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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

261–270 of 407 posts

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#261

My cousin runs a very small home-made html blog. I really like it and it gives me that early 2000s nostalgia. I'm sure he'd be psyched if some people here were to read it. https://deadvey.com https://deadvey.com/blog/index.html https://deadvey.com/blog/feed.xml

Sorry. No. Tell him something about ergonomics and bad contrast. That color-scheme is a NO-GO.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add a third fold: the huge rise in garbage ads above, below, overlapping, and surrounding content. Facebook et al have ads, of course, but they are extremely "tame" by comparison. Renting out every pixel ruined many sites.

I agree with you, and I don’t understand why some of these small blogs on niche topics even have ads. How much are they making a month? I’d be surprised if it’s even $5 a month for many of them.

Sometimes they're put there by the hosting provider. The blog author doesn't get the money, it all goes towards hosting costs. Which are, you know, real. Running a blog costs continuous money even if you don't have many visitors because of constant crawling, spam attacks, the need to have a machine online 24/7 etc.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#263
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.

Yeah, I think it's noteworthy that the times in history we view as high water marks in terms of personal websites are also the times in history we had really good aggregators/navigation tools for personal websites. I think in absolute terms we aren't significantly worse off than in the '90s when "surfing the web" was so big there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime. On the flip side, it doesn't matter ho…

You're (maybe) inadvertently on to something there,

> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.

  1. (1) pastime, interest, pursuit -- (a diversion that occupies
  one's time and thoughts (usually pleasantly);

I think what some of us are nostalgic for is when the "Web" was a way to pass the time. For many it was a cultural curiosity first, then an entertainment source. At some point it pivoted to being work. It turned into filing taxes, shopping for insurance, and a place for maintaining a "professional profile". From what I see of social media a great many people make it into "work" of a kind. In this metamorphosis we somehow made the silly web serious and the serious web silly. Now nobody knows the difference and so the headspace of "passtime" has itself sort of vanished.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#264
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.

I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the social media crowd). Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.

Instead of overlapping generations, there's a gap of a whole generation of 'mainstream' internet users between the geeky amateurs/dial-up internet which arguably ceases being the dominant usecase already in mid-1990s before the dot.com boom starts due to this generation, and the app users which get seriously started only from around 2010.

Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#265
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's all you've been doing. But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees. But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.

> 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…

> 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals

It, like every other community, has an aggregate identity built from the contributions of the individuals within the community.

> Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states [racism is only allowed in /b/]

If you honestly believe that /b/ is the only place on 4chan where you will find racist sentiment you need to have your head examined.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#266

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.

I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general.

Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#267

It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge. Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them. Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they publ…

> It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge

Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe every month.

For a blog do you really need more?

Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the same price but for the average user generating your own content has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#268
I don't know, I've given up on following people across the web. They’ve all got a sickness that compels them to incessantly fidget with their sites: fonts, colors, designs, and About pages change almost weekly. And then they babble on about why they made those decisions.

It’s a garden, a stream, a worry board, a playground. It runs on WordPress, now Jekyll, now Hugo, now Ghost. No no, now it’s “handcrafted” HTML and CSS like the old days.

It's the same psychosis that prevents people from shutting up about their note taking system, their ideal journal setup, whether they should use a Moleskine or Leuchtturm, yellow or white paper, ruled or blank.

I don’t see a “cozy” or “small” web of independent minds on the Internet. I see a group of anxious and nervous and restless people trying in vain to assemble a Self and grasping for meaning where there is none.

If you’ve got a personal website, just leave it the fuck alone.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#269

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.

I agreed that I thought SU wouldn't work in today's internet, and I clicked on the cloudhiker link thinking I'd be met with SEO trash, but I ended up on this post: https://dynomight.net/ikea-purifier

Which was a great post and now I understand more than I did about how air filters work...more complicated than I'd thought.

Maybe I should give cloudhiker a try.

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