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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?

#31

Post by hellojesus »

If you want the experience again, the best way, as others have pointed out, is to search via sites and not crawlers - specifically community forums or non-crawled aggregators.

If you truly want to experience the frustration of the original, pre dominating search engine web, then I highly recommend tor sites. Many are not advertised in directories and the only way to find them is to find other interesting tor sites. Kind of a chicken and egg problem, but thankfully some basic search engines and dread exist to get the ball rolling.

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

#33

Post by msoad »

dash2 wrote: post #27

Counterpoint to all the gloom. 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 the…

yes, we just have to accept that those big aggregators won and the idea of truly distributed internet did not become a reality

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

#34

Post by threatofrain »

mikewarot wrote: post #25

Here's a tortious causal chain that I think explains everything. 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 secur…

I generally don't like to bring any attention to language, but I do wonder if you mean tortious.

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

#37

Post by Cd00d »

Netherland4TW wrote: post #7

You might get a kick out of this website: https://usefulinterweb.com/ It curates a list of 1000s of interesting websites, and adds about 3-4 new links daily

I found the idea of this promising, but the first link I followed took me to an Amazon page to buy a book. I feel like that's directly taking me out of the useful internet experience, as I was expecting content on the topic.

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

#39

Post by Minor49er »

There are a lot of really interesting things on Neocities. Check out their Browse section, enter a tag of anything you're interested in, set the filter, and check out what's there:

https://neocities.org/browse

I've also been having a lot of fun on minus which is a minimal social network that gives each user a lifespan of 100 posts max:

https://minus.social/

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

#40

Post by throw8383833jj »

the problem is Search engines suck really really badly at finding good sites. I think the war between SEO spammers and search engines has been won by the SEO spammers. And the search engine filters are now so exclusive that 99% of the good content gets filtered out. this has been a growing problem over the last 15 years but it's getting so bad that even technical searches are starting to suck.

Just as an example: in the last few days all i wanted to find was a single Dockerfile setup that worked out of the box. and nearly every single example I could find in the top 20 results was broken.

I mean, try looking up subjects that many people have written about. For example: "Why does climate change matter?" Nearly every single top 20 search result sucks really bad with barely 3 to 5 paragraphs not even going into depth. We know for a fact there are hundreds of extremely in-depth articles that cover this subject with great depth and examples, and explanations.

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