One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather than type URLs or manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard.
The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on websites?
EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd see today, where most content follows the same patterns to achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could not be successful today.
Stumbleupon! What a gleaming ray of sunshine in the vast landscape of the web!
I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often wonder why. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don't have any solutions to:
- Engagement: SU lived and died on it's users, a paragon of the crowdsourced model. For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting people from the mire to function
- Gaming the system: One of the things that made SU great was that there wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there. If you 'stumbled' on a thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or otherwise *actually valuable*. These days, I can't imagine a successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO vultures.
Or Stumbleupon clone's aren't popular because there really just isnt a lot of demand for them. Stumbleupon clones already exist. People generally prefer social media and in this case I'd say Reddit more specifically.
In regards to "Gaming the system," I do not think popularity begets SEO spam. SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search so that you get ad revenue from visits. If you have genuinely valuable content and get popular from Stumbleupon that doesn't create an incentive to implement SEO spam. Ads maybe - but not publishing garbage to rank high on google search because you already solved the discoverability problem.
I think there are many reasons why SU would fail, but the biggest to me is that so much content is that so much content is produced just for the major social media sites. SU wouldn't offer net value over just using those apps.
For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A modern SU would often send you to the major social media sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!" banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I could just stay in one app and see so much of the same content?
I think the SEO problem would be harder. Even though there's definitely a network effect, a few dedicated users can curate a thousand interesting web sites, and that's probably enough to draw in anyone moderately interested.
I believe you are missing the crucial reason why all the people are consuming content in apps now.
Google is in large part to blame for this, if not the main reason.
Many years ago, Google started updating their search algorithm to heavily prefer specific domains like govs, edus, or handpicked ones like Reuters or Microsoft.
I used to run my own blog and forum, and it used to be on the top of the search results for the niche it occupied. After the changes, it fell off the front pages and I'd often see the top search result being a link to a random reddit comment mentioning the search phrase and no other content.
It was at that point I realized that there was no point in running your own website to create "content". You can't compete with domains whitelisted by Google unless you have a lot of money to spend on SEO.
Some people point to the "Panda" update as when this all started happening.
IMO "apps" is something of a red herring. I don't think a whole lot would change if somehow everybody switched to web versions of big social media; they'd just be endlessly scrolling in a single browser tab instead of in a single app.
This effect was apparent back before smartphones became ubiquitous, where desktop users (especially more casual/less technical) were spending disproportionate amounts of time on Facebook and YouTube. It's where we first started seeing people sourcing their news exclusively from social media.
Some qualities of apps may bolster this effect, but the root problem lies in the addictiveness, convenience, endlessness, and network effects of large platforms.
But these platforms want you on their app instead of webpages. That's why the apps exist. There's a reason they are willing to go through the hassle/expense of maintaining native code apps instead of just one website. It is the core of their business.
I'd add a third fold: the huge rise in garbage ads above, below, overlapping, and surrounding content. Facebook et al have ads, of course, but they are extremely "tame" by comparison. Renting out every pixel ruined many sites.
I agree with you, and I don’t understand why some of these small blogs on niche topics even have ads. How much are they making a month? I’d be surprised if it’s even $5 a month for many of them.
I'll give you spam sites, but I'll also note that at least 4 of the 5 examples you gave of where people go to consume content in apps also have highly functional and usable websites, even on mobile. I'm not familiar with TikTok, so I can't comment on it.
I'd also note that if you want to just, say, consume from YouTube, spam sites are no longer in the picture.
It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously.
What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.
That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.
Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.
One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.
The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type).
I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform. It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social media users are building their "personal brand" and value proposition to their next employer/business partner.
I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own land to extract rent from.
It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.
One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.
I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general.
Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.
I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.
Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.
It’s like my options are go by an anonymous handle like CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin Bieber should die back in 2011…
Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad
Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling.
IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.
Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.
On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between this and people who participated under handles that weren't obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more associated with BBSs early on).
> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name
It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform.
There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been.
Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves.
> 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world.
That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".
People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.
This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them.
I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).
>Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
What? Reddit has gone from interesting and nerdy, to circle-jerk, to an insane aslyum. At least for anything remotely political (and political things will often invade hobby subs). I used to use it all day every day, and now I use X instead. Almost entirely 100% -> 0% | 0% -> 100%.
the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat)
without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
I love this idea, I've got a ton of links that I was going to add to a post at some point. I like the idea of having a whole separate section on the blog for that, with a feed. Very cool, I'll have to find some time to add something like this to my site.
I just wanted to say that I recently went back to using my RSS feed as a main source of news, and your TILs have been one of the first additions to it. Appreciate it!
I think the secret to blogging frequently might well be not having a job... I occasionally pick up pieces of consulting work or sponsorship but I'm mainly working full-time (uncompensated) on my own projects.
Link blogs are different though: posting to those genuinely takes a couple of minutes per link. I've maintained my link blog happily while having a full-time job.
We could automate the link posting process. Here is a thought, create a form which accepts the input of link details, stores in some place and ur website reads and displays from there. Submitting a form could be simpler and can be done from any device.
One dynamic that I think contributes to the disappearance of websites, but which has maybe a more positive shine than some other explanations, is the increasing usage of internet technologies to support small social group interaction. Consider the hypothetical Jan 1 scenario described by the author: the 2024 equivalent is seeing a screenshot of a Tweet that reminds you of a friend, and then posting it in your groupchat. This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server. I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline. The internet is now less like cave-diving or archaeology, and more like a house party. The space is familiar and comfortable, in part because of the "For You" feed, but also because the point is to share the space with people you're close to. Certainly Instagram profiles have replaced personal blogs, which isn't great, but also Instagram messaging has (partly) replaced comment sections which TBH is probably better for many people's experiences. Anonymous forums can, for all their fun and novelty, be hostile and sad places when you get down to it.
> This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server.
Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed that boat, but that was my impression.
> I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline.
Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that "websites" started declining as social media platforms took off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a reaction to and rejection of those platforms.
> Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period?
Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back in the day people would login to AIM after school or something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one activity that your friend group would do among other things (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the limits of their friend group or were always online, but I think the experience was far less common than it is today. For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone line, rather than the central forum for all communication and interaction.
> Does that timeline for that theory make sense?
That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old web". However I do think that coziness was present in early social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of socialness?
edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness" is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the chatroom/messaging paradigm.
I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result.
I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice much difference from Google.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.
Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)
Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news, e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information siloing up we should build communication web thats not owned by big corps. It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve.
I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC tinkerer from the '90's.
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
I'm not sure it's true exactly - OSS had email as one type of messaging, and IRC as another. The problem is that email lacks instant-ness (and for a long time you couldn't send larger files as attachments), and IRC lacks, or lacked, rich functionality.
Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.
We all miss the opinionated blog era of the 2000s, but even if the Buzzfeed-like aggegator sites that replaced them in the 2010s hadn't existed, the blogs were going to die out eventually.
Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great websites therefore have a start and an end. We should be archiving these websites, not telling people to "just post anyway" so that the site doesn't disappear from Google Search.
For a Gen Z parallel to this, look to any Reddit thread about how some Youtuber they worshipped a decade ago has either disappeared or is making low-quality content to pump affilliate links. We wouldn't want that happening to our favorite writers of yesteryear. There's no shame in calling time on something.
20 years ago, maddox.xmission.com was my go-to place for rants and laughs. The site is still around, but I've changed, so my interests are elsewhere. Similarly, I can't expect the site's author to still be playing the same character that made me bookmark the site all those years ago.
Maddox is on threads and appears to be the same person. I on the other hand am now a nearly 40yo man with a family and house and career, and not the lol-southpark 12 year old I was when he started.
I've made the decision to give up app development and go back to plain old webapps. Google's requirement to update the "targetsdk" for every app appears to be a "war on free", as only people making money off their apps are willing to jump through such hoops. I expect the noose to tighten even more as more app developers comply. So rather than fight it, I decided to throw in the towel early. I expect Google will try to walk a fine line of getting the right number of developers to jump ship, but I'd expect to see a lot more hobbiests switching back to web development in the coming years.
I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
I would really like web3 to go back to distributed networks. Fediverse and all that. I guess cryptocurrencies fit in there too; I guess web3 would have its light and dark side. But decentralisation would be a nice theme.
TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
Isn't TikTok solidly Web 2? It does not do any revolutionary. Maybe 2.3, but certainly it is pretty much same as for example Youtube. Just done bit differently.
Yes, but I'd describe it more like Web 2.5 is basically the gross-weaponization of gossip as a glorified get-rich-quick pyramid scheme. There is little-to-no reason for this mode of thinking in 2024 and beyond, if we are to realize anything resembling actual human potential.
Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.
Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.
I think Web 3 is already here; it is your browser that has millions of LOC and that is more powerful then ever before. There are hundreds and thousands of useful browser extensions and I think we should build around that ecosystem. Mix powerful web browser and its extension ecosystem with DeFi and other decentralized solutions and we should get some interesting use cases and apps.
Web 3.0: back to independent websites but adding federation and detailed, subject-specific semantic markup (as provided by the schema.org standards, supported by the major search engines) to aid in discoverability.
No one seems to remember the original web 3.0 was the semantic web from almost 20 years ago. It in part enabled the news feed aggregation of modern social media.
Web 4.0, since this nomenclature is nothing but hype and BS anyway, will be the web completely ruined by AI content. And unfortunately that web is already here.
Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides, or direction on something...are absolutely littered with ads. It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The incentives that got is to today are all pointed towards an ad based world, so part of me just laments the feeling of seeing more of these kinds of blogs.
recipes are the worst, I've resorted to just printing them out on physical paper, stapling them, and keeping the good ones in a manilla folder. lol it works surprisingly well actually, that folder is a very fast MRU cache or in reverse order an LRU cache.
You're missing the forest for the trees. I don't want to download a bunch of crap so that I can avoid seeing other crap. Eventually the providers will find a way around the crap I installed with more crap, you get the idea.
It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.
A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.
The internet is a lonely place, all these substitutes for in person communication and interaction fail and will always fail. It's why we're more connected and more lonely than ever. Sure you can now find that person halfway around the world that agrees with you on some esoteric topic you care about, but that's not a real relationship.
Well, the apps aren't designed to cultivate that relationship is the thing. They are designed to drive content engagement -- doom scrolling is the ultimate goal of every major social media platform of today, because that is where the ad revenue is.
There's no technical reason apps can't be designed to connect you more meaningfully to individuals that you resonate with. The problem for them is once that starts to happen, you don't need the platform as much and your engagement with it drops. It requires a company that focuses on that, and not engagement / pure revenue, as a focus. I'd wager the main reason those companies haven't taken off is people like money. If you are good enough to build such a platform, you're also good enough to make 250k+ _today_. If you are currently making 80k, it is a very hard thing to turn down.
>A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard.
The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system.
Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.
The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will.
Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.
That's because the vast majority of people don't care about what the other vast majority think or say. Social media only works because algorithms push provocative content. Otherwise nobody would find it worth the time.
Internet centralized itself around few corporations, people don't want to selfhost/self publish websites, I have own devlog on github pages, and when I try to convince friends who do interesting things to start writing about them, its always "I'll just post on twitter" or "i'llshow some screens on discord" etc. Internet shrank in recent years greatly, with more and more dead places that are not updated being closed down due to hosting issues or simply lack of interest from original authors.
It gets sadder when one of corporation suddenly decides that whole genre of things is not welcomed and/or just simply pull the plug on certain functionality/content.
Same goes with old phpbb forums - everyone sits on various discords, and places-pockets of knowledge dies one by one, recently lot of 3d-design related people mourned closure of cgsociety forum.
The world keeps turning and it can be shocking when what was once a comfortable way of doing things, so comfortable you just take it for granted, suddenly becomes passe. A couple others things come to mind, not just personal websites.
I used to like giving CDs to friends and family at Christmas: here is some music that you might like that you probably don't know about. I'm sure it was a frog in a boiling pot phenomenon, but it seemed to happen all at once: the recipients all said, "Thanks, but I don't have a CD player."
The same thing with app development -- people want to click a link and immediately start interacting and not need to install anything. I've written a few emulators for old computers that weren't popular to begin with, which already limits the audience to a handful of people who care at all. Even among that narrow selection of people who visit my sites, probably 95% of them can't be bothered to download and install an emulator, and I get it. It would be a fun exercise rewriting them to be web apps, but the inability to seamlessly save/restore disk images to the user's space really harms the experience.
Anyway, I have to attend to my guestbooks and curate a webring.
Apps themselves have undergone a similar transformation. It's OK to have an app for everything but instead today we sort of have a more common format: "login and we let you download the For You page in what looks like an app".
For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.
Also https://indieblog.page/ to randomly jump to a post from any of the mentioned personal blogs from that post plus many many more. (close to 3500 personal blogs)
Once upon a time, people installed applications. You installed skype. You installed AIM. You installed iTunes. You installed Microsoft Office.
Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com. You don't have to install and constantly update desktop apps because you can load an always-up-to-date webpage in 500 milliseconds. PWAs have access to desktop notifications, serial ports, your local filesystem, etc. They can do everything desktop apps can. With WASM, they can even handle high-performance workloads. The web is just a better way to distribute software.
IMO, operating systems should go all-in on web apps. ChromeOS basically does that. The capyloon project [1] aims to do that for mobile devices. There should be no downloadable apps. "App stores" should just be CDNs. Browser caching can enable offline use. There's no technical reason why the web can't be just as user-friendly as downloadable apps. It's just culture.
And, hopefully making the web more usable would also soften the power of the platform silos.
> Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com.
The web was designed for documents and form. Everything else feels like rudimentary solutions which barely get to what native desktop UI is capable of. And the latter is better designed. Web apps are ok if you want a good enough solution (good for business, I guess) but worse for customers.
Most people use only a handful of tools, and only on few devices. Trying to build something to work for everyone result in something that is worse than a solution crafted for that particular platform.
I think it's just numbers. Us internet users used to be a minority, and in a very short time a huge influx of new users came online through apps.
So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to.
The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.
And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.
You're still part of a minority now. Namely the few people that remember what the internet used to be like and still browse it like they used to.
For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out).
I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.
> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web.
Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift
And this is where we get hybrids. Topic specific wikis. If I want to know about quests in a Fallout game I check one wiki if I want to know about alternate universe Lex Luthors I check another wiki.
And of course they themselves have experienced the same phenomenon, with 90% of fandom wikis being absorbed into the blob that is "Fandom (tm)". It's turned fan wikis from what felt like niche non-commercial projects into yet another corporate entity trying to sell me more Marvel movies
my kids pour over the SCP foundation wiki. All fan made up content, very detailed and a lot of it. It's pretty amazing really what a community has put together and maintained without a profit motive behind it.
on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered failures because the definition of success has radically changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in your domain then your site is failure.
I dread the idea of social commerce and the like eclipsing individual apps because the support experience from these companies is already so poor. I can't even imagine what fresh hell could eclipse the walled garden (social media) inside of the walled garden (app stores).
I tried to sign up for Facebook to make a business page and was instantly banned for no reason. My appeal was denied after uploading a picture of myself. It just doesn't make sense from a consumer or SMB perspective to continue to promote this path but most can't afford not to participate.
Funnily enough though, on New Years Eve 2023 I was talking to a few people about a website that I'd made. The only criticism that I received was that there was no app... it is a one-time-use experience that takes less than 5 minutes, then you never have to use it again except to check order status.
But -- going back to "most can't afford not to participate" -- as I write this I figure that I might as well relent, make the app and start checking into the possibilities with social commerce as to not be left behind screaming about an open internet.
I think that as the author notes, we have gone. And I think it’s because we grew up. We don’t have the spare time like we used to, which, inevitably means we don’t access same sites, depriving them of visitors and relevant revenue.
We’ve gone, but replacement never came. They got stuck on twitter, discord, tiktok, twitch, snapchat.
Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.
It's like saying, I hope the new pop music trends that all the kids are listening to dies out, and 80s rock becomes cool again. It just isn't gonna happen.
I just don't think the idea that we don't have spare time is true. People prove that they have time to spend ample amounts of time on the big social apps. The truth is that it is much easier to check out and scroll mindlessly for an hour or two, versus finding meaningful creations on the web.
Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's one of the nicest things about the web today.
Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
>Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it.
That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.
Related reading: Picked up a copy of a book called "We Got Blog: How weblogs are changing our culture" in the university library a few days ago, published in 2002. An nostalgic and interesting, albeit rather random, semi-curated collection of blog posts from prominent, mainly US, bloggers. Tells the story of Blogger too.
> It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends.
I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was Thursday, January 1st, 2009.
Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least.
> it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least
It is hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in college.
I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything, "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we did.
Way more content, maybe, but on platforms that are not made for long term retention and curation, but for attention span of a fruit fly and optimized for engagement. The content might get the quick giggle or wow, but then it has passed. TikTok and similar are not the kind of platform that I would search answers to questions on or that I would use to follow a hobby in depth. Perhaps my hobbies don't lend themselves to being represented by TikTok shorts or whatever they call them there.
I, and I'm sure there are many others in their 30's who would agree, prefer to get my information in written form. Pictures/diagrams are fine, but I don't want to watch a 10-15 minute video, or even a 2 minute video to get information I can read in less than 30 seconds. "Kids" these days seem to prefer the video medium much more. I don't know why, but I find it interesting that reading scores have also tanked a lot in the last 20 or some odd years.
I am lucky I found one in my own language recently. We are a small community, like 250 active users. Most of it is joking, having a blast, and insulting. It's very funny.
For me forums are the best of internet. I don't consider reddit a forum because it has an opaque algorithm. Hackernews is great, but it's threads are very short lived, and it's to big to be a functional traditional forum.
This is what I associate with my best days online. Good old threaded message boards with persistent conversations.
They're not completely dead but there are fewer than there were. And newer forum software like Discourse that tries to mimic Reddit or StackOverflow is not the same.
Social-media ate the traffic. A 10 minute video of someone typing on you-tube will capture more views than a well formatted website. Thus, people just started gleaning other peoples static content into low-effort media. These days there are bots that automate this process to make garbage content.
Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...
i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. You just gave away your audience to facebook and tiktok. people are selfish, they like to give feedback and rant about anything. BigTech definitely nudged them away from that and into their garden. Yeah, spam does not scale, but you 'd have to deal with that, things that scale get eaten.
The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form underneat
>i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments.
It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
Not just spam.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.
My cousin runs a very small home-made html blog. I really like it and it gives me that early 2000s nostalgia. I'm sure he'd be psyched if some people here were to read it.
What's the point of maintaining a website when the big search engines (Google) hides them under tons of SEO crap? You find information on social media now. And that's worse than how you used to find information in search. I've given up hope for the web.
An anecdote. I craft a hand written, deliberate technical blog and publish monthly. Google tanked my impressions from 3k/ month to 300 last year. I still churn it out though, I just know people won't find me through search any more.
well if genAI begins to replace search and includes citations like the hypetrain promises then the SEO/AI-EO race starts all over again... so there's that.
I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad - it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no nerd gatekeeping required.
The problem with having a platform like that is the obvious incentive for rent-seeking.
In the short term user interests align with platform interests because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature social media platform still around. They turn themselves to poison.
I have been thinking exact same things sometimes, I want to view some random websites, but I don't know many anymore, only some tools, which is great, but not exiting.
I think it's cause there's no good Content Management system, there's wordpress, it's still very popular, but kind of bloated and hard so manage.
I haven't found any Headless CMS, that I could just self host and attach the data to my website :/
I've switched to self hosted wiki.js for my blog & personal notes.
And pocketbase as a headless CMS. I self host it - however free hosting is at pockethost.io
Obviously an imperfect analogy - but the article reminded me of an older acquaintance, describing how the world he lived in became so shriveled and monotonous, as he descended into alcoholism.
I think you touch on something correct. It's not that the websites are gone. It's because the used to be readers has been caught in echo chambers and new trends and can't seem to understand that they are the ones who changed.
I don't know, I've given up on following people across the web. They’ve all got a sickness that compels them to incessantly fidget with their sites: fonts, colors, designs, and About pages change almost weekly. And then they babble on about why they made those decisions.
It’s a garden, a stream, a worry board, a playground. It runs on WordPress, now Jekyll, now Hugo, now Ghost. No no, now it’s “handcrafted” HTML and CSS like the old days.
It's the same psychosis that prevents people from shutting up about their note taking system, their ideal journal setup, whether they should use a Moleskine or Leuchtturm, yellow or white paper, ruled or blank.
I don’t see a “cozy” or “small” web of independent minds on the Internet. I see a group of anxious and nervous and restless people trying in vain to assemble a Self and grasping for meaning where there is none.
If you’ve got a personal website, just leave it the fuck alone.
This comment is so mean-spirited... reading it made me sad. I'm allowed to own so little in this world, so how I present myself online is particularly dear to me. If you don't like my website, you can go find others. What does it matter to you?
I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just sharing an honest opinion and criticizing a widespread behavior that I've noticed. I've stopped following people because the "housekeeping" posts just kept coming. There's so much focus on digital structures, on the means by which they express themselves or engage their audience, on the colophon, that they forget to make a point or write about anything else.
I'm worn down by this kind of chatter, by the hyper-focus on the platforms and the tools instead of the message. It's the same thing with designer portfolio pages. They can't get off the treadmill and they're constantly tweaking their portfolio instead of settling on a good layout and letting their work speak for itself.
There's this endless frenetic energy that pushes people to search for phrases, labels, names, categories, definitions that allow them to rationalize their behavior and justify how they're spending time online.
Listen, I'm the OCD type and I'm guilty of this sort of thing, too. And every now and then I find myself obsessing over tools in a way that's unproductive and I have to stop and pull myself out of that headspace. There's an instant feedback loop to editing themes, messing with fonts, publishing a blog post (that no one will read) and so it's easy to keep going. And it's easy to waste a fuck load of time doing this sort non-work.
Anyway, I feel like I'm watching the progression of a most chronic illness that keeps people tinkering in an anxious state of mind, and that makes me sad. It seems unhealthy to me, but you can do whatever you want!
Oh! I remember reading your "On second thought, I don't like blogging" post and nodding along. I think I've linked it a few times elsewhere in HN comments. We are aligned!
I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers. You could blame this on the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone away because browsing the web (i.e. reading stuff on websites) has largely gone away for most people.
It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.
I'm slightly alarmed by this, not just because of the decline of literacy and the slower speed of transmission, but the stronger charisma effects through voice seem to me to be a driver of problems. That seems to be why there are so many terrible influencer cult leaders.
Part of me has the same concerns, as I love books and think reading is critical. However, I also realize that reading and books are a technology that has developed through history, like anything else, and that a yet-unseen format of the future (that incorporates video, text, audio, etc.) may be more effective than reading. I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech.
> they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers
Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then were saying much the same then just with books as their example of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I also remember reading some claim that most people back then were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs too.
[0] right before Harry Potter came out.
[1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New Testament.
It is just that video content generate so much more monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.
If you're a new creator and don't have family with good media connections, then YouTube is pretty much the only way that you can actually get paid for what you make. Regardless of medium.
Anybody tell me what are the other realistic options?
I don't know where you get that idea from. But humans has been reading for thousands of years. And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound. Tons of evidence has been based on that premise.
It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.
Reading as a mass culture phenomenon is absolutely not thousands of years old and mass literacy didn't exist in a lot of places a mere century or two ago. Even today, you'd be surprised at how most people have very basic literacy skills.
And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it doesn't really matter if reading is better than watching a video if people prefer to watch videos.
I also specifically said it's not an issue of impatience, but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to communicate here, but: the average person likes watching/listening to other people talk. Maybe the über cyborg AI gods of the future will communicate directly with mental models, but for everyone else, the only thing that is better than video is probably a hologram, which is basically the same thing taken to the next level.
I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but it does seem like it’s been accelerating. In my head I’ve been blaming LLMs—appification was already driving content into silos, but the locks came out quickly this past year as the silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free. I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels like a waste of time at this point—everything is designed and optimized to maximize “engagement” (ie monopolizing your attention) and that’s not well-aligned with being _useful_. Cookie banners, paywalls, spam—everywhere. Mobile sites are practically unusable—half page banner ad at the top, video ad auto playing underneath it, ad network drawer sliding up from the bottom, interstitial ads in the content itself, a popup over the page asking you to sign up for an account, a chat bot in the corner, and a “continue reading” fold mid page. It’s just…not fun anymore.
Yes. Although you can block a lot of stuff (I run a pi-hole and put my connection through it via a VPN when I'm on the road), the bigger issue is really the content itself is being warped by what you describe too. Take Threads, to which I've recently moved in preference to Xitter. It's quite clear that whether conscious or not, a large section of people on there are playing for followers, making stupid controversial statements to get attention because that's how things work now.
I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?
In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.
You should set your browser to always open pages in Reader View. Especially on mobile. If needed, you can easily turn it off for specific pages. This blocks all crap and leaves you with the text and images only.
Cookie banners aren't designed to optimize engagement, they're forced on websites by the EU.
Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it! Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social media virality dead, but they can still work out better than trying to fight ad blocking.
Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention and bring you to their shop. It's not really about doomscrolling from there on.
So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily better.
I think what changed was education. Digging through the internet archive, as I do about 16 hours a day (as an out-of-work RoR dev with a nostalgia problem), I see many sites that look like they were started by highschoolers. And that reminded me that once upon a time, computer literacy in school meant "have the kids put some HTML and PHP on the school webserver". These days, they're probably learning how to crack leetcode or something that won't result in fun websites.
"Because it's still out there, we just have to find it."
With search engines operated by advertising companies, or companies that profit from advertising. there is an incentive to actively prevent discovery and hide what is not profitable.
Search "too fast" on Google and draw a ban. Even when this is public information being searched; it does not belong to Google.
Facilitating discovery by web users is against Big Tech interests.
Big Tech will do the "discovery"; relax and consume what is presented. Want to go deep into results. Not so fast.
According to Big Tech, what's actually online is not your business. Only what Big Tech wants to show you matters.
What's actually online beyond this might be mostly garbage,^1 but the public is actively prevented from discovering that fact.
At least, they won't discover it via Big Tech intermediation.
Maybe it's not all garbage. But how would anyone know. The advertising company sits in the middle, controlling what can and cannot be discovered.
1. Not advertising garbage but another kind that has no utility for advertising.
Don't believe me. Read some zone files, starting with the com.zone. There are milllions of websites that have become all but impossible to discover via Big Tech intermediation of the web.
Commercial web was something wildly new and wildly interesting for all the people that used it because such a thing never existed before but web consolidated over the years and now people find it boring and not that useful. We should support and fight more for the "Open Web" nature of the web and slow down with walled gardens.
Speaking of "Where Have All the Websites Gone?", they are most likely dead. There are millions of dead websites that no longer exist on the WWW. I didn't do any formal research or data mining project but my assumption is that there are more dead websites than there are alive websites or in another words websites that exist today on the web. Since history is a passion of my, I think I and others should do more to explore and perhaps revive those websites for the sake of information and knowledge preservation and retrieval.
I agree with many of the sentiments in this article and for the past year or so have had curation in the back of my mind when I use the Internet.
Yes, the users are on the big tech apps, but the great majority of these users aren’t interested in niche websites. Many of them began using the Internet for leisure/socializing when they created their first social media app sometime in the mid 2010s. The lack of potential interested users in this space could even be a good thing early on.
For those who want to become a link curator, it would be more in the spirit of the cause to not use a something like Linktree, but rather to self host a minimal site with good discoverability. This barrier of entry, though small, may be too much for most people however
> here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery
Yes, we vanished, because algorithmic curation is overall a lot more effective. We may be nostalgic of the craftsmanship that came with old school curation, but it's not coming back any more than we moving out of cities to return to a agrarian life.
EXCEPT MAYBE that algorithmic curation is expensive, and advertising revenue can only cover a certain amount before turning people off. High interest rates as well as growth slowdown will cause a reckoning, in the next few years, of these costs - and I expect that in some areas we will see a return to traditional curation.
I share the same sentiment, which is why I created this website: https://www.sublink.app
It's not about promoting anything, but rather, I genuinely wish for a platform where everyone can curate their favorite websites and articles, you can read my article here: https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/12/07/sublink/
I struggle to keep up with all the blogs and niche communities I watch. I spend too much time on websites (like HN). I rarely cannot find a good website about some subject—yes, there is lots of spam. I'm not on any social networks, or TikTok, or anything like that, so maybe I just never lost the connection this author can't seem to find. I don't agree with the premise of the article because it doesn't match my experience, though it's just my experience.
People just don't think of the world in terms of finding their people. Work? Find people doing cool things. Internet? Find people writing about or doing cool things. Friends? Find cool people to hang out with. Dating? Find cool people to... (none of my business.)
Instead, it's all about job applications, swiping right, scrolling the algos, etc. Nobody thinks in terms of people.
My list isn't even websites. It's people, and whatever ways I can follow or contact them.
Interesting .. I run a self-hosted web site mainly for my own amusement and education, and my blog mainly focuses on tech that I'm okaying with. I largely ignore my access logs but the other day I had a look and found that 80% of my traffic comes from RSS feed aggregators, and subsequent blog post accesses are almost exclusively tech-related. I'm hoping for more real human visitors in 2024 :)
search engine's stopped focusing on search and behind the scenes became select engines and they would do the searching in advance.
this was probably sometime around 2012 when the first big hacking scandals on the web that were causing mainstream media to focus on them and those places were routinely pointing out using basic search modifiers in Google to find. Google pulled all the useful operations and neutered their search functionality. Then they worked with a variety of different interest groups to steer the discussions and search results online for optics and political reasons and actively started to monitor and change search queries and inject not just ads but additional content based on various factors.
"Creating content" meant for a platform tends to reduce quality to the lowest common denominator of what will work for that platform. When the algorithm reigns supreme, there's less incentive to try something new. The internet has lost its sense of fun creative trial and error.
Internet is corporate now. Therefore it leads to corporations. Corporations lead to other corporations. Big platforms lead to big platforms.
Internet is ad bisness right now. Anything that is not monetized, falls into obscurity. You will not have the scale, budget, readers, followers without big money.
It is not a hostile "elite takeover", but it is organic result of big corporations entering the game.
You cannot moderate Internet for disinformation. Big brother cannot easily ban "words" "extremism" on the Internet, and cannot control speech. Social media platforms can moderate their contents, can ban people, and control what is being said, what is true, and what is not true. This produce a nice coherent version of world seen by big corporations, but is not entirely true. I think it is beneficial for corporations, elite, big brother to channel all communication through social platforms.
Internet cannot be personal and private any more. No corporation will have any incentive for that. It is impossible at personal level to have search engine. It requires corporation, or organization.
There are millions, and millions of the lost Internet. Google does not rank it, as it has difficulty to say what is important anymore. Most of the traffic is beyond scope of Google. Does Google knows what exactly goes through TikTok, discord? Probably it has some idea.
People themselves have changed. Most of the traffic goes to celebrity photos at Instagram, memes, logan paul videos. Nobody is interested in any form of writing/reading. Most of the Internet users are too dumb to comprehend anything what would interest 'us'.
Google creates a Internet bubble for everyone. It is really difficult to find anything interesting. It often leads to mainstream links. Maybe because it is more reliable, less chance of disinformation. Not sure.
Internet is a shopping mall right now, more than a place to find Interesting places. Corporations built roads toward their own shops. This starved creative people out of their small nests.
Google rolls out EEAT for SEO. What could any blog do to be relevant in EEAT? I think it can do nothing.
For discoverability, linktree type portals in your bio is a great way to send people to your personal blog that they probably wouldn’t have found by any another means.
I cannot speculate as to the magnitude, but I suspect that having your blog copied by some spam-type and then them hitting you for a copyright violation might be a chilling factor.
Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now they're largely not. But usually you wanted the content, not the website, and that's easier than ever to get at.
> the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way
100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
i recently created a website: 13channel.crabdance.com
we only have a handful of users, feel free to join us.
I think it's hard for people to stick around since there are no alerts, subscriptions, notifications, etc. You have to come back to the website and check.
lol. i guess someone on your local wifi might intercept your posting password and delete your post to 13channel!
it's an anonymous imageboard with fairly uncontroversial topics. what's your threat model such that https would make you feel safer on 13channel?
fwiw i agree, we're gonna implement it soon just as a matter of principle, but it does seem a bit silly - what are you worried about happening? what is there to "secure"?
just for fun - something to do with my digital ocean droplet. it's actually down now since i deleted the droplet and am planning on buying a VPS. probably won't run an imageboard tho.
It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge.
Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them.
Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they publish to be as inaccessible (from outside their silo) as possible.
> It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge
Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe every month.
For a blog do you really need more?
Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the same price but for the average user generating your own content has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"
Squarespace specifically is positioned much more as a "website for your business" than for your personal space online but they do seem accessible enough.
I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name registration?
While it was conceived a while ago, the internet does seem to be going that way. I recently visited a popular C programming forum I used to frequent a decade ago, and was surprised to see a huge increase in bots, and almost no organic discussions or content.
I found a web page on my drive that I had created, I don't know, maybe two decades ago. For kicks I opened it in a browser (cringe) and for laughs clicked on the links.
To no one's surprise they were essentially all dead. Curiously the only one that worked was to a Pixies (the band) site.
The causes seem two-fold.
One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather than type URLs or manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard.
The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on websites?
EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd see today, where most content follows the same patterns to achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could not be successful today.
Stumbleupon! What a gleaming ray of sunshine in the vast landscape of the web!
I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often wonder why. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don't have any solutions to:
Or Stumbleupon clone's aren't popular because there really just isnt a lot of demand for them. Stumbleupon clones already exist. People generally prefer social media and in this case I'd say Reddit more specifically.
Here is one I found with a 5 second search: https://cloudhiker.net/
It works great. It's fun. Hopefully people will enjoy it. But I dont think we need to make excuses for why its not more popular.
16 replies →
In regards to "Gaming the system," I do not think popularity begets SEO spam. SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search so that you get ad revenue from visits. If you have genuinely valuable content and get popular from Stumbleupon that doesn't create an incentive to implement SEO spam. Ads maybe - but not publishing garbage to rank high on google search because you already solved the discoverability problem.
2 replies →
This site has seemingly solved both of those problems. So isn't HN the modern StumbleUpon, albeit with more focus on technical topics?
1 reply →
> I can't imagine a successful platform not getting beleaguered by the SEO
May I suggest inclusion of the following snippet in the <head> section of every page on such a site:
That single line would be enough to make any site very UNappealing to SEOs
I think there are many reasons why SU would fail, but the biggest to me is that so much content is that so much content is produced just for the major social media sites. SU wouldn't offer net value over just using those apps.
For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A modern SU would often send you to the major social media sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!" banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I could just stay in one app and see so much of the same content?
2 replies →
I miss Stumbleupon and discoverability. I despise the me-shaped bubble that I'm forced to occupy on the current, broken internet.
I think the SEO problem would be harder. Even though there's definitely a network effect, a few dedicated users can curate a thousand interesting web sites, and that's probably enough to draw in anyone moderately interested.
I believe you are missing the crucial reason why all the people are consuming content in apps now.
Google is in large part to blame for this, if not the main reason.
Many years ago, Google started updating their search algorithm to heavily prefer specific domains like govs, edus, or handpicked ones like Reuters or Microsoft.
I used to run my own blog and forum, and it used to be on the top of the search results for the niche it occupied. After the changes, it fell off the front pages and I'd often see the top search result being a link to a random reddit comment mentioning the search phrase and no other content.
It was at that point I realized that there was no point in running your own website to create "content". You can't compete with domains whitelisted by Google unless you have a lot of money to spend on SEO.
Some people point to the "Panda" update as when this all started happening.
IMO "apps" is something of a red herring. I don't think a whole lot would change if somehow everybody switched to web versions of big social media; they'd just be endlessly scrolling in a single browser tab instead of in a single app.
This effect was apparent back before smartphones became ubiquitous, where desktop users (especially more casual/less technical) were spending disproportionate amounts of time on Facebook and YouTube. It's where we first started seeing people sourcing their news exclusively from social media.
Some qualities of apps may bolster this effect, but the root problem lies in the addictiveness, convenience, endlessness, and network effects of large platforms.
"Apps" in this contexts means "Platforms" or a "Closed" web vs the "Open" web.
1 reply →
But these platforms want you on their app instead of webpages. That's why the apps exist. There's a reason they are willing to go through the hassle/expense of maintaining native code apps instead of just one website. It is the core of their business.
2 replies →
I'd add a third fold: the huge rise in garbage ads above, below, overlapping, and surrounding content. Facebook et al have ads, of course, but they are extremely "tame" by comparison. Renting out every pixel ruined many sites.
I agree with you, and I don’t understand why some of these small blogs on niche topics even have ads. How much are they making a month? I’d be surprised if it’s even $5 a month for many of them.
4 replies →
Re StumbleUpon: you might be interested in the "random page" feature of wiby.me: https://wiby.me/surprise/
I'll give you spam sites, but I'll also note that at least 4 of the 5 examples you gave of where people go to consume content in apps also have highly functional and usable websites, even on mobile. I'm not familiar with TikTok, so I can't comment on it.
I'd also note that if you want to just, say, consume from YouTube, spam sites are no longer in the picture.
I miss StumbleUpon on a regular basis! I feel like now adays it'd just be flooded with spammy garbage sites unfortunately.
It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously.
What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.
That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.
Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.
It's all fun until the parasites move in.
One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it.
I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.
Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.
The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type).
I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
3 replies →
The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform. It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social media users are building their "personal brand" and value proposition to their next employer/business partner.
I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own land to extract rent from.
It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.
It's just sad.
One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.
I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general.
Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
3 replies →
how do i get in there?
1 reply →
I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.
I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.
7 replies →
>> elite takeover of the internet.
Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.
1 reply →
It’s like my options are go by an anonymous handle like CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin Bieber should die back in 2011…
Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad
Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.
Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling.
IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.
Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.
On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between this and people who participated under handles that weren't obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more associated with BBSs early on).
> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name
It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform.
There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days.
It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
5 replies →
In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been. Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves.
And that's never going away.
3 replies →
> 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world.
That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".
People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
32 replies →
Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.
This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them.
I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).
>Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
What? Reddit has gone from interesting and nerdy, to circle-jerk, to an insane aslyum. At least for anything remotely political (and political things will often invade hobby subs). I used to use it all day every day, and now I use X instead. Almost entirely 100% -> 0% | 0% -> 100%.
the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat)
without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
X/Twitter still supports anonymous accounts right?
If you provide your phone number for security and your credit card number for verification of humanity, sure.
Yes
I want more people to have link blogs.
I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark
I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed.
It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ for this.
I'd love to see more of these.
I love this idea, I've got a ton of links that I was going to add to a post at some point. I like the idea of having a whole separate section on the blog for that, with a feed. Very cool, I'll have to find some time to add something like this to my site.
have you seen https://ooh.directory ?
Hadn't looked since it launched, wow it's looking very healthy! Here's my listing there https://ooh.directory/blog/96nwv6/
have you seen https://curlie.org ?
I just wanted to say that I recently went back to using my RSS feed as a main source of news, and your TILs have been one of the first additions to it. Appreciate it!
I have mine! https://sancoderr.netlify.app/links/
I enjoyed the blog. Where do you find the time to post though, once you're done with work or do you schedule specific time to post?
I think the secret to blogging frequently might well be not having a job... I occasionally pick up pieces of consulting work or sponsorship but I'm mainly working full-time (uncompensated) on my own projects.
Link blogs are different though: posting to those genuinely takes a couple of minutes per link. I've maintained my link blog happily while having a full-time job.
We could automate the link posting process. Here is a thought, create a form which accepts the input of link details, stores in some place and ur website reads and displays from there. Submitting a form could be simpler and can be done from any device.
Here's mine: https://mglz.de/links.html
One dynamic that I think contributes to the disappearance of websites, but which has maybe a more positive shine than some other explanations, is the increasing usage of internet technologies to support small social group interaction. Consider the hypothetical Jan 1 scenario described by the author: the 2024 equivalent is seeing a screenshot of a Tweet that reminds you of a friend, and then posting it in your groupchat. This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server. I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline. The internet is now less like cave-diving or archaeology, and more like a house party. The space is familiar and comfortable, in part because of the "For You" feed, but also because the point is to share the space with people you're close to. Certainly Instagram profiles have replaced personal blogs, which isn't great, but also Instagram messaging has (partly) replaced comment sections which TBH is probably better for many people's experiences. Anonymous forums can, for all their fun and novelty, be hostile and sad places when you get down to it.
> This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server.
Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed that boat, but that was my impression.
> I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline.
Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that "websites" started declining as social media platforms took off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a reaction to and rejection of those platforms.
> Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period?
Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back in the day people would login to AIM after school or something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one activity that your friend group would do among other things (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the limits of their friend group or were always online, but I think the experience was far less common than it is today. For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone line, rather than the central forum for all communication and interaction.
> Does that timeline for that theory make sense?
That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old web". However I do think that coziness was present in early social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of socialness?
edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness" is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the chatroom/messaging paradigm.
I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/
It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
Wow. I see this as proof web surfing died because the Big Search Engines prefer to promote commercial entities over individual interests.
5 replies →
Really missing a way to sort by recency, that would make it far more useful for me.
2 replies →
Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice much difference from Google.
For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.
Are you sure that's the correct URL? That site is a near-default Wordpress site with a single Hello World post from 2018.
1 reply →
> I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there.
Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.
Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.
On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.
My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.
1 reply →
Have you heard of https://www.marginalia.nu/ in general, and especially the https://search.marginalia.nu/ from there?
search.marginalia.nu is one option. Apparently Kagi also has a "Small Web" option. Check out this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38821248
They're still there. When I stumble upon them I take note and gather them into this web gallery. Well Made Web, the old town of the Internet:
https://wmw.thran.uk
Agreed that SEO garbage has made it very hard to find good websites
That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)
Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news, e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information siloing up we should build communication web thats not owned by big corps. It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve.
I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC tinkerer from the '90's.
Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."
Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.
The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.
Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.
> It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve.
Interesting take
I'm not sure it's true exactly - OSS had email as one type of messaging, and IRC as another. The problem is that email lacks instant-ness (and for a long time you couldn't send larger files as attachments), and IRC lacks, or lacked, rich functionality.
Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.
3 replies →
We all miss the opinionated blog era of the 2000s, but even if the Buzzfeed-like aggegator sites that replaced them in the 2010s hadn't existed, the blogs were going to die out eventually.
Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great websites therefore have a start and an end. We should be archiving these websites, not telling people to "just post anyway" so that the site doesn't disappear from Google Search.
For a Gen Z parallel to this, look to any Reddit thread about how some Youtuber they worshipped a decade ago has either disappeared or is making low-quality content to pump affilliate links. We wouldn't want that happening to our favorite writers of yesteryear. There's no shame in calling time on something.
20 years ago, maddox.xmission.com was my go-to place for rants and laughs. The site is still around, but I've changed, so my interests are elsewhere. Similarly, I can't expect the site's author to still be playing the same character that made me bookmark the site all those years ago.
Maddox is on threads and appears to be the same person. I on the other hand am now a nearly 40yo man with a family and house and career, and not the lol-southpark 12 year old I was when he started.
I've made the decision to give up app development and go back to plain old webapps. Google's requirement to update the "targetsdk" for every app appears to be a "war on free", as only people making money off their apps are willing to jump through such hoops. I expect the noose to tighten even more as more app developers comply. So rather than fight it, I decided to throw in the towel early. I expect Google will try to walk a fine line of getting the right number of developers to jump ship, but I'd expect to see a lot more hobbiests switching back to web development in the coming years.
This is where I'm at, too. The overhead of getting a mobile app up and distributed is extremely heavy and distracting.
I have taken a look at hyperview and tried it out. That's probably the only way I'll ever do another mobile app.
Isn't this how we classify web "generation"?
* Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard
* Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers
* Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.
Web 3 as you described it never existed.
I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
I would really like web3 to go back to distributed networks. Fediverse and all that. I guess cryptocurrencies fit in there too; I guess web3 would have its light and dark side. But decentralisation would be a nice theme.
TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
7 replies →
Isn't TikTok solidly Web 2? It does not do any revolutionary. Maybe 2.3, but certainly it is pretty much same as for example Youtube. Just done bit differently.
4 replies →
> Web 3 as you described it never existed.
But it's been talked about this way a lot. Think of the ... in Rust posts but replace it with ... on the blockchain.
Btw where are the ... in Rust posts? They've been replaced by ... with AI?
Yes, but I'd describe it more like Web 2.5 is basically the gross-weaponization of gossip as a glorified get-rich-quick pyramid scheme. There is little-to-no reason for this mode of thinking in 2024 and beyond, if we are to realize anything resembling actual human potential.
Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.
Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.
I think Web 3 is already here; it is your browser that has millions of LOC and that is more powerful then ever before. There are hundreds and thousands of useful browser extensions and I think we should build around that ecosystem. Mix powerful web browser and its extension ecosystem with DeFi and other decentralized solutions and we should get some interesting use cases and apps.
Web 3.0: back to independent websites but adding federation and detailed, subject-specific semantic markup (as provided by the schema.org standards, supported by the major search engines) to aid in discoverability.
No, Web 2.0 was coined mostly off the back of XMLHttpRequest which enabled reloadless interactivity.
Then Web 3.0 was coined by a bunch of crypto grifters who tried to inherit credibility by extending the x.0 numbering scheme.
It's all rather meaningless. See also: Industry 4.0.
No one seems to remember the original web 3.0 was the semantic web from almost 20 years ago. It in part enabled the news feed aggregation of modern social media.
Someday there will be a Web 4.0, similar to some of the visions of Web 3.0, but without the money stuff, instead a true p2p web.
Web 4.0, since this nomenclature is nothing but hype and BS anyway, will be the web completely ruined by AI content. And unfortunately that web is already here.
There is a distinct difference between Web 2.0 (think wikis, blogs) and the social-media paradigm that followed since ~2012-13.
Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides, or direction on something...are absolutely littered with ads. It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The incentives that got is to today are all pointed towards an ad based world, so part of me just laments the feeling of seeing more of these kinds of blogs.
/rant
A lot of those recipe sites just love to start off with a 5 paragraph essay before the actual recipe.
Everything online reads like a magazine.
recipes are the worst, I've resorted to just printing them out on physical paper, stapling them, and keeping the good ones in a manilla folder. lol it works surprisingly well actually, that folder is a very fast MRU cache or in reverse order an LRU cache.
Tip: ublock origin on PC, vivaldi browser on android. No more ads
You're missing the forest for the trees. I don't want to download a bunch of crap so that I can avoid seeing other crap. Eventually the providers will find a way around the crap I installed with more crap, you get the idea.
It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.
3 replies →
And the few pages that stop working probably weren't good for your time management anyway.
A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.
The internet is a lonely place, all these substitutes for in person communication and interaction fail and will always fail. It's why we're more connected and more lonely than ever. Sure you can now find that person halfway around the world that agrees with you on some esoteric topic you care about, but that's not a real relationship.
Well, the apps aren't designed to cultivate that relationship is the thing. They are designed to drive content engagement -- doom scrolling is the ultimate goal of every major social media platform of today, because that is where the ad revenue is.
There's no technical reason apps can't be designed to connect you more meaningfully to individuals that you resonate with. The problem for them is once that starts to happen, you don't need the platform as much and your engagement with it drops. It requires a company that focuses on that, and not engagement / pure revenue, as a focus. I'd wager the main reason those companies haven't taken off is people like money. If you are good enough to build such a platform, you're also good enough to make 250k+ _today_. If you are currently making 80k, it is a very hard thing to turn down.
>A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard.
The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system.
Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.
The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will.
Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.
2 replies →
That's because the vast majority of people don't care about what the other vast majority think or say. Social media only works because algorithms push provocative content. Otherwise nobody would find it worth the time.
Internet centralized itself around few corporations, people don't want to selfhost/self publish websites, I have own devlog on github pages, and when I try to convince friends who do interesting things to start writing about them, its always "I'll just post on twitter" or "i'llshow some screens on discord" etc. Internet shrank in recent years greatly, with more and more dead places that are not updated being closed down due to hosting issues or simply lack of interest from original authors. It gets sadder when one of corporation suddenly decides that whole genre of things is not welcomed and/or just simply pull the plug on certain functionality/content.
Same goes with old phpbb forums - everyone sits on various discords, and places-pockets of knowledge dies one by one, recently lot of 3d-design related people mourned closure of cgsociety forum.
The world keeps turning and it can be shocking when what was once a comfortable way of doing things, so comfortable you just take it for granted, suddenly becomes passe. A couple others things come to mind, not just personal websites.
I used to like giving CDs to friends and family at Christmas: here is some music that you might like that you probably don't know about. I'm sure it was a frog in a boiling pot phenomenon, but it seemed to happen all at once: the recipients all said, "Thanks, but I don't have a CD player."
The same thing with app development -- people want to click a link and immediately start interacting and not need to install anything. I've written a few emulators for old computers that weren't popular to begin with, which already limits the audience to a handful of people who care at all. Even among that narrow selection of people who visit my sites, probably 95% of them can't be bothered to download and install an emulator, and I get it. It would be a fun exercise rewriting them to be web apps, but the inability to seamlessly save/restore disk images to the user's space really harms the experience.
Anyway, I have to attend to my guestbooks and curate a webring.
Apps themselves have undergone a similar transformation. It's OK to have an app for everything but instead today we sort of have a more common format: "login and we let you download the For You page in what looks like an app".
For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.
See also: "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points | 6 months ago | 1960 comments)
Also https://indieblog.page/ to randomly jump to a post from any of the mentioned personal blogs from that post plus many many more. (close to 3500 personal blogs)
This could be a nice monthly HN post like the who’s hiring / who wants to be hired ones.
“What blogs did you post to in the last month?”
From the thread: https://dm.hn still going
Once upon a time, people installed applications. You installed skype. You installed AIM. You installed iTunes. You installed Microsoft Office.
Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com. You don't have to install and constantly update desktop apps because you can load an always-up-to-date webpage in 500 milliseconds. PWAs have access to desktop notifications, serial ports, your local filesystem, etc. They can do everything desktop apps can. With WASM, they can even handle high-performance workloads. The web is just a better way to distribute software.
IMO, operating systems should go all-in on web apps. ChromeOS basically does that. The capyloon project [1] aims to do that for mobile devices. There should be no downloadable apps. "App stores" should just be CDNs. Browser caching can enable offline use. There's no technical reason why the web can't be just as user-friendly as downloadable apps. It's just culture.
And, hopefully making the web more usable would also soften the power of the platform silos.
[1]: https://capyloon.org/
> Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com.
The web was designed for documents and form. Everything else feels like rudimentary solutions which barely get to what native desktop UI is capable of. And the latter is better designed. Web apps are ok if you want a good enough solution (good for business, I guess) but worse for customers.
Most people use only a handful of tools, and only on few devices. Trying to build something to work for everyone result in something that is worse than a solution crafted for that particular platform.
There is no technical reason we can't eat soup with a fork. It's just culture.
I think it's just numbers. Us internet users used to be a minority, and in a very short time a huge influx of new users came online through apps.
So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to.
The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.
And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.
You're still part of a minority now. Namely the few people that remember what the internet used to be like and still browse it like they used to.
For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out).
I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.
The "old web" is one of the cases in which people forget about absolute numbers and focus too much on relative proportions.
There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks relatively speaking.
See the same sentiment from Marginalia : https://www.marginalia.nu/log/79-ikea-offramp/
Great analogy from the post:
> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web.
Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift
And this is where we get hybrids. Topic specific wikis. If I want to know about quests in a Fallout game I check one wiki if I want to know about alternate universe Lex Luthors I check another wiki.
And of course they themselves have experienced the same phenomenon, with 90% of fandom wikis being absorbed into the blob that is "Fandom (tm)". It's turned fan wikis from what felt like niche non-commercial projects into yet another corporate entity trying to sell me more Marvel movies
1 reply →
my kids pour over the SCP foundation wiki. All fan made up content, very detailed and a lot of it. It's pretty amazing really what a community has put together and maintained without a profit motive behind it.
on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered failures because the definition of success has radically changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in your domain then your site is failure.
Great point imo, not an easy point to make given how altruistic wiki is generally seen.
Another angle is Google's algo making people too scared to link out to other sites which was happening around the early 00's.
This is a really good point.
I dread the idea of social commerce and the like eclipsing individual apps because the support experience from these companies is already so poor. I can't even imagine what fresh hell could eclipse the walled garden (social media) inside of the walled garden (app stores).
I tried to sign up for Facebook to make a business page and was instantly banned for no reason. My appeal was denied after uploading a picture of myself. It just doesn't make sense from a consumer or SMB perspective to continue to promote this path but most can't afford not to participate.
Funnily enough though, on New Years Eve 2023 I was talking to a few people about a website that I'd made. The only criticism that I received was that there was no app... it is a one-time-use experience that takes less than 5 minutes, then you never have to use it again except to check order status.
But -- going back to "most can't afford not to participate" -- as I write this I figure that I might as well relent, make the app and start checking into the possibilities with social commerce as to not be left behind screaming about an open internet.
I think that as the author notes, we have gone. And I think it’s because we grew up. We don’t have the spare time like we used to, which, inevitably means we don’t access same sites, depriving them of visitors and relevant revenue.
We’ve gone.
We’ve gone, but replacement never came. They got stuck on twitter, discord, tiktok, twitch, snapchat.
Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.
It's like saying, I hope the new pop music trends that all the kids are listening to dies out, and 80s rock becomes cool again. It just isn't gonna happen.
2 replies →
it is the centralisation of visitor count widgets, guestbooks and web-rings on geocities
I just don't think the idea that we don't have spare time is true. People prove that they have time to spend ample amounts of time on the big social apps. The truth is that it is much easier to check out and scroll mindlessly for an hour or two, versus finding meaningful creations on the web.
Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's one of the nicest things about the web today.
Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
>Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it.
That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.
Evil Mad Scientist have a monthly (well, maybe not every month) link post.
https://www.evilmadscientist.com
Hey! What a cool collection of links. It's a perfect HN rabbit hole!
Related reading: Picked up a copy of a book called "We Got Blog: How weblogs are changing our culture" in the university library a few days ago, published in 2002. An nostalgic and interesting, albeit rather random, semi-curated collection of blog posts from prominent, mainly US, bloggers. Tells the story of Blogger too.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/928428.We_ve_Got_Blog
> It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends.
I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was Thursday, January 1st, 2009.
Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least.
> it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least
It is hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in college.
I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything, "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we did.
Way more content, maybe, but on platforms that are not made for long term retention and curation, but for attention span of a fruit fly and optimized for engagement. The content might get the quick giggle or wow, but then it has passed. TikTok and similar are not the kind of platform that I would search answers to questions on or that I would use to follow a hobby in depth. Perhaps my hobbies don't lend themselves to being represented by TikTok shorts or whatever they call them there.
5 replies →
I, and I'm sure there are many others in their 30's who would agree, prefer to get my information in written form. Pictures/diagrams are fine, but I don't want to watch a 10-15 minute video, or even a 2 minute video to get information I can read in less than 30 seconds. "Kids" these days seem to prefer the video medium much more. I don't know why, but I find it interesting that reading scores have also tanked a lot in the last 20 or some odd years.
2 replies →
Too many nitpickers nowadays too.
After long and boozy night? It might as well be Tuesday :)
For you, that was the worst hangover of your life. For me, it was Tuesday.
Thanks to exponential growth there are still more websites than ever. The issue is indexing and how people consume content.
For a proof of concept try https://wiby.me/ -- which seems to be curated more like Yahoo's catalog of yore.
You can find traditional web content we just need more applications that index it properly.
The Google index is dominated by SEO-optimized [sic] clickbait and social media content is well understood to be low bar.
Good old forums.
I am lucky I found one in my own language recently. We are a small community, like 250 active users. Most of it is joking, having a blast, and insulting. It's very funny.
For me forums are the best of internet. I don't consider reddit a forum because it has an opaque algorithm. Hackernews is great, but it's threads are very short lived, and it's to big to be a functional traditional forum.
This is what I associate with my best days online. Good old threaded message boards with persistent conversations.
They're not completely dead but there are fewer than there were. And newer forum software like Discourse that tries to mimic Reddit or StackOverflow is not the same.
I always disliked forums. With the groups very tight nit, elitist, and only referring to some garbage search function.
Social-media ate the traffic. A 10 minute video of someone typing on you-tube will capture more views than a well formatted website. Thus, people just started gleaning other peoples static content into low-effort media. These days there are bots that automate this process to make garbage content.
Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...
i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. You just gave away your audience to facebook and tiktok. people are selfish, they like to give feedback and rant about anything. BigTech definitely nudged them away from that and into their garden. Yeah, spam does not scale, but you 'd have to deal with that, things that scale get eaten.
The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form underneat
>i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments.
It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam.
Not just spam.
Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam.
A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it.
And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.
My cousin runs a very small home-made html blog. I really like it and it gives me that early 2000s nostalgia. I'm sure he'd be psyched if some people here were to read it.
https://deadvey.com https://deadvey.com/blog/index.html https://deadvey.com/blog/feed.xml
Love it, colorscheme and all. It's very legible for me.
Sorry. No. Tell him something about ergonomics and bad contrast. That color-scheme is a NO-GO.
I somehow suspect that the poor contrast and readability are part of the aesthetic he's going for.
1 reply →
What's the point of maintaining a website when the big search engines (Google) hides them under tons of SEO crap? You find information on social media now. And that's worse than how you used to find information in search. I've given up hope for the web.
An anecdote. I craft a hand written, deliberate technical blog and publish monthly. Google tanked my impressions from 3k/ month to 300 last year. I still churn it out though, I just know people won't find me through search any more.
well if genAI begins to replace search and includes citations like the hypetrain promises then the SEO/AI-EO race starts all over again... so there's that.
https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/about He is still among us through his words... such a wonderful soul.
https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/
"Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain."
RIP, AB.
I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad - it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no nerd gatekeeping required.
The problem with having a platform like that is the obvious incentive for rent-seeking.
In the short term user interests align with platform interests because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature social media platform still around. They turn themselves to poison.
Exept of cause that it creates a bunch of giant for profit gatekeepers manipulating the content stream for maximum profit(for the gatekeeper).
It also creates a world of nearly unlimited consumption, and the majority of the userbase is on the consumption side, not the publishing side.
I have been thinking exact same things sometimes, I want to view some random websites, but I don't know many anymore, only some tools, which is great, but not exiting.
I think it's cause there's no good Content Management system, there's wordpress, it's still very popular, but kind of bloated and hard so manage.
I haven't found any Headless CMS, that I could just self host and attach the data to my website :/
I've switched to self hosted wiki.js for my blog & personal notes. And pocketbase as a headless CMS. I self host it - however free hosting is at pockethost.io
Not sure what web 3.0 will be fought with but web 4.0 will definitely be sticks and stones
Obviously an imperfect analogy - but the article reminded me of an older acquaintance, describing how the world he lived in became so shriveled and monotonous, as he descended into alcoholism.
I think you touch on something correct. It's not that the websites are gone. It's because the used to be readers has been caught in echo chambers and new trends and can't seem to understand that they are the ones who changed.
Beer is one way out ...
I don't know, I've given up on following people across the web. They’ve all got a sickness that compels them to incessantly fidget with their sites: fonts, colors, designs, and About pages change almost weekly. And then they babble on about why they made those decisions.
It’s a garden, a stream, a worry board, a playground. It runs on WordPress, now Jekyll, now Hugo, now Ghost. No no, now it’s “handcrafted” HTML and CSS like the old days.
It's the same psychosis that prevents people from shutting up about their note taking system, their ideal journal setup, whether they should use a Moleskine or Leuchtturm, yellow or white paper, ruled or blank.
I don’t see a “cozy” or “small” web of independent minds on the Internet. I see a group of anxious and nervous and restless people trying in vain to assemble a Self and grasping for meaning where there is none.
If you’ve got a personal website, just leave it the fuck alone.
This comment is so mean-spirited... reading it made me sad. I'm allowed to own so little in this world, so how I present myself online is particularly dear to me. If you don't like my website, you can go find others. What does it matter to you?
I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just sharing an honest opinion and criticizing a widespread behavior that I've noticed. I've stopped following people because the "housekeeping" posts just kept coming. There's so much focus on digital structures, on the means by which they express themselves or engage their audience, on the colophon, that they forget to make a point or write about anything else.
I'm worn down by this kind of chatter, by the hyper-focus on the platforms and the tools instead of the message. It's the same thing with designer portfolio pages. They can't get off the treadmill and they're constantly tweaking their portfolio instead of settling on a good layout and letting their work speak for itself.
There's this endless frenetic energy that pushes people to search for phrases, labels, names, categories, definitions that allow them to rationalize their behavior and justify how they're spending time online.
Listen, I'm the OCD type and I'm guilty of this sort of thing, too. And every now and then I find myself obsessing over tools in a way that's unproductive and I have to stop and pull myself out of that headspace. There's an instant feedback loop to editing themes, messing with fonts, publishing a blog post (that no one will read) and so it's easy to keep going. And it's easy to waste a fuck load of time doing this sort non-work.
Anyway, I feel like I'm watching the progression of a most chronic illness that keeps people tinkering in an anxious state of mind, and that makes me sad. It seems unhealthy to me, but you can do whatever you want!
1 reply →
This comment is kind of hilarious because I felt similar feelings which is why I took down my site!
Oh! I remember reading your "On second thought, I don't like blogging" post and nodding along. I think I've linked it a few times elsewhere in HN comments. We are aligned!
1 reply →
I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers. You could blame this on the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone away because browsing the web (i.e. reading stuff on websites) has largely gone away for most people.
It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading.
It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.
I'm slightly alarmed by this, not just because of the decline of literacy and the slower speed of transmission, but the stronger charisma effects through voice seem to me to be a driver of problems. That seems to be why there are so many terrible influencer cult leaders.
Part of me has the same concerns, as I love books and think reading is critical. However, I also realize that reading and books are a technology that has developed through history, like anything else, and that a yet-unseen format of the future (that incorporates video, text, audio, etc.) may be more effective than reading. I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech.
8 replies →
> they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers
Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then were saying much the same then just with books as their example of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I also remember reading some claim that most people back then were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs too.
[0] right before Harry Potter came out.
[1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New Testament.
Yes, they did, even if they were reading pulp novels and not classic literature.
3 replies →
I think it is not that people don't like reading.
It is just that video content generate so much more monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.
If you're a new creator and don't have family with good media connections, then YouTube is pretty much the only way that you can actually get paid for what you make. Regardless of medium.
Anybody tell me what are the other realistic options?
I think if you asked people under the age of thirty what they prefer, 90% are going to choose video over books.
2 replies →
I don't know where you get that idea from. But humans has been reading for thousands of years. And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound. Tons of evidence has been based on that premise.
It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.
Reading as a mass culture phenomenon is absolutely not thousands of years old and mass literacy didn't exist in a lot of places a mere century or two ago. Even today, you'd be surprised at how most people have very basic literacy skills.
And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound.
I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it doesn't really matter if reading is better than watching a video if people prefer to watch videos.
I also specifically said it's not an issue of impatience, but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.
3 replies →
Video? How quaint. Why not simply translate the latent representation of concepts.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to communicate here, but: the average person likes watching/listening to other people talk. Maybe the über cyborg AI gods of the future will communicate directly with mental models, but for everyone else, the only thing that is better than video is probably a hologram, which is basically the same thing taken to the next level.
3 replies →
I'm going to start writing more, again. I'm definitely stealing this one, “2086© (so I don't forget to change the year) From Jason.”
I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but it does seem like it’s been accelerating. In my head I’ve been blaming LLMs—appification was already driving content into silos, but the locks came out quickly this past year as the silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free. I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels like a waste of time at this point—everything is designed and optimized to maximize “engagement” (ie monopolizing your attention) and that’s not well-aligned with being _useful_. Cookie banners, paywalls, spam—everywhere. Mobile sites are practically unusable—half page banner ad at the top, video ad auto playing underneath it, ad network drawer sliding up from the bottom, interstitial ads in the content itself, a popup over the page asking you to sign up for an account, a chat bot in the corner, and a “continue reading” fold mid page. It’s just…not fun anymore.
Yes. Although you can block a lot of stuff (I run a pi-hole and put my connection through it via a VPN when I'm on the road), the bigger issue is really the content itself is being warped by what you describe too. Take Threads, to which I've recently moved in preference to Xitter. It's quite clear that whether conscious or not, a large section of people on there are playing for followers, making stupid controversial statements to get attention because that's how things work now.
I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?
In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.
1 reply →
You should set your browser to always open pages in Reader View. Especially on mobile. If needed, you can easily turn it off for specific pages. This blocks all crap and leaves you with the text and images only.
I will give this a try. Thanks!
1 reply →
Cookie banners aren't designed to optimize engagement, they're forced on websites by the EU.
Paywalls aren't designed to optimize engagement, they kill it! Paywalls slaughter almost all your traffic and kill social media virality dead, but they can still work out better than trying to fight ad blocking.
Spam, well, most spam is short. They want to get your attention and bring you to their shop. It's not really about doomscrolling from there on.
So if you're complaining about both ads and paywalls then really you just want content made by volunteers for free. But as Wikipedia has shown, that can work great for a short time until the normies get exhausted and move on, leaving behind the truly crazy fanatics to stay in charge. It's not necessarily better.
I think what changed was education. Digging through the internet archive, as I do about 16 hours a day (as an out-of-work RoR dev with a nostalgia problem), I see many sites that look like they were started by highschoolers. And that reminded me that once upon a time, computer literacy in school meant "have the kids put some HTML and PHP on the school webserver". These days, they're probably learning how to crack leetcode or something that won't result in fun websites.
"Because it's still out there, we just have to find it."
With search engines operated by advertising companies, or companies that profit from advertising. there is an incentive to actively prevent discovery and hide what is not profitable.
Search "too fast" on Google and draw a ban. Even when this is public information being searched; it does not belong to Google.
Facilitating discovery by web users is against Big Tech interests.
Big Tech will do the "discovery"; relax and consume what is presented. Want to go deep into results. Not so fast.
According to Big Tech, what's actually online is not your business. Only what Big Tech wants to show you matters.
What's actually online beyond this might be mostly garbage,^1 but the public is actively prevented from discovering that fact.
At least, they won't discover it via Big Tech intermediation.
Maybe it's not all garbage. But how would anyone know. The advertising company sits in the middle, controlling what can and cannot be discovered.
1. Not advertising garbage but another kind that has no utility for advertising.
Don't believe me. Read some zone files, starting with the com.zone. There are milllions of websites that have become all but impossible to discover via Big Tech intermediation of the web.
Archived version if anyone needs it: https://archive.is/5sxo8
Commercial web was something wildly new and wildly interesting for all the people that used it because such a thing never existed before but web consolidated over the years and now people find it boring and not that useful. We should support and fight more for the "Open Web" nature of the web and slow down with walled gardens.
Speaking of "Where Have All the Websites Gone?", they are most likely dead. There are millions of dead websites that no longer exist on the WWW. I didn't do any formal research or data mining project but my assumption is that there are more dead websites than there are alive websites or in another words websites that exist today on the web. Since history is a passion of my, I think I and others should do more to explore and perhaps revive those websites for the sake of information and knowledge preservation and retrieval.
I agree with many of the sentiments in this article and for the past year or so have had curation in the back of my mind when I use the Internet.
Yes, the users are on the big tech apps, but the great majority of these users aren’t interested in niche websites. Many of them began using the Internet for leisure/socializing when they created their first social media app sometime in the mid 2010s. The lack of potential interested users in this space could even be a good thing early on.
For those who want to become a link curator, it would be more in the spirit of the cause to not use a something like Linktree, but rather to self host a minimal site with good discoverability. This barrier of entry, though small, may be too much for most people however
> here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery
Yes, we vanished, because algorithmic curation is overall a lot more effective. We may be nostalgic of the craftsmanship that came with old school curation, but it's not coming back any more than we moving out of cities to return to a agrarian life.
EXCEPT MAYBE that algorithmic curation is expensive, and advertising revenue can only cover a certain amount before turning people off. High interest rates as well as growth slowdown will cause a reckoning, in the next few years, of these costs - and I expect that in some areas we will see a return to traditional curation.
My entry into this idea is a web directory for TTRPG generators.
https://rpggen.dev
I curate this site manually. Source is on Github, in case people want to contribute.
I share the same sentiment, which is why I created this website: https://www.sublink.app It's not about promoting anything, but rather, I genuinely wish for a platform where everyone can curate their favorite websites and articles, you can read my article here: https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/12/07/sublink/
is it selfhostable? or can it only be used on your instance?
I struggle to keep up with all the blogs and niche communities I watch. I spend too much time on websites (like HN). I rarely cannot find a good website about some subject—yes, there is lots of spam. I'm not on any social networks, or TikTok, or anything like that, so maybe I just never lost the connection this author can't seem to find. I don't agree with the premise of the article because it doesn't match my experience, though it's just my experience.
People just don't think of the world in terms of finding their people. Work? Find people doing cool things. Internet? Find people writing about or doing cool things. Friends? Find cool people to hang out with. Dating? Find cool people to... (none of my business.)
Instead, it's all about job applications, swiping right, scrolling the algos, etc. Nobody thinks in terms of people.
My list isn't even websites. It's people, and whatever ways I can follow or contact them.
Interesting .. I run a self-hosted web site mainly for my own amusement and education, and my blog mainly focuses on tech that I'm okaying with. I largely ignore my access logs but the other day I had a look and found that 80% of my traffic comes from RSS feed aggregators, and subsequent blog post accesses are almost exclusively tech-related. I'm hoping for more real human visitors in 2024 :)
There is Gemini and it seems to be filling in that niche. Plenty of sites there you can explore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
Just go to these places and from there you can find many more sites from people who are on sdf.
gemini://gem.sdf.org/
gemini://sdf.org/
I used to love a site called 'Stumble Upon' that would take you to random interesting websites. Those were the days.
Not exactly the same, but the spirit is similar: https://indieblog.page/
Messing Ads with Search result is just ridiculous of the stupidity of human i've seen.
In a decade, i never see any actual useful Ads results to worth it.
If you want to show ads, make a dedicated Ads page, and i'll go there to browse your Ads, right ?
I go to your search page to search, to save my time, not to waste my time to ignore those useless Ads.
search engine's stopped focusing on search and behind the scenes became select engines and they would do the searching in advance.
this was probably sometime around 2012 when the first big hacking scandals on the web that were causing mainstream media to focus on them and those places were routinely pointing out using basic search modifiers in Google to find. Google pulled all the useful operations and neutered their search functionality. Then they worked with a variety of different interest groups to steer the discussions and search results online for optics and political reasons and actively started to monitor and change search queries and inject not just ads but additional content based on various factors.
"Creating content" meant for a platform tends to reduce quality to the lowest common denominator of what will work for that platform. When the algorithm reigns supreme, there's less incentive to try something new. The internet has lost its sense of fun creative trial and error.
textsfromlastnight.com still exists[1], but it's not even linked in the article. The websites are not gone, you just have to find and link them.
[1]: https://textsfromlastnight.com/
I feel like hacker news is the curated content that the author wants, at least for technology.
Here's the list of indie web resources to I follow:
https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content
Really enjoyed the post, the recommended sites and the authors general website
Internet is corporate now. Therefore it leads to corporations. Corporations lead to other corporations. Big platforms lead to big platforms.
Internet is ad bisness right now. Anything that is not monetized, falls into obscurity. You will not have the scale, budget, readers, followers without big money.
It is not a hostile "elite takeover", but it is organic result of big corporations entering the game.
You cannot moderate Internet for disinformation. Big brother cannot easily ban "words" "extremism" on the Internet, and cannot control speech. Social media platforms can moderate their contents, can ban people, and control what is being said, what is true, and what is not true. This produce a nice coherent version of world seen by big corporations, but is not entirely true. I think it is beneficial for corporations, elite, big brother to channel all communication through social platforms.
Internet cannot be personal and private any more. No corporation will have any incentive for that. It is impossible at personal level to have search engine. It requires corporation, or organization.
There are millions, and millions of the lost Internet. Google does not rank it, as it has difficulty to say what is important anymore. Most of the traffic is beyond scope of Google. Does Google knows what exactly goes through TikTok, discord? Probably it has some idea.
People themselves have changed. Most of the traffic goes to celebrity photos at Instagram, memes, logan paul videos. Nobody is interested in any form of writing/reading. Most of the Internet users are too dumb to comprehend anything what would interest 'us'.
Google creates a Internet bubble for everyone. It is really difficult to find anything interesting. It often leads to mainstream links. Maybe because it is more reliable, less chance of disinformation. Not sure.
Internet is a shopping mall right now, more than a place to find Interesting places. Corporations built roads toward their own shops. This starved creative people out of their small nests.
Google rolls out EEAT for SEO. What could any blog do to be relevant in EEAT? I think it can do nothing.
Internet is dead. Google is potemkin village.
For discoverability, linktree type portals in your bio is a great way to send people to your personal blog that they probably wouldn’t have found by any another means.
I cannot speculate as to the magnitude, but I suspect that having your blog copied by some spam-type and then them hitting you for a copyright violation might be a chilling factor.
My shout-out page: https://www.cynicusrex.com/shoutout.html
There are a lot of fun websites. Start here https://ooh.directory instead of your App Store.
Social networks absorbed most of them, forums went into groups, small corporate websites went into pages and so on.
Tried to load, got:
> Secure Connection Failed
> An error occurred during a connection to www.fromjason.xyz. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR
In Firefox on Windows.
Oh, the irony.
I couldn’t help but read the title to the tune of Where Have All the Cowboys Gone by Paula Cole.
Heroku took them away, or in the least took mine away, when they shut down their free tier.
Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now they're largely not. But usually you wanted the content, not the website, and that's easier than ever to get at.
> the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way
100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
meh++
What a pleasure reading the article and following the little trails! Highly recommended!
i recently created a website: 13channel.crabdance.com
we only have a handful of users, feel free to join us.
I think it's hard for people to stick around since there are no alerts, subscriptions, notifications, etc. You have to come back to the website and check.
It's also hard to stick around when the website doesn't implement HTTPS and is insecure.
lol. i guess someone on your local wifi might intercept your posting password and delete your post to 13channel!
it's an anonymous imageboard with fairly uncontroversial topics. what's your threat model such that https would make you feel safer on 13channel?
fwiw i agree, we're gonna implement it soon just as a matter of principle, but it does seem a bit silly - what are you worried about happening? what is there to "secure"?
1 reply →
But what is its mission?
just for fun - something to do with my digital ocean droplet. it's actually down now since i deleted the droplet and am planning on buying a VPS. probably won't run an imageboard tho.
> 2086© (so I don't forget to change the year)
I love this guy.
unrelated to the post but this website is dope <3
It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge.
Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them.
Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they publish to be as inaccessible (from outside their silo) as possible.
[0]https://xkcd.com/2501/
> It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge
Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe every month.
For a blog do you really need more?
Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the same price but for the average user generating your own content has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"
Squarespace specifically is positioned much more as a "website for your business" than for your personal space online but they do seem accessible enough.
I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name registration?
1 reply →
There is a popular conspiracy theory called the 'dead internet' theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
While it was conceived a while ago, the internet does seem to be going that way. I recently visited a popular C programming forum I used to frequent a decade ago, and was surprised to see a huge increase in bots, and almost no organic discussions or content.
Yeah it does feel like all the websites have gone, it only the static ones
I found a web page on my drive that I had created, I don't know, maybe two decades ago. For kicks I opened it in a browser (cringe) and for laughs clicked on the links.
To no one's surprise they were essentially all dead. Curiously the only one that worked was to a Pixies (the band) site.
They still show up at Kottke (curated) and Metafilter (community) from time to time.
LOL. And on HN once in a blue moon, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38945125
social media ate them
social media ate it
TikTok accounts cover many of those websites, TikTok hashtags cover many of the others.
I'd just say most people here are near death and can't learn the new way.
The same as some felt lost when the magazines disappeared to websites.
The old modeling (miniature) magazines and computer mags were awesome, but we moved on. Some great things were lost, more was gained.
Anthony Bourdain website now is Martin Shkreli's TikTok (which is really interesting)
Adapt or die.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]