Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Whatever happened to exploring the internet?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 286 posts

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

#191

Post by thewakalix »

jfengel wrote: post #65

You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you imagined. There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already. I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (o…

Most things are boring in general, not just on the internet (https://xkcd.com/863/).

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

#192

Post by stevenicr »

mlok wrote: post #173
mlok wrote: post #172

A few years ago a few links on HN talked about "the small web", webrings, and drove me to a trove of amazing original little websites exploring the possibilities offered by the web 1.0 mostly. Just like back in the days. And some of them were real pieces of art. I never managed to find them again. For example I remember a website that told a story in the form of a calendar you gad to scroll down, it found it so creat…

Maybe the web 1.0 was for exploring ? Maybe the web 2.0 changed that ?

I thought web 2.0 was supposed to be easier sharing,

I'd say it was what, web 2.5 (?) where many started raising the drawbridges and closing off the wall gardens; making it harder to explore / share.

google, fbook, even insta, and I'm sure others purposefully making it harder for the little sites to be discovered, kind of the opposite of what web 2.0 was supposed to bring.

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

#193

Post by westcort »

jfengel wrote: post #65

You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you imagined. There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already. I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (o…

I found the same problem, so I cataloged all of the books in the Library of Congress on archive.org, music, pictures, Project Gutenberg and created this: https://www.locserendipity.com

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

#194

Post by dwd »

abnercoimbre wrote: post #98
dwd wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing new under the sun. It is a high bar to produce something truly innovative and different, and not just the same old with a shinier interface. Same goes for all the creative arts: television, music, movies, art, etc. You always come up against the law of diminishing marginal utility so very little ever feels as good as it was to begin with. Do you have a favourite band but now only ever really listen t…

> The only way to escape that cycle is to be a creator (with yourself as an audience of one). Sorry I must've misunderstood: is it a requirement that the audience is an audience of one?

It can play out in different ways: creating software to scratch your own itch; writing a book to explore a concept that interests you (Tolkien and language is a good example); playing music that you like (and maybe only you will like; drawing, sculpting, painting what interests you.

The idea is that your target audience is yourself and no one else, therefore an audience of one.

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

#195

Post by throwawayboise »

karaterobot wrote: post #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 wa…

In addition to this, sites are now focused on keeping you on the site, so they can serve more ads. There is no payoff in linking to a lot of other sites, so the web is no longer a complex landscape of interlinked sites, it is field of tarpits that each try their best to keep you from escaping.

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

#196

Post by cable2600 »

There are more sites than the ones you find on Google. Some sites don't have the Google Juice SEO power and fall to the last page of rankings.

For example I tried to find a video of Dave Chappelle talking about Hollywood forcing black actors to dress in drags for some movies. Instead I get a lot of the Dave Chapelle on Netflix making fun of Transgender people. It is all in the SEO.

Then again there is a lot of crap on the Internet it is better to avoid with fake news and silly videos so you stick to 5 or 6 sites you know are good.

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

#197

Post by neom »

futureshock wrote: post #101
jfengel wrote: post #65

You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you imagined. There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already. I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (o…

I think this is half the explanation. The other half is that people stopped making cool internet things just out of the passion and craft of it. Now everything on the internet is "content," a hyper optimized form of human intellectual output that is devoid of art, minimal on information, excreted instead of created, measured to the lowest common denominator, monetized yet worthless, just enough bait on the hook for t…

Internet is too damn hard to make these days!!!! When I go back through wayback and look at the sites I was making as an early teenager in the late 90/early 2000s, it was me every month publishing the same thing but you could tell I'd just discovered a new menu in dreamweaver. Tables to tables and frames, tables and frames to some css, css to some dhtml. At some point I learned all the dreamweaver menus I wanted to learn and there isn't any stackoverflow or anything to really learn much more online, so that was that, I moved on to learning linux, and then on to learning irc. I wan't trying to learn to code, I was trying to figure out how to make weird things I could put on the internet. That was fun! I worked on digitalocean, all my friends are in dev tools etc. I think all that stuff is cool, but the idea of me making a fun mess around project to learn web today literally gives me anxiety, hell even using sqarespace is an unrewarding utilized journey.

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

#198

Post by cgriswald »

mch82 wrote: post #188
noduerme wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough that I had to hand-write all my web code when I started in the business, and I still do. Primarily because I never liked templates or wanted to learn how to tweak them - that's learning someone else's framework and being at their mercy. As it turns out, writing your own code is a lost skill and the companies and individuals who do need that service are willing to pay an arm and a leg for it. So I can c…

In 1997 a classmate would write HTML on paper with a pencil during class. It slipped my memory until recently & now I like to imagine it worked out well for him.

I learned perl on paper and pen with a copy of Larry Wall’s Perl in a hotel room in Long Beach. (An ex’s business trip, nothing to do during the day and too young to rent a car.) Having to check my own work with no interpreter (until I got home) really made me think both when I wrote it and when I reviewed it. Helped grok the concepts that were new and the syntax.

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

#200

Post by exabrial »

I'm going to date myself, and I'm not even "that old". When I was a kid, I used to call BBSs and find other numbers on those BBSs to also call. I downloaded ANSI animations, "anarchist cookbooks", strange and interesting posts by local aeronautical engineers and assembly workers, libertarian propaganda, programming tutorials, and probably what was considered the first of "blogs". As dialup faded away in the late 90s, we briefly had telnet to reach our beloved BBSs, then it was onto personal websites.

Today, personal websites are still by far the most interesting finds. They exist, they're just difficult to filter through the noise of social media. When using the search engines, shy away from anything on a major social media site and tend towards the modern tucows/geocities equivelants.

Post reply on HN