Live data from Hacker News

Del.icio.us

del.icio.us

141–150 of 531 posts

Re: Del.icio.us

#141

This is probably one of my favorite developments coming from the quarantine. Maciej Ceglowski is a keeper of the torch reminding us of what the web used to be: a weird place filled with weird people who were guided by curious intellects and a belief that the internet can and would liberate us in some strange and amazing way. Before social media amplified celebrity worship and extreme positions, everyone's voice on th…

> In some ways Mark Zuckerberg was cut from the old cloth. The original Facebook was in many ways amazing, quickly evolving, and so open. Everything took a turn for the worse with advertising.

At the same time, for me, Facebook was the first example of the internet becoming more samey, centralized and where its users became more consumers of a platform instead of individual creators.

When I first got to use Facebook (after it had opened up to more than just users from particular US universities), I loved the fact that it had a cohesive look and feel. The newsfeed I was a bit less enthusiastic about, but hey it was convenient compared to visiting my friends' profile pages.

But over time I kind of started missing actively visiting the 'page' of a friend, and especially the craziness in how they were able to modify their myspace/cu2/hyves.nl/etc. pages. Sure, it was often ugly as hell, filled with emoji, psychedelic backgrounds, and autoplaying music. but it was /them/ expressing themselves.

I think a lot of what's turned out to be problematic about Facebook (and perhaps the broader internet) is that most platforms have completely locked down people's ability to express themselves to comments and a tiny little profile picture next to it.

Re: Del.icio.us

#142

Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service,…

> I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly

Delicious was pretty much perfect as it was. Morphing into something like a Twitter or Reddit would not have been a move in a positive direction.

Re: Del.icio.us

#143
This makes me feel kind of nostalgic. Makes me think about when I first got into SEO and ezinearticles dominated serps, and the best places to post content was hubpages and squidoo. Reddit, digg, delicious, stumble upon, furl, fark, etc were just places we used to link to our article pages. I never really would’ve thought reddit would be what it is today.

Re: Del.icio.us

#144

Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service,…

One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising. Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut. The rise of advertising everywhere, and the los…

Google succeeded by making keyword-targeted advertising available to the masses, didn't even need any spying for that at first because search provides the keywords quite naturally.

Yahoo failed by trying to be Where Everyone Comes For Everything and monetize that through traditional big buck ad campaigns.

Re: Del.icio.us

#145

Hmm next what, people will abandon Facebook and flock back to thematic PHPBB forums? (I honestly can't wait!)

People aren’t remembering the negatives to these. I still use a normal style forum sometimes.

Being single threaded is annoying. People keep asking the same questions or repeating the same stuff again and again. No fault of their own. Discovery in a single thread is crazy hard.

Finding what you’re looking for in a thread can take a long time. Some one may ask a question your interested in knowing the answer to, but finding people who respond to it is not easy. If you post something in the middle of a [popular] thread, there’s a good chance it barely gets read or noticed.

Many of these problems afflict reddit too and Reddit and HN issue of threads being almost dead after a day is really annoying.

I have a feeling grass is greener on the other side and people in either case.

Re: Del.icio.us

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that talk but forgot to say what Yahoo didn't do - show you what you wanted on the first page. You can run circles around it they just weren't good enough. But sure nostalgia is great and bringing delicious back will be amazinggggg

Who shows you what you want on the first page? Facebook shows you what they want. If you don't have an ad blocker Google shows you what they are paid most to show. Amazon the same.

If you do a search from the browser search/url bar, my experience is that with Google as the default search engine, the first page will still show me what I want, on the first page, better than any past tools.

There's a ton I don't like about Google, and whether true or not it feels like they were 'better' in the past. A huge step up from the multiple AltaVista searches or the clicking around on Yahoo that I had to do pre-google.

Maybe there are better alternatives these days, but DDG still isn't fully there for most of my searches, and I use Bing for very specific types of searches that I wouldn't bring up in polite society...

Re: Del.icio.us

#147

Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly. I like to think there was an alternate reality where Yahoo didn't run itself into the ground, and took its properties: delicious, flickr, tumblr, its massive userbase across fantasy sports, groups, news, messenger, geocities and answers, its email service,…

> Delicious was for a time at the cultural nerve center of the web, and I think had the potential to be something like a twitter or a reddit if stewarded correctly.

Delicious turning into Twitter or Reddit would have been a real loss.

"But it doesn't scale!" is practically a mantra for HN, but scalability is fairly low on the list of values for me. I'd rather have interesting websites than big websites, and I'd rather see websites go bankrupt than compromise their values. The reason I care that Delicious might come back is that it was still interesting when it went down last. Digg and Slashdot still exist, but frankly I care so little that I actually had to look up that fact, and after verifying that they existed, I clicked away.

Re: Del.icio.us

#148

Hmm next what, people will abandon Facebook and flock back to thematic PHPBB forums? (I honestly can't wait!)

People aren’t remembering the negatives to these. I still use a normal style forum sometimes. Being single threaded is annoying. People keep asking the same questions or repeating the same stuff again and again. No fault of their own. Discovery in a single thread is crazy hard. Finding what you’re looking for in a thread can take a long time. Some one may ask a question your interested in knowing the answer to, but f…

> I have a feeling grass is greener on the other side and people in either case.

That's a bit reductive, perhaps. The way I see it, different styles of 'forums' or 'communities' can foster different types of interactions. it's a bit like how in the 'real world' we might have a gathering where everyone sits in a circle, or small separate tables, or a bar area, or a conference-style 'lecture + hallway-track', etc. each have their advantages and drawbacks.

Re: Del.icio.us

#149
I'm shocked by the number of people calling a website founded in 2003 as "old school". That was 3 years after the dot-com bust!

Re: Del.icio.us

#150
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One difference in the fate of Yahoo vis a vis Google, is that Yahoo didn't spy on its users and exploit the knowledge gained from spying to make gazillions from advertising. Take from that what you will. Google made money, and then Facebook learned how to make money by trumping Google - by harvesting the "digital surplus" of its users to power an advertising juggernaut. The rise of advertising everywhere, and the los…

I don't know how Yahoo spied on their users, privacy wasn't that big a thing in the early 2000s. But just look at the difference between the Google homepage and that of Yahoo from 1999. Google was a simple "search" box, Yahoo was cluttered with tons of stuff, including ads. What made Google successful, besides being very effective as a search engine, is that it didn't have annoying ads, trivia and dubious content. Ti…

Privacy was always a thing and a concern, just not for kids jumping into the internet that don't know better, and that's still a problem today.
Post reply on HN