Comment by dividefuel
1 year ago
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.
I agreed that I thought SU wouldn't work in today's internet, and I clicked on the cloudhiker link thinking I'd be met with SEO trash, but I ended up on this post: https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier
Which was a great post and now I understand more than I did about how air filters work...more complicated than I'd thought.
Maybe I should give cloudhiker a try.
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I didn't mean to do this, but a smarter person than I once said if you want the answer to a question on the internet you ought to post the wrong answer, and I feel like I inadvertently did this.
In my hubris I assumed there wasn't anything comparable that was live, but this is pretty awesome. Glad to have egg on my face here.
2 and a half years ago CloudHiker was a much more direct spiritual successor to StumbleUpon, and it was called Stumbled.cc
It worked better, didn't require an extension like CH and then at some point they changed and all the content on the site went downhill. As others in the thread have mentioned, it was starting to become SEO'd.
Looks great, makes a really great statement on its front page and then offers their extension for your browser... the link goes straight to the Chrome store, no other browser gets the extension support it seems
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Hmm, my first cloudhiker link gives me a:
Five Tips to Make Meditation Easy and Enjoyable - Video Five questions that beginning meditators…
Not exactly what I was hoping for.
cloudhiker just took me to a delightful site. Fun rewarding experience, will prob never use it again.
That looks great. Is there a list of these types of sites?
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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.
It's not the successful website that turns to seo spam, it's seo spammers that spam the StumbleUpon api with bots "liking" their spam.
> SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search
The same SEO mindset/paradigm is used to make sure someone's spam surfaces on any variety of platforms, not just Google Search. We can argue about the specific semantics of "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) not being the right word to use for gaming TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat algorithms. Perhaps a different word is needed.
But the above poster's sentiment is not flawed, even if you think it's overreaching within a specific meaning of "SEO".
This site has seemingly solved both of those problems. So isn't HN the modern StumbleUpon, albeit with more focus on technical topics?
SU was always one of the many aggregators in the addth.is toolbar, alongside places like Reddit. They do both serve the same function of making the Internet more discoverable - noting that early Reddit didn't have comments.
> 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?
From what I learned about SU, it mainly died because at some time they got more and more spam websites, I would call this the early days of SEO spam. Users slowly vanished. SU increased the the amount of ads on the site, which led to even more users vanishing. A circle of death.
Did you use StumbleUpon? There was very little overlap, it was a completely different part of the internet; more actual "web" than "just uses the internet for transport"
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.
Yes, this, thank you for clarifying.
These major platforms offer a much more streamlined UX for passively consuming content than a web browser, and most people seem to prefer that simpler UX.
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.
Of course, platforms are going to do everything in their power to exert as strong as a grip as possible on users.
The thing is though, with the amounts of money involved even small improvements in engagement and retention justify considerable expenditures. Their willingness to spend on things like native apps is not necessarily representative of the impact of those things.
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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’d be surprised if it’s even $5 a month for many of them.
I doubt it is even that, or close, if you take any average reading.
> I don’t understand why some of these small blogs on niche topics even have ads.
I think in many cases they have the ads there just in case one day they randomly get mentioned in a high-profile place, get a pile of traffic, and that makes them an amount in ad revenue worth caring about. Of course, they probably underestimate the effect of such a glut of traffic, most likely their site will grind to a halt long before much ad revenue is totted up, and their “15 minutes” will be over before it is back up again.
In some cases it is simply that they've chosen to host somewhere “free” where they have little or no control over the ad content, and probably never see a penny of any revenue from it (the host takes that in exchange for the “free” services).
Sometimes they're put there by the hosting provider. The blog author doesn't get the money, it all goes towards hosting costs. Which are, you know, real. Running a blog costs continuous money even if you don't have many visitors because of constant crawling, spam attacks, the need to have a machine online 24/7 etc.
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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.