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Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

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131–140 of 286 posts

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

#131
1. Many of the creators of web sites and many of the users have changed. The creators often know diddly squat except some framework, they often work for a dullard and produce dull nonsense. The audience is often deeply "consumer" in the derogatory meaning of the word.

Result: When you're surfing you see so much of no interest that it's no longer fun.

(There is good stuff out there it's just so hard to find.)

2. The search engines also actively destroyed all those people who used to list interesting sites. Now the replacement for finding interesting sites is often some half witted algorithm, that's definitely not human, definitely hasn't the slightest clue and won't even let you take charge to get what you want.

3. People used to write their own material, experiment with program driven sites, be interesting. Now so many, even those who used to be interesting, make regurgi-posts all the time. They provide a link to an article that they've often not really read. That article is produced by somebody under time pressure who thinks the web is some text and a stock image or two, but mostly 100 times as much code as anything useful, so they can watch your every move, extract your money.

That's enough for now. If you want you can recreate the web as something that increases your intellect, not this destroyer abomination thing, choice is yours. If you have say five or so friends similarly inclined you can do it. Your choice.

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smaller subreddits are a great counterexample as well. Many are teeming with user creations, be it art, short stories, personal projects, etc. Just about anything and everything can be found there, and much of it is people just doing their thing for no profit besides an integer counter on their post.

Link us!

Here are a couple of user created content subreddits I like. They fall into the general overlapping categories of making and fixing things, and taking cool pictures of clouds, plants, and *nix desktops. :)

If you prefer the new layout you can "s/old/www/g".

https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/

https://old.reddit.com/r/CLOUDS/

https://old.reddit.com/r/electronics/

https://old.reddit.com/r/KerbalSpaceProgram/

https://old.reddit.com/r/painting/

https://old.reddit.com/r/Pizza/

https://old.reddit.com/r/ramen/

https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/

https://old.reddit.com/r/succulents/

https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/

https://old.reddit.com/r/vintagecomputing/

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

#135
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, more people are making cool internet things than ever. The internet is in a golden age of creative expression across every conceivable medium. Anything you can think of - art, music, video, games, ARGs, fiction and unfiction. But they're not putting those things on quirky hand-coded websites , so Hacker News doesn't care. The idea that most of the modern web is boring, uninteresting and not worth anyone's t…

Neat! So uh, where is that stuff? Link us!

Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Instagram and TikTok.

And elsewhere.

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

#137
Time for my pet theory!

Search is orthogonal to exploration. At first Google/yahoo/etc we're so bad that improvements in their systems made everything better.

But at some point they started trading one against the other because the easy wins were gone.

Because Google is the market leader (at least by the time this becomes relevant) everyone tried to compete with them and follow their path. Google optimized search really strongly over exploration. So much so that most users only interact with the very first result these days.

And thus exploring the internet is dead because there's not a good way to do it. This had knock on effects where nobody designs to be explored like they used to (or are explicitly hostile to it), so it's probably actually quite hard to build an internet explore engine at this point

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

#138
I used to frequent various forums. They all seem to have disappeared.

For some reason, "discource" has taken over as the forum software, but I don't ever remember finding it engaging or interesting.

Sure, the old forum software were kind of "old", pre-ajax. You had to click all the time. But somehow, it was engaging. People would post there, and threads could go on for days, and I would come and check every so often for new replies.

This all seems to have gone. Most programming discussion now takes place on HN and Reddit.

Almost all the discource based programming forums are mostly just Q&A (aka support).

Some discussions happen on Twitter, but Twitter is not really a good platform for discussions. I mean, it doesn't even have a good way of navigating all the comments on a thread!!

I think what killed it for me is that by design, discussions just fade into the "next" page after about two days, so you never see the kind of thread where comments keep pouring in for days and weeks.

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

#139
It’s painful going to a new site, only to be greeted by huge hard-to-dismiss popups telling you to subscribe / disable your ad blocker / enter your email / etc, then a cookie dialog you have to parse and carefully operate in order to not get OneTrusted, then the whole page may refresh and take you back to the top because of these shenanigans. Oh and does this site have multiple video players attacking you from the corners? These days I do feel a twinge of adrenaline as I gird myself to load a new site, so I’ll prefer to stay on the ones I know.

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

#140
It's because your interface to the internet is not browsing-based.

Back when we used things like the Yahoo directory as our main method of searching, we'd travel down different categories, finding unexpected websites as we went. That felt like exploring, because you were making choices about which direction to go, and that would determine what you saw next.

With a search engine, you tell the search engine what you want, it takes you there. There's no browsing there, so very little discovery.

The other main method of finding things today is aggregation: places like Hackernews, or Twitter. The reason using those sites doesn't feel like exploring is because they're just pushing new things right at you. It's not a matter of you seeking anything out, or making any choices, so it doesn't feel the same.

You can get that feeling of exploration on Twitter or (e.g. YouTube, Twitch, etc.) by using the relationships of individual people or channels as a path to travel down. But, that's not the most common way to use those sites, nor what they're optimized for: they want to show you a list of recommended new things based on an algorithm, and that won't feel like you're exploring, because you aren't; you're on a guided tour.

I think these companies gave us what we want most of the time, and one consequence is that the idea of a directory-based interface to the web went away, along with the feeling that using such an interface evoked.

Wikipedia is one of the only sites many people still use that is still organized like a hyperlinked directory, and meant to be used to serendipitously explore and find unexpected information yourself.

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