Interesting .. I run a self-hosted web site mainly for my own amusement and education, and my blog mainly focuses on tech that I'm okaying with. I largely ignore my access logs but the other day I had a look and found that 80% of my traffic comes from RSS feed aggregators, and subsequent blog post accesses are almost exclusively tech-related. I'm hoping for more real human visitors in 2024 :)
Where Have All the Websites Gone?
381–390 of 407 posts
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#382Earlier 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.
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
Having to use an extension would make me suspicious... I'd rather just open indexed sites in new tabs.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#383Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 swear that IKEA filter writeup was on HN once upon a time. That or someone else's thorough analysis of the exact same appliance!
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#384It 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…
the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat)
without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#385The 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 miss StumbleUpon on a regular basis! I feel like now adays it'd just be flooded with spammy garbage sites unfortunately.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#386It 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…
It's all fun until the parasites move in. One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it. I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the croc…
The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool.
The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well.
Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#387For discoverability, linktree type portals in your bio is a great way to send people to your personal blog that they probably wouldn’t have found by any another means.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#388There is a popular conspiracy theory called the 'dead internet' theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
While it was conceived a while ago, the internet does seem to be going that way. I recently visited a popular C programming forum I used to frequent a decade ago, and was surprised to see a huge increase in bots, and almost no organic discussions or content.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#389It 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…
Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.
Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling.
IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping.
Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.
Re: Where Have All the Websites Gone?
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
Video game mod sites are highly political. You can’t get away with anything that would have been fine in the year 2007. There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.
There are still "spicy" fourms.
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