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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

This is what the early web was all about: people sharing their obscure hobbies and obsessions with everyone else, building small communities across the world. It was beautiful. It is still out there, to a degree, but unfortunately the socials have sucked the air out of publishing on external websites. Back in the day, this guy would have had his own blog or specific AV/cinephile forum, and now he's just another guy on youtube.

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More otimistically, there were far fewer obsessive niches online then as the technical requirements were so large to set a site up. Even if the ones that existed were great.

There are a lot more obsessive YouTube channels and newsletters in a lot more varied niches today by comparison. I'm delighted regularly by new discoveries.

If you were obsessed with cinema and films, chances are you were already adjacent enough to the internet to blog about it. If you were obsessed with woodworking, probably you needed to wait for the smartphones and YT boom.

Unless you were one of the few people lucky enough to live in New York most of us never had access to movies beyond what you could find in a second tier Blockbuster on a Friday night. Or worse: cable television.

Nah. phpbb was a thing. Every niche crafting hobby imaginable had at least on "authoritative" forum-based online community before smartphones were a thing.

Quantity != quality.

I'd rather take fewer niche authors over a mass of posers more interested in making the number go up for their monetization than about what they are covering.

Kagi has a cool app called Small Web around this

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