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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#151

Post by bheadmaster »

pjc50 wrote: post #142
bheadmaster wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, that's all you've been doing. No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead. > But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point…

But you can still post racism inside /b/?

Yes.

On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/ users is "/b/tards".

In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned upon in this day and age.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#152

Post by renegat0x0 »

Internet is corporate now. Therefore it leads to corporations. Corporations lead to other corporations. Big platforms lead to big platforms.

Internet is ad bisness right now. Anything that is not monetized, falls into obscurity. You will not have the scale, budget, readers, followers without big money.

It is not a hostile "elite takeover", but it is organic result of big corporations entering the game.

You cannot moderate Internet for disinformation. Big brother cannot easily ban "words" "extremism" on the Internet, and cannot control speech. Social media platforms can moderate their contents, can ban people, and control what is being said, what is true, and what is not true. This produce a nice coherent version of world seen by big corporations, but is not entirely true. I think it is beneficial for corporations, elite, big brother to channel all communication through social platforms.

Internet cannot be personal and private any more. No corporation will have any incentive for that. It is impossible at personal level to have search engine. It requires corporation, or organization.

There are millions, and millions of the lost Internet. Google does not rank it, as it has difficulty to say what is important anymore. Most of the traffic is beyond scope of Google. Does Google knows what exactly goes through TikTok, discord? Probably it has some idea.

People themselves have changed. Most of the traffic goes to celebrity photos at Instagram, memes, logan paul videos. Nobody is interested in any form of writing/reading. Most of the Internet users are too dumb to comprehend anything what would interest 'us'.

Google creates a Internet bubble for everyone. It is really difficult to find anything interesting. It often leads to mainstream links. Maybe because it is more reliable, less chance of disinformation. Not sure.

Internet is a shopping mall right now, more than a place to find Interesting places. Corporations built roads toward their own shops. This starved creative people out of their small nests.

Google rolls out EEAT for SEO. What could any blog do to be relevant in EEAT? I think it can do nothing.

Internet is dead. Google is potemkin village.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#153

Post by aethertron »

mrkramer wrote: post #149
aethertron wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will. Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to fa…

>The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will. Web blogging was fragmented across independent web sites, Blogger and walled…

I am pro open web. I like the remix-ability of its tools. But walled gardens are easier to use, as they've invested in design, and designed for non-power-users. Open web enjoyers need to build better tools, and/or accept that it's going to be a smaller domain of the tech-savvy, or try to raise the technical abilities of the general public (perhaps via better tools?).

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#154

Post by sotix »

mrkramer wrote: post #125
Juraph wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve what I had searched for.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#155

Post by jayveeone »

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…

This is a really good point.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#156

Post by carlosjobim »

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…

You should set your browser to always open pages in Reader View. Especially on mobile. If needed, you can easily turn it off for specific pages. This blocks all crap and leaves you with the text and images only.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#157

Post by aethertron »

mrkramer wrote: post #128
Stranger43 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there:

  1. National law
  2. Facebook TOS  
  3. Group rules
But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#158

Post by keiferski »

ben_w wrote: post #144
keiferski wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, they did, even if they were reading pulp novels and not classic literature.

I am the "they" in the case of last generations' "kids these days". What "kids these days" do and don't do has always been a subject of parental concern, but the reality is that people aren't a homogenous group, and being an adult makes you more aware of people who grow up differently than you did. Just as my mum was concerned about my reading habits (she probably saw a headline about it), so too are you concerned ab…

There is pretty reliable data that says people read less today. It's not just the "parents complain about their kids" fallacy.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#159

Post by dividefuel »

The causes seem two-fold.

One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather than type URLs or manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard.

The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on websites?

EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd see today, where most content follows the same patterns to achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could not be successful today.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#160

Post by karaterobot »

I struggle to keep up with all the blogs and niche communities I watch. I spend too much time on websites (like HN). I rarely cannot find a good website about some subject—yes, there is lots of spam. I'm not on any social networks, or TikTok, or anything like that, so maybe I just never lost the connection this author can't seem to find. I don't agree with the premise of the article because it doesn't match my experience, though it's just my experience.
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