191–200 of 283 posts
When I was a teenager I came up with several technical and nontechnical websites, zines with programming and reverse engineering tutorials, interviews, and just plain fucking around. And everyone else around me was pretty much the same. There were multiple "scenes", we formed deep relations on IRC, even though almost none knew my real name or how I looked. I still meet some of those people online (few even in real li…
There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web designers who had to do everything on their own, including making GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because it's easier.
We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button where the webrings would be.
All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of Reddit or Facebook. I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there: https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
Excellent site - thank you! Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed... Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience. Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.
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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.
[0]Computational advertising for print in the very early nineties...)
Edit: a last gasp website I absolutely considered Sui Generis and was invaluable in the graphics world was Drawn.ca . I'd be immensely grateful to hear of any mirrors or archive.
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Excellent site - thank you! Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed... Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience. Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
I wonder if there's a search engine that ranks results with worst SEOs first
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such as the above post
So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite enjoyable to read.)
In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are often way too serious and over the top.
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Maybe less virtue and more necessary evil. It was a lot easier to not be a sellout in the economic boom of the 90s when you could find that paid the bills. The younger generation now is barely scraping by. They aren't into hustle culture because they love it, they do it because they're broke.
But 99.99% of people could stream Twitch 10 hours a day, put out half a dozen Youtube videos a week, chase every TikTok trend, and never make a dime. And at the end of it all? They wasted so much of their time doing things to chase the money, instead of things they liked, and when Twitch decides they're not going to preserve archives from unpopular streams, they don't even have the artifact left over.