Really enjoyed the post, the recommended sites and the authors general website
Where Have All the Websites Gone?
121–130 of 407 posts
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
I'd say IRC is a good example of one of the flaws of FOSS culture - the tendency to get cemented on the first working minimum viable solution, but then become too ossified to ever improve on it. IRC was great for its time, but it doesn't have remotely the minimum set of features the average person expected of a messenger solution 10 years ago. After the initial success of FOSS in chat protocols, almost all of the improvements came from commercial software, and it was too difficult to coordinate introduction of new features across all the implementations
And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3, way too late, and still with little support. The reason a lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm not accusing you of that attitude! I'm commenting on others I've seen many times over the years)
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#123A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#124I 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?
Agreed that SEO garbage has made it very hard to find good websites
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#125It 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…
I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#126Earlier 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.
I'm not sure how people forgot this but Web 2.0 wasn't about Facebook etc as they are today. It was about content creation and blogging and social media was just a way to blog and create content.
Web 2.0 was all about networks and sharing. Heck, one of the biggest ideas at the time was "mashups". If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) got its start there. Yahoo! Pipes was a thing. Websites would freely provide RSS feeds you could not only subscribe to in your Reader but also use to create your own news feed in your dashboard that also showed you the latest issue of your favorite webcomic, the weather forecast and a stock ticker. Everything was beta. Most of it was free. Much of it could be fed into other things. Scraping was for hobbyists, not startups.
If anything, the walled gardens were Web 2.1. When companies realized that keeping data inside the platform rather than sharing it makes it easier to monetize.
I think if we're going with version numbers it also makes sense to describe the dot-com bubble as Web 1.0 as the biggest change that led to it was the massive increase in the number of people with Internet access making the Web commercially interesting (or viable). What some HNers fondly remember as the old Web is either the late pre-Web 2.0 days with webrings, Geocities and personal hobby websites (the latter eventually being supplanted by blogs, tumblr, livejournal and so on) or the pre-Web 1.0 days when most websites were hyperspecific hobby projects written by technophiles and hosted on Internet connected potatos or their university's web server.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if you asked people under the age of thirty what they prefer, 90% are going to choose video over books.
Maybe not books. But let's ask would they prefer video to check ingredients in a recipe or a textual article? Or maybe video instead of wikipedia page to verify some facts... Similar things go to many things that would clearly be superior as text, but there simply isn't that much money in something user will quickly skim over. Instead of forced pre-roll adds and sponsorships.
Definitely I think younger people prefer TikTok cooking videos to bloated recipe websites.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform. There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days. It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorsh…
>It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#129A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy. Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not…
>A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy.
A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard.
The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system.
Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#130Good old forums.
I am lucky I found one in my own language recently. We are a small community, like 250 active users. Most of it is joking, having a blast, and insulting. It's very funny.
For me forums are the best of internet. I don't consider reddit a forum because it has an opaque algorithm. Hackernews is great, but it's threads are very short lived, and it's to big to be a functional traditional forum.