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Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

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Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#11

Post by marginalia_nu »

I've put some thought on this topic, and I think the driving force between the Internet seeming so small nowadays is a combination of changes to how search engines work, as well a move from forums to big social media which has meant a shift from organic community discovery to being drip-fed content from based on what an algorithm thinks will be engaging.

The Internet, as you remember it, still very much exists. Some forums have shut down, but there are still small personal websites, blogs, all that stuff. They're just really hard to find with Google and facebook/reddit/twitter.

Here are some cool and creative things I've discovered recently. I have no affiliation with these projects, I just thought they were cool:

http://www.lileks.com/

http://dreamcult.xyz/

http://sod.jodi.org/index.html

http://godxiliary.com/

https://www.floppyswop.co.uk/

https://www.dedware.com/

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#12

Post by lolcat_cowsay »

throwawayboise wrote: post #8
TheMonarchist wrote: post #4

> I seem to have collapsed down to checking 5 to 6 sites. I check about 20 sites regularly even when I have other interesting things to do. > Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest? Search engines? > Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”? It sounds like you would like to find lists of recommended sites that people used to have on their homepages. Most people don't main…

> Search engines Which search engines in 2021 give you real, interesting websites and not SEO gamed content pages that exist only to serve ads?

Gemini's search engine

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#13

Post by marginalia_nu »

throwawayboise wrote: post #8
TheMonarchist wrote: post #4

> I seem to have collapsed down to checking 5 to 6 sites. I check about 20 sites regularly even when I have other interesting things to do. > Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest? Search engines? > Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”? It sounds like you would like to find lists of recommended sites that people used to have on their homepages. Most people don't main…

> Search engines Which search engines in 2021 give you real, interesting websites and not SEO gamed content pages that exist only to serve ads?

Shameless self-promotion: https://search.marginalia.nu/

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#15

Post by kkoncevicius »

Recently I began "exploring the internet" again with the help of a niche search engine that was posted here on HN not that long ago [1]. Seems like it returns lesser known, interesting, contrarian websites where the authors speak their mind. For example I found websites that: speculate that milk and lactose might be a hidden cause for several chronic conditions [2]; try to re-explain evolution by re-positioning the relationship between life, organism, and DNA [3]; rich homepages like this one [4];

[1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/ [2]: http://www.nomilk.com/ [3]: https://bwo.life/org/index.htm [4]: http://www.valdostamuseum.com/hamsmith/TShome.html

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#18

Post by dusted »

I think it's important to ignore the commercial part of the Internet when discussing this, sure, back in olden days, commercial sites interlinked a lot more than they do now, but they had to, now they don't.

There's something satisfying in browsing some site, and following a link to the next.. That's really what I think of as "exploring". Exploring only works when you link to your friends sites (and when your friends has sites you can link to) and they link back.. The interlinking has probably weakened somewhat, I don't know why, but I suspect it to be partly because we've gotten so used to link rot, and nobody wants to have a site full of dead links..

That said, I still link to others. And I must shamlessly plug https://geekring.net/ as a tool for exploring (though, it's only about a hundred pages), you could add yours! :)

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#19

Post by gregmac »

When I was first using the web, it was largely via Yahoo! directory [1] results. Most of the interesting sites were people's personal sites (with lots of URLs like something.edu/~user), and most people maintained a list of links to other sites they found interesting -- chances are if you liked their site, you'd like most of the ones they linked to as well.

Pretty much all that stuff is just gone now.

The closest thing I do like this today is probably Twitter: follow someone interesting, and you'll start discovering people/projects/sites/etc they find interesting. Similarly, HN/Reddit are maybe the closest thing to randomly browsing the "directory", but otherwise everything is via organic search results for a specific topic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory

Re: Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

#20

Post by chomp »

As the Internet grew, businesses built themselves around it. Metrics optimized websites for behaviors that aren't organic. You only check 5 to 6 sites because, either unintentionally or intentionally, for better or worse, they indulge you in ways that the old Internet did not.

Look for communities that are built around the humans in them, vs a single company. Web rings, Gemini, IRC are all great places to start.

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