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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

fromjason.xyz

291–300 of 407 posts

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#291

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…

This comment is so mean-spirited... reading it made me sad. I'm allowed to own so little in this world, so how I present myself online is particularly dear to me. If you don't like my website, you can go find others. What does it matter to you?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#292

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.

how do i get in there?

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One issue is a lot more sites today have headers that block displaying the site in a frame. This prevents sites like StumbleUpon from displaying their UI at the same time as the content; the only way around it that I’m aware of is a browser extension.

How is that related to other browsers not getting an extension?

Because it’s more work to maintain an extension for N browsers than to maintain a single website. So developers tend to just pick the one they care about.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#294

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…

This comment is kind of hilarious because I felt similar feelings which is why I took down my site!

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#295

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…

This site has seemingly solved both of those problems. So isn't HN the modern StumbleUpon, albeit with more focus on technical topics?

SU was always one of the many aggregators in the addth.is toolbar, alongside places like Reddit. They do both serve the same function of making the Internet more discoverable - noting that early Reddit didn't have comments.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#296
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

how do i get in there?

You don't. If you could, the FBI could. You would have to be introduced by a friend who's in it.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#297

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…

> SEO spam is a specific game to rank high in google search

The same SEO mindset/paradigm is used to make sure someone's spam surfaces on any variety of platforms, not just Google Search. We can argue about the specific semantics of "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) not being the right word to use for gaming TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat algorithms. Perhaps a different word is needed.

But the above poster's sentiment is not flawed, even if you think it's overreaching within a specific meaning of "SEO".

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://wilby.me/ does that. But back in the day all the "interesting, non-commercial websites" would be listed in a curated web directory arranged by subject, and we're still missing that. There is an emerging practice of niche subject-specific "awesome-lists" but these are no substitute.

Are you sure that's the correct URL? That site is a near-default Wordpress site with a single Hello World post from 2018.

I believe he means to say https://wiby.me

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#299
post #233

What's the point of maintaining a website when the big search engines (Google) hides them under tons of SEO crap? You find information on social media now. And that's worse than how you used to find information in search. I've given up hope for the web.

An anecdote. I craft a hand written, deliberate technical blog and publish monthly. Google tanked my impressions from 3k/ month to 300 last year. I still churn it out though, I just know people won't find me through search any more.
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