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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#271

Post by cpeterso »

aredox wrote: post #24

See the same sentiment from Marginalia : https://www.marginalia.nu/log/79-ikea-offramp/

Great analogy from the post:

> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#272

Post by pixl97 »

hgs3 wrote: post #221
azornathogron wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can only imagine of Google faced the full firehose of their search traffic at your blog that most people would go broke paying their web bill.

This said, I do think the bigger issue is we have pretty much 2 big search engines so there is no real competition in the market. And that those search engines are also ad companies and have a vested interest in showing ads.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#273

Post by darreninthenet »

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.

Looks great, makes a really great statement on its front page and then offers their extension for your browser... the link goes straight to the Chrome store, no other browser gets the extension support it seems

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#274

Post by sideshowb »

nonethewiser wrote: post #186
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…

In regards to "Gaming the system," I do not think popularity begets SEO spam. SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search so that you get ad revenue from visits. If you have genuinely valuable content and get popular from Stumbleupon that doesn't create an incentive to implement SEO spam. Ads maybe - but not publishing garbage to rank high on google search because you already solved the discoverability…

It's not the successful website that turns to seo spam, it's seo spammers that spam the StumbleUpon api with bots "liking" their spam.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#275

Post by thomasfromcdnjs »

lmm wrote: post #39

Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now the…

meh++

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#276

Post by shuntress »

jpc0 wrote: post #267
shuntress wrote: post #254

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. Fo…

Squarespace specifically is positioned much more as a "website for your business" than for your personal space online but they do seem accessible enough.

I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name registration?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#277

Post by kridsdale1 »

rchaud wrote: post #256

We all miss the opinionated blog era of the 2000s, but even if the Buzzfeed-like aggegator sites that replaced them in the 2010s hadn't existed, the blogs were going to die out eventually. Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great websites therefore have a start and an…

Maddox is on threads and appears to be the same person. I on the other hand am now a nearly 40yo man with a family and house and career, and not the lol-southpark 12 year old I was when he started.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#279

Post by ben_w »

keiferski wrote: post #158
ben_w wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

P != NP.

Link and everyone can look, but I sure 'ain't gonna search for this "reliable data" and then try to figure out if what I find is or isn't, in fact, reliable.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#280

Post by mrkramer »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #177
mrkramer wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps there is some space for community projects that collect links to blogs and tag them and build a simple search for that. Does it perhaps exist?

Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but it is dead now.

I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.

I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149

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