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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#221

Post by hgs3 »

azornathogron wrote: post #14
miramba wrote: post #11

I 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?

You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/ It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.

Wow. I see this as proof web surfing died because the Big Search Engines prefer to promote commercial entities over individual interests.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#222

Post by aodonnell2536 »

I agree with many of the sentiments in this article and for the past year or so have had curation in the back of my mind when I use the Internet.

Yes, the users are on the big tech apps, but the great majority of these users aren’t interested in niche websites. Many of them began using the Internet for leisure/socializing when they created their first social media app sometime in the mid 2010s. The lack of potential interested users in this space could even be a good thing early on.

For those who want to become a link curator, it would be more in the spirit of the cause to not use a something like Linktree, but rather to self host a minimal site with good discoverability. This barrier of entry, though small, may be too much for most people however

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#224

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

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…

One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#225

Post by zilti »

cgearhart wrote: post #166
zilti wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 persona…

A bit ironic that the very thing the web freed itself from already once (walled gardens from the likes of AOL) now comes back again much stronger.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#227

Post by mtillman »

simonw wrote: post #190

I want more people to have link blogs. I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed. It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://w…

have you seen https://ooh.directory ?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#228

Post by iamcasen »

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…

I feel this, but likely because I am a software engineer and PC tinkerer from the '90's.

Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."

Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.

The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.

Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#229

Post by ipaddr »

nonethewiser wrote: post #192
pksebben wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 crowd…

Or Stumbleupon clone's aren't popular because there really just isnt a lot of demand for them. Stumbleupon clones already exist. People generally prefer social media and in this case I'd say Reddit more specifically. Here is one I found with a 5 second search: https://cloudhiker.net/ It works great. It's fun. Hopefully people will enjoy it. But I dont think we need to make excuses for why its not more popular.

That looks great. Is there a list of these types of sites?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#230

Post by jwells89 »

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…

IMO "apps" is something of a red herring. I don't think a whole lot would change if somehow everybody switched to web versions of big social media; they'd just be endlessly scrolling in a single browser tab instead of in a single app.

This effect was apparent back before smartphones became ubiquitous, where desktop users (especially more casual/less technical) were spending disproportionate amounts of time on Facebook and YouTube. It's where we first started seeing people sourcing their news exclusively from social media.

Some qualities of apps may bolster this effect, but the root problem lies in the addictiveness, convenience, endlessness, and network effects of large platforms.

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