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Hacker News?
Or Twitter, at least half of my feed consists of people who frequently share links to a variety of tech-related sites. Also many people have an interesting site linked in their bio. (If you prefer just your feed without Twitter's ads and suggestions try https://tweetdeck.twitter.com).
> 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…
It's fun to assemble link lists, it has a sort of scrapbooking quality to it, and as long as the links are of high quality, they can be very enjoyable to browse through as well. That's the benefits beyond the service they provide for the personal website ecosystem which is really struggling with serious discoverability issues.
The modern web was designed to rope you in and keep you there. Look up random stuff that interests you, not using a big name search engine. Then if you find a site on a webring, and look at connecting sites.
Computing evolved up the point of Multics. The military has always been a driver of computing research to some extent. The deployment of computing resources to help plan airstrike missions showed a critical need for developing a system in which a single computer could handle multiple levels of secure data. The research resulted in capability based security, which was in the process of being folded into Multics.
The folks at Bell labs happened to have a spare DEC machine, and having seen the complexity of Multics, decided to eschew capabilities, and instead relied on a much simpler, and quicker to implement system based on group and user IDs into Unix. This quickly spread to be the defacto multi-user model of security across the academic world.
Over time, PCs came to dominate the low end of computing. When it came time to implement multi-user and network systems, the Unix model, or a slightly upgraded model, based on access control lists (as in Windows) effectively ate the world.
Eternal September happened, and the internet went commercial. With this, we now have persistent internet, and are stuck with the oversimplified security model from Linux and Windows dominating everything. As such, no computer is actually secure.
Because computers aren't secure, you can't trust programs that run on them to be secure. Because of this, you can't trust the web browser on your computer to not get you into trouble if you click on the wrong link. This results in a very strong tendency to avoid clicking on links from unknown domains and sites among the general public.
Because the audience has settled into a few walled gardens, most of the authors of content have had no choice but to move to do the same.
And here we are, because capability based security is seen as too complicated (it doesn't have to be, in fact it can be simple to use), we're all stuck with facebook, twitter, etc.
It feels really to be "exploring the internet". In a glorious quality and extent that I could have never imagined when my dad brought home a modem in 1995.
Most interesting content is indeed either
(a) on 5 or 6 sites, or linked from there (b) on professional news or media websites
This is because only a tiny proportion of people have the skills, or need, to build their own website with their own domain. 99% of people - including 99% of people with interesting things to say - will say them on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Substack. Then there are people paid to be interesting. You'll find them on the NYT, or (for my region) the Eastern Daily Press.
This is fine! Web browsers are read-only. Certain websites, built on the web, provide services for writing. People use them.
Written content on the Internet are much lower in terms of quality than before. SEO has taken over and so written content tend to be wordy or salesy. There is no mechanism for users to flag low quality content to Search engines or other users, so it is a free for all.
Online forums are long gone. People migrated to Reddit where discussion is much more shallow, or private communities on Facebook.
We could still find interesting stuff on YouTube, for now.
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…
Well for starters, we used to call it "Surfing the Internet" not "exploring the internet". The modern web was designed to rope you in and keep you there. Look up random stuff that interests you, not using a big name search engine. Then if you find a site on a webring, and look at connecting sites.
Listen to these words and think about what they actually mean: Internet Explorer, or Web Browser, even Netscape Navigator with its nautical theme has such connotations.