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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#41

Post by Moru »

yard2010 wrote: post #13
mym1990 wrote: post #5

Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides, or direction on something...are absolutely littered with ads. It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The incentives that got is to today are all…

Tip: ublock origin on PC, vivaldi browser on android. No more ads

And the few pages that stop working probably weren't good for your time management anyway.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#42

Post by yreg »

Stranger43 wrote: post #25

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 con…

> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name

It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#43

Post by cousin_it »

Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's one of the nicest things about the web today.

Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#44

Post by pjc50 »

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…

I'm slightly alarmed by this, not just because of the decline of literacy and the slower speed of transmission, but the stronger charisma effects through voice seem to me to be a driver of problems. That seems to be why there are so many terrible influencer cult leaders.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#45

Post by danielovichdk »

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…

I don't know where you get that idea from. But humans has been reading for thousands of years. And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound. Tons of evidence has been based on that premise.

It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#46

Post by ProxCoques »

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…

Yes. Although you can block a lot of stuff (I run a pi-hole and put my connection through it via a VPN when I'm on the road), the bigger issue is really the content itself is being warped by what you describe too. Take Threads, to which I've recently moved in preference to Xitter. It's quite clear that whether conscious or not, a large section of people on there are playing for followers, making stupid controversial statements to get attention because that's how things work now.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#47

Post by robertlagrant »

meinheld111 wrote: post #16
plastic3169 wrote: post #4

Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news, e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information siloing up we should build communication…

> It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve. Interesting take

I'm not sure it's true exactly - OSS had email as one type of messaging, and IRC as another. The problem is that email lacks instant-ness (and for a long time you couldn't send larger files as attachments), and IRC lacks, or lacked, rich functionality.

Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#48

Post by shiroiuma »

cousin_it wrote: post #43

Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's one of the nicest things about the web today. Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize…

>Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it.

That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#50

Post by keiferski »

danielovichdk wrote: post #45
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…

I don't know where you get that idea from. But humans has been reading for thousands of years. And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound. Tons of evidence has been based on that premise. It has nothing to do with young people and a sudden change in human patience. If your young ones are impatient of they read something is disturbing them, but it's definitely not human evolution.

Reading as a mass culture phenomenon is absolutely not thousands of years old and mass literacy didn't exist in a lot of places a mere century or two ago. Even today, you'd be surprised at how most people have very basic literacy skills.

And on a cognitive level reading is superior to video or sound.

I'm pretty skeptical of that claim, but even if it's true, it doesn't really matter if reading is better than watching a video if people prefer to watch videos.

I also specifically said it's not an issue of impatience, but rather a fundamental shifting of media formats.

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