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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#91

Post by Juraph »

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…

Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type).

I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#92

Post by mym1990 »

keiferski wrote: post #79
mym1990 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech." This is a very baffling thing to say. Its like saying "I don't think fish gills are an effective form of breathing for fish, but it just happened to evolve like that." Reading and writing is an amazing way to communicate things that need to span time. Street signs, postcards, books, literally every…

My point is that the average person doesn’t actually like to read and would rather watch a video or listen to audio. The number of hours spent scrolling TikTok or YouTube absolutely dwarfs the number of hours people spend reading books for pleasure. This is…basic sociological knowledge about contemporary society and really not a controversial thing to say at all. People read much less today than they used to. Writing…

Why the strawman? Your claim of the average person not liking to read and what we are actually discussing of reading/writing being a good form of communication are two different things.

Plenty of people like lots of bad things because we have monkey brains, stop thinking that just because a group likes something, it is good. I watch the behavior day in and day out...people watch HOURS of content per day, and at the end they have synthesized almost none of it. A majority of social video and audio is just a way for people to entertain themselves and a buffer against being alone with their thoughts. I wholeheartedly agree that audio and video can be great learning and communication tools. To say that is what is happening on a majority of social media is extremely misguided.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#93

Post by keiferski »

Ekaros wrote: post #77
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 think it is not that people don't like reading. It is just that video content generate so much more monetization. At least compared to work done. Thus most relevant content is generated as video instead of text. And those generating text are struggling with revenue sources.

I think if you asked people under the age of thirty what they prefer, 90% are going to choose video over books.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#94

Post by benguild »

I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web.

Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#95

Post by keiferski »

mym1990 wrote: post #92
keiferski wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that the average person doesn’t actually like to read and would rather watch a video or listen to audio. The number of hours spent scrolling TikTok or YouTube absolutely dwarfs the number of hours people spend reading books for pleasure. This is…basic sociological knowledge about contemporary society and really not a controversial thing to say at all. People read much less today than they used to. Writing…

Why the strawman? Your claim of the average person not liking to read and what we are actually discussing of reading/writing being a good form of communication are two different things. Plenty of people like lots of bad things because we have monkey brains, stop thinking that just because a group likes something, it is good. I watch the behavior day in and day out...people watch HOURS of content per day, and at the e…

I am describing what I see as a societal shift and commenting on it. You are making this (and your other comment) into some moralistic activist argument, which is entirely missing the point and frankly just uninteresting. As I said, it’s not about what is better, it’s what ends up being used by people that drives culture.

Adding to that: the critique of writing has a long history going back all the way to Plato. This is not a new topic.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#96

Post by Whoppertime »

benguild wrote: post #94

I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web. Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the be…

And this is where we get hybrids. Topic specific wikis. If I want to know about quests in a Fallout game I check one wiki if I want to know about alternate universe Lex Luthors I check another wiki.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#97

Post by nairboon »

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.

Someday there will be a Web 4.0, similar to some of the visions of Web 3.0, but without the money stuff, instead a true p2p web.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#98

Post by nairboon »

Ekaros wrote: post #72
bdcravens wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't TikTok solidly Web 2? It does not do any revolutionary. Maybe 2.3, but certainly it is pretty much same as for example Youtube. Just done bit differently.

These version numbers are for marketing. None of them are revolutionary, only the web itself is.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#99

Post by ben_w »

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…

> they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers

Did they ever? I grew up with newspapers, but adults back then were saying much the same then just with books as their example of "things kids don't read these days"[0], to the extent that my mum decided she ought to bribe me to read more[1]. But I also remember reading some claim that most people back then were reading just the headlines of newspapers, and if they were particularly engaged by that, perhaps the first/last paragraphs too.

[0] right before Harry Potter came out.

[1] I can't remember exactly how much any more, but I got at least a few week's worth of pocket money from the New Testament.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#100

Post by bvvg »

ok_dad wrote: post #52
mcv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think Web N isn't about the actual tech being used, it's about the way the tech is being used and how it interacts with the real world and our society. Web 1 was HTML informational web sites, maybe some chat rooms and games here and there but not much affect on the real world. Web 2 was/is the "web app" where you can transact various business online, and group into communities and stuff and which is well integrated…

The advent of the smartphone and touchscreen is essentially the defining characteristic of Web 2.0 and we haven't really approached Web 3.0+ in any meaningful way, in my experience. However, I am not a computer architecture/hw guru, yet I still expect the future to be pleasantly surprising despite this, erm, rather unnecessarily difficult time.
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