Where Have All the Websites Gone?

Oh! I remember reading your "On second thought, I don't like blogging" post and nodding along. I think I've linked it a few times elsewhere in HN comments. We are aligned!

> here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery

Yes, we vanished, because algorithmic curation is overall a lot more effective. We may be nostalgic of the craftsmanship that came with old school curation, but it's not coming back any more than we moving out of cities to return to a agrarian life.

EXCEPT MAYBE that algorithmic curation is expensive, and advertising revenue can only cover a certain amount before turning people off. High interest rates as well as growth slowdown will cause a reckoning, in the next few years, of these costs - and I expect that in some areas we will see a return to traditional curation.

> Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period?

Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back in the day people would login to AIM after school or something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one activity that your friend group would do among other things (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the limits of their friend group or were always online, but I think the experience was far less common than it is today. For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone line, rather than the central forum for all communication and interaction.

> Does that timeline for that theory make sense?

That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old web". However I do think that coziness was present in early social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of socialness?

edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness" is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the chatroom/messaging paradigm.

It's simply that platforms are more convenient. Most bloggers never got a comment that wasn't spam, but platforms make it easier to find an audience. Platforms (if they're big enough) make it easier to find content relevant to your interests than webrings or link aggregators ever did. Most people don't want to learn how to hand-code HTML and run a server just to express themselves or communicate on the web. Curation is also a plus, but framing that as "wanting censorship" is disingenuous. What people want is stability and predictability.

It also doesn't really lead to a blandification of content. The quality of content on the web now is higher than its ever been. The value gained by being able to publish nearly effortlessly to the web without being a tech nerd is outweighed by the value lost in not being able to put a skull playing a trumpet in a site header.

He clearly learnt how to use Facebook, no small feat there...

Honestly though someone asked me about developing a website, I pointed them at a local provider and they had a custom domain + email + a template driven website up in literally 5 minutes... They needed to know how to use a credit card and a web browser.

Pretty sure there are similar experiences all over, I can't really speak for other countries to be fair and I am not those places target market. I pay for a VPS and deploy whatever I want on it vs the guy that asked me for a website who doesn't even know what a domain name is.

There are products for both of us.