Comment by mihaaly
2 years ago
It is so refreshing seeing content first simple pages from time to time in the cacophony of attention seeking (obstructively injecting themselves) pages with zero or negative (misinformation, misdirection, pure lies and harm) content. It is no fun using the World Wide Web anymore, it is a pure danger zone and struggle.
Except exceptions like this one here.
One of my sorrow how formally respectable mediums like BBC suck up to this crap trend. Their scrolling articles where your fingers get tired while the emptionally manipulative and exagerating nothing with active shiny presentation goes is something I ever finished, but once I tried. Rubbish! (and unluckily their content too in general, even for the simpler text articles, increasingly, all oppinion random quotes dipped in thick dripping emotional manipulation). Have to read The Economist instead. Not cheap but there the content matter still over the form.
Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites. Webrings, category-sorted directories with an entry 'portal' & similar.
These mostly disappeared as the web's content size exploded, maintaining those directories became too much work, and search engines were just so much easier / better to find what you're looking for.
These days: ad & tracking infested bloated trash everywhere, and search engine's usefulness have declined. Putting the few "small web" gems out there in a curated directory, might just be easier than trawling through heaps & heaps of junk (or in near-future: have AI assistant do that for you).
A kind of white-listing, if you will.
I remember a text mode BBC site a la https://lite.cnn.io and https://text.npr.org. Now it's not any more.
Gemini with gemini://gemi.dev/waffle.cgi opening the full BBC URL (with https:// on front) would be the closest to that.
Edit:
gemi.dev/cgi-bin/waffle.cgi/links?https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews
Try Lagrange in a PC or Android and open this URL.
> Maybe the time is right to bring back manually curated lists of useful/interesting websites.
HN and other link-aggregation forums are more or less a crowdsourced version of that.