261–270 of 286 posts
Seems like we just have a better "map" now, but I don't otherwise agree with your idea at all. HN has 30 or so unique sites linked from its front page that constantly are swapped out for other ones. You probably have never heard of many of them before. Why isn't this "exploring"?
Everything posted on HackerNews has an agenda.
The Internet to me does seem to have settled on an equilibrium level of variety which is quite narrow and perhaps to some degree stagnant, whereas in the past it seemed to represent a universe of more opportunity.
This is not dissimilar to how markets can sometimes price in the value of optionality. For example, I remember reading somewhere that the share price of a pharma co which has a wide pool of R&D avenues available for further investment can actually shrink when the co settles on a particular choice, setting its budget and strategy for the next few years on following that single (hopefully) star even though this is a necessary step for latent potential to actually be realised into practical reality.
The Internet has collapsed into a tool which serves the functions that are most in demand for the audience, and to some degree it has sacrificed possibility (who pays for that?) for utility.
Even the appetites of the masses (who provide the demand for what is most prevalent on the net) for fresh content are perhaps stabilising around particular 'centres of mass'. With large numbers of viewers, patterns and uniformity are now predominating which may have been muted when the internet was a platform for explorers and non-standard viewers.
The same thing could have happened with other forms of media, too. For example, movies now seem to increasingly rely on special effects to the extent that I sometimes now find it more of a disappointment than otherwise. Sure, it might be pretty to see whirly colours of space or magic, or fascinating to see buildings and glass facades bursting under shockwaves, or planets colliding, but only for a while - we can move on now. Even literary fiction quite often starts to feel same-y when browsing.
Also, it takes more work now for content providers to produce something that can escape from the gravitational field of established content platforms. Newness and optionality has value (ask Black-Scholes), and when it does raise its head, it is quickly mopped up by 'fast followers' with deep pockets.
A consequence of this, too, is that the reticence of content providers to share anything new without a pay wall has also increased.
Unintuitively, it may be that tides of people and attention associated with a platform's maturity tend to homogenise and flatten the landscape of original thought (even making it harder to find valuable newness).
Also see IndieWeb.
Long before MS deprecated "the blue E", you could still "walk the web" with Yahoo Categories. Yahoo shut down dir.yahoo.com years ago: https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370 I don't know if there are any replacements for it. Most of the archive.org links are still working and the directory is still worth exploring: https://web.archive.org/web/20140927131133/https://dir.yahoo...
There was DMOZ (which Google has previously used to seed it's crawl) and now there's https://www.curlie.org/
My suggestion to refresh the feeling of wonder is to go to site directories instead of the search engine of choice, like: https://dmoz-odp.org
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…
Indeed, webrings and 'blogrolls' were awesome - a great way to share the web. Then google came in and started penalizing web sites for outbound links. Then everyone stopped the blogrolls and the webrings disappeared - and people even got stingy with linking to a site in a blog post. Sure, blame 'shady seo' or what have you - and yeah that became a thing, but the real blame is google. Pushing sites down google was suc…
Google are practically unqualified to separate genuine content from spam. What's their reason to serve users who can be endlessly contented with externally recommended content? That's effectively ad-blocking at the mental level to them. If we could invent some ubiquitous on-page discovery mechanism we'd have big tech over a barrel.
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…
It’s absolutely worth mentioning your search engine, Marginalia [1] as well. [1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=steak+recipe&profi...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Neat! So uh, where is that stuff? Link us!
Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, Instagram and TikTok. And elsewhere.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030207162038/http://www.k10k.n...