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Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

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Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#131

Post by kordlessagain »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #92
falcolas wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.

Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.

I use screenshots on my search engine to work around this issue. If you are interested, I have an open server deployment for it.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#132

Post by sumitviii »

tb0ne wrote: post #90
javajosh wrote: post #74

God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you. The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire. The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options abo…

You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product came along. I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible. But it does not get replaced, because it is the establish…

>and using a competitor is suicide because your content will never get any traction

You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know what they are doing than any of us.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#133

Post by kradeelav »

tmaly wrote: post #124
kossTKR wrote: post #9

I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…

I think we would need something like a modern Geocities to encourage people to start building indices again. It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.

Good news, it exists over on neocities which is experiencing something of a revival in younger circles now. :)

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#134

Post by vitaflo »

ineedtosleep wrote: post #126
kossTKR wrote: post #9

I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…

IMO it's not just about being bite-sized, memeable content catering to the lowest common denominator. It's that nearly everyone making content is copying marketing strategies. Back then it was more of a show-and-tell vibe, now everything is trying to sell something.

Everyone has become a sellout. When I was growing up this was considered a bad thing. Today it’s a virtue.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#135

Post by javajosh »

tb0ne wrote: post #90
javajosh wrote: post #74

God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you. The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad. Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy content you admire. The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain now, and users have many many options abo…

You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product came along. I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent video platform today because it is better than its competitors. Youtube today is absolutely terrible. But it does not get replaced, because it is the establish…

The phrase you're looking for is "network effect". And it is indeed a real thing [0]. But I find it ironic you're implying it's implacable on a thread about MySpace.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#136

Post by algoeci »

kossTKR wrote: post #9

I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…

Read Something Interesting (www.readsomethinginteresting.com) is a great compilation of interesting blog posts, I've spent many an long afternoon discovering new blogs there.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#137

Post by quest88 »

falcolas wrote: post #113
marginalia_nu wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.

I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web. I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.

I've considered running my own IA (https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3), which only archives my chrome history, which is stored in a local sqlite db.

I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how the pieces should be glued together.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#138

Post by BrainVirus »

>Codeblog is powered by MDX, a new flavor of Markdown that supports JSX. With MDX, words look like words, and code looks like HTML.

Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity.

About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing.

About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main ingredient being white-space: pre-line.)

Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become published.

Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world. The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#139

Post by a1o »

vitaflo wrote: post #134
ineedtosleep wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it's not just about being bite-sized, memeable content catering to the lowest common denominator. It's that nearly everyone making content is copying marketing strategies. Back then it was more of a show-and-tell vibe, now everything is trying to sell something.

Everyone has become a sellout. When I was growing up this was considered a bad thing. Today it’s a virtue.

There's not incentives currently for the no money involved approach. Before, there was still some unknown promise of the thing you are doing being discovered at some point, and also you could still sellout - lots of creators did this eventually. The noise is really high today.

Re: Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)

#140

Post by RobotToaster »

falcolas wrote: post #37
kossTKR wrote: post #9

I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both pretty and thoroughly made. Mind expanding stuff. I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compila…

> so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.

It won't help with ones that are already gone, but there's a firefox plugin called Archiveror that automatically archives your bookmarks.
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