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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#161

Post by cgearhart »

carlosjobim wrote: post #156
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.

I will give this a try. Thanks!

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#162

Post by fullshark »

aethertron wrote: post #123

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. 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 internet is a lonely place, all these substitutes for in person communication and interaction fail and will always fail. It's why we're more connected and more lonely than ever. Sure you can now find that person halfway around the world that agrees with you on some esoteric topic you care about, but that's not a real relationship.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#163

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

assimpleaspossi wrote: post #75
yreg wrote: post #42

Earlier 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.

In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been. Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves. And that's never going away.

From 2006 when I joined until maybe just after Obama (2009 or 2010, not sure? maybe as late as 2011) it was the best ever. Like HN on roids. Better than Slashdot that came before it, which was already a junk site by that point, larger than K5. Then it ate every internet forum ever, and turned into this weird authoritarian pervert Myspace thing.

Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#165

Post by pksebben »

dividefuel wrote: post #159

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 m…

Stumbleupon! What a gleaming ray of sunshine in the vast landscape of the web!

I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often wonder why. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don't have any solutions to:

  - Engagement: SU lived and died on it's users, a paragon of the crowdsourced model.  For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting people from the mire to function

  - Gaming the system:  One of the things that made SU great was that there wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there.  If you 'stumbled' on a thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or otherwise *actually valuable*.  These days, I can't imagine a successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO vultures.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#166

Post by cgearhart »

zilti wrote: post #26
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…

I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?

In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#167

Post by pksebben »

yreg wrote: post #42
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.

This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them.

I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#168

Post by kelseyfrog »

bheadmaster wrote: post #151
pjc50 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously.

That's a bold claim. It requires a single counter-example to disprove. I take it seriously, so your statement is empirically wrong. Please retract it.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#169

Post by eshack94 »

> It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends.

I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was Thursday, January 1st, 2009.

Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least.

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