Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frik | Hacker News Reader

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I see more and more everything2.com [1] in comments on HN - is it popular again?

I remember E2 as (unofficial) predecessor of Wikipedia more than ten years ago [2]. Back in the days Wikipedia also had a triva section - nowadays its forbidden [3], what a pitty. (good we still have IMDb and its trivia pages)

It's sad that Harry Eng's Wikipedia article redirects [4] to "Impossible bottle" article and Bulwersator removed the paragraph about Harry Eng two years ago [5].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything2

[2] /. posts that made Wikipedia popular, "Everything2 Hits One Million Nodes": http://slashdot.org/story/01/03/29/2035230/everything2-hits-... , http://news.slashdot.org/story/01/03/02/1422244/nupedia-and-...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Trivia_sections

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Eng#Harry_Eng

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Impossible_bottle&...

I didn't knew E2 before, but reading that article was almost impossible with all those nonsense internal links. I simply don't get whats going on, it's supposed to be some SEO? Awful

Those are traditional at E2 - a quirk of that particular community. I don't think they're SEO. If done right, sometimes they make you think. Sometimes they don't even go anywhere and are still successful in that regard. Sometimes not.

e2 is fairly deranged. It's not your place to head for an informative read, and "encyclopedia" would definitely not be the right word, but it's great for ideas, stimulation, not-quite-sure-if-satire, unfinished short fiction, and link chains like "geometrical" > cannon defense patterns > transhumanism > The Broken God > a cloned kitten named "cc". I think of it like /b/ for bored grad students who are into Barthelme and Jeff Noon. One of the treasures of the internet, in my book :)

Jeez the amount of time I spent on E2 in high school and college was stunning. So many open tabs as I followed those links. Even wrote an app to find the "shortest distance" between two randomly selected ideas.

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