The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

Good to hear -- my startup wants to be one more example.

Irony: The opportunity, goal, purpose of my startup is to help people find such Web sites, especially little or focused ones, that they will like. Or the short description of my startup is to help people find Internet content they will like, say, via, roughly search, discovery, recommendation.

A novel part is that the site gets some new data via a likely so far unique iterative, interactive dialog, specific to each use, and then manipulates that data with some math I derived, likely new. A classic, but mostly neglected, advanced pure math result says that, in principle, the iterations should converge to what can be regarded as the right results!

For more, no key words are involved. Can argue that the results give the user the results, content, with the meaning they will like best, i.e., make some progress on working with meaning. So, the problem, the challenge is to respond to the explosion of Internet content, now often from specialized, focused, small Web sites.

For one more -- there are no user IDs, logins, or use of HTTP cookies. In particular, two users who execute the same dialog on the same day (i.e., before I add to the database) get the same results. I.e., for the users there is some relatively good privacy.

Here I'm just taking the opportunity of this OP to describe my solution.

I wrote the Web site code, in .NET, and as far as I can tell the code is ready for significant production. As in the OP and some of the comments already in this thread, my plan is, indeed, to run my own server, using Windows Server, SQL Server, and, for hardware, an AMD FX-8350 at 4.0 GHz. I'm adding data, am not live yet, and have not settled in a domain name yet.

What'd you think?

I follow the NFT thing, at least in its metaverse incarnation, and it looks like it's about over. None of the 3D worlds that have NFTs have significant usage. The reaction of game companies is mostly "do not need or want". The reaction of gamers is "hell, no". Nobody is doing much with their overpriced "virtual land". Where it even exists. There are many wannabe virtual worlds that never actually launched a 3D world.

There isn't much of an NFT resale market. There are minters, and there are suckers. Any chance to make money flipping NFTs was used up last year. NFTs may stay around as collectables, but to make money that way, you must have fans who buy your merch. You need to own an NBA franchise, be a famous performer, or have a major collectable brand.

NFT sentiment on Reddit has gone from positive to very negative in the last three months. The hype isn't working any more. Without hype, it dies.

Then there's enforcement. About twice a month, the US SEC brings the hammer down on some crypto-related crook.[1] They're still working through the Initial Coin Offering scam backlog. They'll get to NFTs as the complaints start coming in.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...

The problem is, a lot of the content quality is pretty bad. I remember being a kid in the '90s and viewing page after Geocities page on "Pokemon hacks" which were collections of hearsay versions of what is now known as MissingNo hack, many of which were just plain incorrect. Some of these sites would ask people to send in $5 to get access to the hacks (which was obviously a scam.) The reason the SNR of independent sites is so high these days is because independent sites aren't under any competitive pressure; they're often made specifically to avoid dealing with the corporate web. A world made up of independent websites would suffer the same incentive and spam problems that today's walled gardens face, with none of the walled garden protections.

Incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior has _always_ been the challenge on the net. People are getting emotional about SNR on the Web these days because it's much more ubiquitous in our lives, but Usenet and Email suffered from the same spam problems the web faces. Usenet faded away but Email also became, in practice, highly centralized the way the Web became, because the problem of spam (whether commercial or by crazies) is so hard to fight.

This. IMHO, those who criticize crypto tend to experience the fallacy of incomplete evidence (aka "cherry picking" [0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking

I think it is a fair comparison they just did not state it fairly well.

Back in the day you could create your own radio station too or make your own TV content and do it relatively affordably. But reaching a massive audience was multiple times more difficult and required help of one of the gatekeepers.

With the internet you can be heard more widely and cheaper yet (comparatively) but again if you want to really reliably reach a giant audience you again need the permission of the gatekeepers.

If modern politics have proven anything it is that you are not gonna become a wildly adored prophet without using a lot of different mega huge social media platforms no matter how hard you try.