Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 407 posts

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#21

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

miramba wrote: post #11

I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?

Have you heard of https://www.marginalia.nu/ in general, and especially the https://search.marginalia.nu/ from there?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#22

Post by pkdpic »

miramba wrote: post #11

I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?

That's an excellent idea, sounds like it might be possible (ironically) as a chrome extension? Someone should make it but more importantly someone should come up with a good name for it ;)

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#23

Post by bdcravens »

dikei wrote: post #15

Isn't this how we classify web "generation"? * Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard * Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers * Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.

Web 3 as you described it never existed.

I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#25

Post by Stranger43 »

It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously.

What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform.

That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.

Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#26

Post by zilti »

cgearhart wrote: post #7

I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but it does seem like it’s been accelerating. In my head I’ve been blaming LLMs—appification was already driving content into silos, but the locks came out quickly this past year as the silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free. I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels like a waste of time at this point—everythin…

I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#27

Post by ImHereToVote »

keiferski wrote: post #20

I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers. You could blame this on the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone away because browsing the web (i.e. reading s…

Video? How quaint. Why not simply translate the latent representation of concepts.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#28

Post by yreg »

miramba wrote: post #11

I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?

> I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there.

Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#29

Post by Baldbvrhunter »

dt3ft wrote: post #6
nickweb wrote: post #3

I think that as the author notes, we have gone. And I think it’s because we grew up. We don’t have the spare time like we used to, which, inevitably means we don’t access same sites, depriving them of visitors and relevant revenue. We’ve gone.

We’ve gone, but replacement never came. They got stuck on twitter, discord, tiktok, twitch, snapchat. Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.

it is the centralisation of visitor count widgets, guestbooks and web-rings on geocities

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#30

Post by Joel_Mckay »

Social-media ate the traffic. A 10 minute video of someone typing on you-tube will capture more views than a well formatted website. Thus, people just started gleaning other peoples static content into low-effort media. These days there are bots that automate this process to make garbage content.

Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...

Post reply on HN