stumble was the algo sweet spot. an endless feed of things that are slightly better than being alone with my thoughts, but no parasocial "community" with concomitant toxicity.
Yeah I think what killed the web was Google and Facebook.
The former brought massive amounts of spam and the latter brought real identies which broke the freedom of the internet.
Or in other words, both brought the Internet and made it real and connected with the real world. And I think that's not a good thing. The Internet was supposed to be a virtual space for exploration, learning, fun, and it should have had no bearing on our actual day-to-day living experience.
But now here we are where Google is a spam filled search engine which hardly returns any products and Facebook is a dystopian wasteland and its founder is walking around like a teenage pimp.
I don't think real identities broke the internet... what really did it was the perfecting of the addiction formula, by multiple companies (from facebook to king). It turned it into an Opium den
>The Internet ... should have had no bearing on our actual day-to-day living experience.
Replace "The Internet" with previous communications technology and maybe that will demonstrate how completely unrealistic that sounds. Television should have had no bearing on our day-to-day existence? Phones? Radio?
I guess you can arbitrarily draw the line at the Internet, sort of like the Amish did with electricity. But it seems arbitrary to me.
The moral of every sci-fi story is that technology is morally neutral and it's how you use it that matters. Why would The Internet be different?
I consider sites like facebook to be akin to diverting water from the Colorado river. At one point it looked like the nile delta from antiquity and today barely a trickle if that at some times reaches the sea with so much water diverted. The ecosystem diversity falls apart.
Ahhh - golden age of internet fun. Looks like they sold the domain and/or pivoted a bit. Feel like a modern version would be relatively easy to monetize if someone were to ramp it up again.
I've noticed https://clicktheredbutton.com quite a lot in my referrer analytics. I don't know if it's as featureful as StumbleUpon was (I never used it) but it seems to have some fun sites
stumble was the algo sweet spot. an endless feed of things that are slightly better than being alone with my thoughts, but no parasocial "community" with concomitant toxicity.
Yeah I think what killed the web was Google and Facebook.
The former brought massive amounts of spam and the latter brought real identies which broke the freedom of the internet.
Or in other words, both brought the Internet and made it real and connected with the real world. And I think that's not a good thing. The Internet was supposed to be a virtual space for exploration, learning, fun, and it should have had no bearing on our actual day-to-day living experience.
But now here we are where Google is a spam filled search engine which hardly returns any products and Facebook is a dystopian wasteland and its founder is walking around like a teenage pimp.
I don't think real identities broke the internet... what really did it was the perfecting of the addiction formula, by multiple companies (from facebook to king). It turned it into an Opium den
3 replies →
>The Internet ... should have had no bearing on our actual day-to-day living experience.
Replace "The Internet" with previous communications technology and maybe that will demonstrate how completely unrealistic that sounds. Television should have had no bearing on our day-to-day existence? Phones? Radio?
I guess you can arbitrarily draw the line at the Internet, sort of like the Amish did with electricity. But it seems arbitrary to me.
The moral of every sci-fi story is that technology is morally neutral and it's how you use it that matters. Why would The Internet be different?
1 reply →
I consider sites like facebook to be akin to diverting water from the Colorado river. At one point it looked like the nile delta from antiquity and today barely a trickle if that at some times reaches the sea with so much water diverted. The ecosystem diversity falls apart.
Kagi Small Web has been fun to explore and reminds me a bit of the StumbleUpon of yore: https://kagi.com/smallweb
If you'd like to read more: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Also Wiby!
https://wiby.me
Ahhh - golden age of internet fun. Looks like they sold the domain and/or pivoted a bit. Feel like a modern version would be relatively easy to monetize if someone were to ramp it up again.
I've noticed https://clicktheredbutton.com quite a lot in my referrer analytics. I don't know if it's as featureful as StumbleUpon was (I never used it) but it seems to have some fun sites
Wait, StumbleUpon shut down? I had no idea.
That's sad, that site was great.
There’s this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42938061
(no affiliation)
And this: https://cloudhiker.net/
(also no affiliation)