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Does anyone remember websites?

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Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#311

Post by peterwwillis »

fphilipe wrote: post #218
Illniyar wrote: post #213

"it was largely a collection of websites made by people who were interested in some subject enough to write about it and put it online. " Oh,you mean like blogs? Seriously, this sounds like being nostalgic for it's own sake. I fail to see how using dreamweaver and ftp is somehow better then using Wordpress and the cloud, writing your own html as a prerequisite to having a website was never a good idea - now everyone…

> Oh,you mean like blogs? Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform. I miss the days where you would encounter a blog filled with great content and with a unique look and feel. It's as if it almost burned in in my memory. I still remember how the website looked of some great articles that resonated with me. That's one of the reasons I dislike Medium et al.

> Yes, but before they all looked the same and were hosted on the same platform.

"LiveJournal was started on April 15, 1999 by American programmer Brad Fitzpatrick as a way of keeping his high school friends updated on his activities. In January 2005, blogging software company Six Apart purchased Danga Interactive, the company that operated LiveJournal, from Fitzpatrick."

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#312

Post by JohnBooty »

q845712 wrote: post #127
JohnBooty wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is true. The only way I can find product buying advice is: 1. To find a community of enthusiasts and see what they have to say about products in that space. This works pretty well for products that actually have enthusiasts. 2. Go to Amazon and read a product's bad reviews. The good reviews are nearly useless. But, with bad reviews, you have to weigh the number of bad reviews against the product's popularity. If…

I bought a subscription to Consumer Reports and have been happy with the two purchases I made on their recommendation (headphones in the $100 range, and a new food processor). Do you consider them compromised? It's actually just about time to renew my subscription and i've been wondering whether I should. I've also used your strategy of reading the bad reviews on Amazon!

I used to be a subscriber. Theoretically I like CR's approach better than Wirecutters; CR purchases their products anonymous and therefore should be quite impartial and totally independent, receiving no special treatment or assistance from manufacturers.

But I found that they simply didn't update their guides nearly often enough to be useful.

Wirecutter's modern twist on CR's formula -- maintaining a frequently updated leaderboard in popular product categories, plus information on deals -- just winds up being more useful to me.

It also seems like Wirecutter has more relevant experts writing their articles. Maybe that's because they're actually better experts; maybe it just seems that way because WC articles begin with the author/authors stating their credentials and experience.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#313

Post by CM30 »

djur wrote: post #231
cheschire wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And wikia. That replaced much of the need for fictional fan sites. I visit memory alpha weekly.

Unfortunately, Wikia looks like it's in the process of becoming a cautionary tale, with its recent move to start injecting its own video content into certain high-traffic wikis and a general decline in customizability and independence.

Wikia seems to be gradually being replaced by self hosted wikis, at least where larger fandoms are concerned. The Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance (Mario Wiki, Zelda Wiki, Bulbapedia, etc) are one example, the Square Enix Wiki Alliance are another, and I'm sure the likes of the Simpsons Wiki have moved away from the service as well.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#314

Post by JohnBooty »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #202
observation wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> annnnnnnd.... I'll let you know when I find another one. Recommend the BIFL (buy it for life) community on Reddit.

That's also good heuristic for 1. - if you're looking for a community about $obscure_topic, there's a good chance there exists reddit.com/r/$obscure_topic. Personally, I always search for a related subreddit as a first order of business when researching an unfamiliar area.

Yeaaaaaaaaahhhhhh hmmmm.

I have very mixed feelings about that. I have some serious experience there; I moderate a subreddit dedicated to audio hardware in which people often ask for and receive purchasing advice.

So on the plus side, you have some fairly knowledgeable people offering advice.

However, even your average "enthusiast" is pretty lacking. No enthusiast has experience with enough relevant speakers to really give informed recommendations. There are thousands of speakers on the market. I've used... dozens? And owned... half a dozen? I mean, nobody has direct experience with even one percent of what's on the market. We try to supplement that direct experience by staying on top of reviews and things, so we have a sense for what's popular and seems to have garnered a lot of happy owners, but it's still very conjectural.

And speakers are a product category where it is somewhat possible to own multiple products, and there is a semblance of objective measurement possible. So we have it easy.

What if you want to buy a fridge? Or silverware? Or socks? Or blankets? There probably aren't fridge enthusiasts and if there are, it's doubtful they own many fridges each. So, you wind up with users just giving anecdotal stories, tainted with heavy doses of confirmation bias, because of course people want to like the fridge they spent their cash on.

Or, worse, you get the opposite effect: brands that sell lots of volume will appear to have the highest failure rate, even if their failure rate is low. If you knew nothing about cars, or the sales volumes for various brands, combing the internets would give the impression that Corollas fail much more often than Lamborghinis. Because tales of mechanical problems for Corollas probably outnumber those for Lambos by a factor of 1,000:1. (My wife owns a Corolla! It's had a problem or two) Which would seem really damning if you didn't know that Corollas outsell Lambos probably 100,000:1 and in reality are probably an order of magnitude more reliable.

You get this effect with Apple products: any Apple-related forum has countless horror stories of failures from Apple owners. But, Apple products are actually generally reliable compared to the competition. It just so happens that they're the Corolla in this analogy, not the Lambo.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#315

Post by carlos_rpn »

dingaling wrote: post #247
hawski wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Google also loves to do is to show you results with a one term striked-out. The striked-out term happens to filter results the most so it's the most important one. Google decides to serve you more popular (and useless) search results.

There is the Verbatim search option for Google text search, which keeps me sane, but frustratingly there is no equivalent for Google Image search. Quite often I'll search for an image of, say, a specific aircraft registration and be shown lots of other aeroplanes of the same type. Very clever, Google, but useless.

Unfortunately if you use verbatim you can't filter by date. That has been quite frustrating sometimes.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#316

Post by Lordarminius »

exikyut wrote: post #285
Lordarminius wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a point there.The digital equivalent of 'word of mouth' being the best form of marketing ?

That to an extent, and also the fact that _real_ artificial intelligence - the kind that you could share exactly where you're up to with programming and it could tell you exactly what site to read next - that doesn't exist yet. I once read that Google indexes 0.5% of everything publicly known.

That figure (0.5%) would suggest to me like theres a lot more room for disruption.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#317

Post by Lordarminius »

8draco8 wrote: post #267
Lordarminius wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to expantiate on this ?

Once I found very nice forum about linux servers. I found it thanks to my friend saying I have to check it out. After spending some time there this forum started to showing up on first page of google every time I looked some solution for my server problem. Google is closing your in your own bubble. It will present to you websites that you already know or that are related to sites that you know.

> Google is closing you in your own bubble. It will present to you websites that you already know or that are related to sites that you know.

This is a good explanation for why my friends search results are very different from mine. Google would spin this as individualization. Is there any way to get around this bubble and unearth fresh results each search ??

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#318

Post by livatlantis »

martinpw wrote: post #226
Zhenya wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite website: http://www.otherhand.org/ And my favorite article on it: http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun... (No association)

That article was a fascinating read. Thank you.

Ah yes, I remember stumbling into this page when looking for cold-case/solved mystery stories. I got through all 13 pages in one afternoon! Excellent story and writing.

Re: Does anyone remember websites?

#319

Post by fmoralesc »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #242
dEnigma wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently tried to search for certain Nintendo 64 ROMs because I wanted to try out an emulator. The first couple of results on Google all lead to horrible, ad-infested websites that claimed to offer a download but either kept on redirecting me to more ad-filled sites, or tried to get me to download some sort of "download helper", "media codec" or "PC cleaning software". Then there were the sites with dozens of fake…

I find emuparadise to be decent for ROMs without anything fancy.

They are really good, but they don't have everything (maybe due to copyright complaints, specially for Nintendo games which might have been re-released for new platforms.)
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