see value in filters for "has RSS" and "has recent posts"—maybe even as the default view—but I absolutely agree that this is much less interesting to me without the wider world of interesting, small sites.

You'd probably like the small web search on Marginalia then: https://marginalia-search.com/

This is just a blog ring.

I would also love to go back to Geocities style web interaction, but the medium is the message, and the way the Internet has evolved as a medium means that people don't naturally interact with it in a way that supports regression to that era. Attempts to force it like neocities have a hyperreal quality to them.

yeah i agree. the crux of it is no corporations / no ads / no astroturfing.

Well, it's much harder for them to add content from websites that don't have a feed.

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