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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

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Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#311

Post by mcbishop »

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.

cloudhiker just took me to a delightful site. Fun rewarding experience, will prob never use it again.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#312

Post by electrondood »

pksebben wrote: post #165
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 crowd…

I miss Stumbleupon and discoverability. I despise the me-shaped bubble that I'm forced to occupy on the current, broken internet.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#313

Post by tivert »

tech_ken wrote: post #285

One dynamic that I think contributes to the disappearance of websites, but which has maybe a more positive shine than some other explanations, is the increasing usage of internet technologies to support small social group interaction. Consider the hypothetical Jan 1 scenario described by the author: the 2024 equivalent is seeing a screenshot of a Tweet that reminds you of a friend, and then posting it in your groupch…

> This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server.

Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed that boat, but that was my impression.

> I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline.

Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that "websites" started declining as social media platforms took off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a reaction to and rejection of those platforms.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#314

Post by genewitch »

rozap wrote: post #269
nonethewiser wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I read the page because you linked it, as an aside " (Yeah, power usage goes down when you add the extra carbon filter to the IKEA purifier. I’ve confirmed this myself with a power meter. Physics is weird.)"

when you block a vacuum cleaner the motor spins faster and uses less electricity, it just sounds like it's "working harder" but if there's less stuff (air) there to create friction then it's working less hard. So the heavier filter material using less electricity makes sense, especially when you take into account the lower "CADR" - wtf-ever that is.

Furthermore , all of my "DIY" air filters do a remarkable job, and they move very little air compared to the fans they're duct taped to, but they still turn black if i don't clean them every month or two.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#315

Post by Paul-Craft »

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…

I'll give you spam sites, but I'll also note that at least 4 of the 5 examples you gave of where people go to consume content in apps also have highly functional and usable websites, even on mobile. I'm not familiar with TikTok, so I can't comment on it.

I'd also note that if you want to just, say, consume from YouTube, spam sites are no longer in the picture.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#316

Post by over_bridge »

pixl97 wrote: post #272
hgs3 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder if Google could build some custom variants of their search. That way they can use their underlying tech but reskin it to bias towards different things - eg favor local results, or scholarly, short form, or video/audio/text. Apply a lens or filter to results so we aren't all being served the same bland concoction of links.

Sure AI could do this on a personal level but communities are built around shared experiences so we might see some major labelled variants emerge that shape new communities.

Each could even have an internal product owner trying to beat the others. Its a simulation of competition which might drive some innovation from Google once again (assuming no real competition is breaking through that market domination anytime soon)

The internet is the way it is largely because of Google's algorithm and people shaping their content to appease it. If they allowed several to exist, we could have several internets also existing without the need for a new walled garden.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#317

Post by Swizec »

nonameiguess wrote: post #286
kridsdale1 wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backing this up. Google is presently most feeling threatened by TikTok, not OpenAI. Because an entire generation of new American adults does not use web browsers, like much at all. Want a burger? You probably open Chrome, go to Google or Kagi and type “Burger $myCity” People under 25 use TikTok and Instagram and just look for “burger” and are blasted by 300 10s videos of real people munching and smiling. Like a perfe…

I'm curious to what extent this is honest to God actually true. Maybe the very first time I ever move to a new city and want a burger, my first thought is find some directory service telling me where burgers can be found. Right now, I have a kitchen and a grill and would make the burger myself as a first choice, and if not, I've lived in the same house for seven years now and have a great dive bar a block away I can…

> Do people really just perpetually not know where to get something they want in the place they live?

No but a) people travel and b) the young post-college demographic is usually new to the area. By virtue of being young and freshly out of college. They really don’t know the city yet!

Personally when I travel my search for burgers goes straight to Apple Maps.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#318

Post by pixl97 »

Stranger43 wrote: post #73
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.

But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform. There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days. It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorsh…

>for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds

Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then.

At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected.

That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere.

Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#319

Post by mglz »

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…

Here's mine: https://mglz.de/links.html

Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?

#320

Post by rimliu »

bloppe wrote: post #289

Once upon a time, people installed applications. You installed skype. You installed AIM. You installed iTunes. You installed Microsoft Office. Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com. You don't have to install and constantly update desktop apps because you can load an always-up-to-date webpage in 500 milliseconds. PWAs have access to desktop notifications, serial ports, your…

There is no technical reason we can't eat soup with a fork. It's just culture.
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