Related reading: Picked up a copy of a book called "We Got Blog: How weblogs are changing our culture" in the university library a few days ago, published in 2002. An nostalgic and interesting, albeit rather random, semi-curated collection of blog posts from prominent, mainly US, bloggers. Tells the story of Blogger too.
Where Have All the Websites Gone?
31–40 of 407 posts
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#32Archived version if anyone needs it: https://archive.is/5sxo8
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#33Obviously an imperfect analogy - but the article reminded me of an older acquaintance, describing how the world he lived in became so shriveled and monotonous, as he descended into alcoholism.
I think you touch on something correct. It's not that the websites are gone. It's because the used to be readers has been caught in echo chambers and new trends and can't seem to understand that they are the ones who changed.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#34I 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?
You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/ It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#35The "old web" is one of the cases in which people forget about absolute numbers and focus too much on relative proportions.
There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks relatively speaking.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#36I 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.
I'm not really sure what you're trying to communicate here, but: the average person likes watching/listening to other people talk. Maybe the über cyborg AI gods of the future will communicate directly with mental models, but for everyone else, the only thing that is better than video is probably a hologram, which is basically the same thing taken to the next level.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#37I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad - it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no nerd gatekeeping required.
Exept of cause that it creates a bunch of giant for profit gatekeepers manipulating the content stream for maximum profit(for the gatekeeper).
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#38Isn'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.
I would really like web3 to go back to distributed networks. Fediverse and all that. I guess cryptocurrencies fit in there too; I guess web3 would have its light and dark side. But decentralisation would be a nice theme.
TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?
(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#39Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now they're largely not. But usually you wanted the content, not the website, and that's easier than ever to get at.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#40Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now the…
> the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way
100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.