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A website to destroy all websites

henry.codes

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Re: A website to destroy all websites

#231

Post by econ »

eleventen wrote: post #196
garganzol wrote: post #179

To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public. This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence tha…

IME, this is just about the opposite of true. I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced. The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop. The next largest slice was esot…

I once spend half a day or so gathering RSS feeds from fortune 500 companies press releases. I expected it to be mostly bullshit but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently if one spends enough millions on doing something there is no room for bullshit in the publication.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#233

Post by jeffbee »

rchaud wrote: post #204
jeffbee wrote: post #142

A lot to unpack here, but the article fails to tackle the question of distribution. Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. I can assure you that although you can probably figure out how to host videos that nobody sees, you cannot afford to host a popular video. The author clearly spent a lot of time writing and presenting this, but the facts and co…

> Creators put their videos on YouTube because that is the way to reach a nearly global audience at zero cost. If a tree fell and there was no one around, did it make a sound? A cursory look through r/newtubers would show you that there are a lot of people who get no views on their videos. Youtube's distribution mattered when it was looking for user-generated content to splice ads into. Today, it is filled with that…

This just sounds like a you problem. Don't watch those channels. Don't upload those videos.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#234

Post by signatoremo »

roughly wrote: post #143
IvanK_net wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise? If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.

I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.

No, you chose to be able to go back to your loved ones in one piece. That very much reveals your preferences. Do you think someone who was in depression, who had a terminal illness might do differently?

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#235

Post by noduerme »

ryandrake wrote: post #210
stephendause wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more. I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind. I also dislike animations that seem to be made for a certain scroll speed. Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary…

I think when you make such strongly opinionated design decisions on your website, you're deliberately inviting strong criticism. They could have used a readable vanilla bootstrap theme and HN would be actually discussing the actual text content instead of the design, but they didn't, and here we are.

The idea that opinionated design is intended to court controversy or criticism is, itself, very cynical. The corollary to that is that all design should be vanilla to make it as unobjectionable to the widest audience possible.

Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.

But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.

Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#236

Post by nine_k »

baubino wrote: post #221
nine_k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations. Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiri…

> It is, definitely, very possible to build a rhizome of small indie sites, along the lines of Web 1.0. But they would also benefit from a thoughtful symbiosis with the "big bad" giants of the modern Web. That’s exactly what the article says. Seems like you made assumptions about the argument based on the design instead of actually reading it.

I sort of missed this idea in the article, reading it more like "we can still thrive in the shade of the skyscrapers" than a call to a symbiotic existence.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#237

Post by kawfey »

raincole wrote: post #203
Aurornis wrote: post #25

I think the comments here are a great example of why this idea always sounds better in nostalgic reminiscence than in practice: As I write this, nearly half of the comments here are complaining about this website. There are complaints about requiring JavaScript, the font size, the design, the color choices, the animations. Complaints about everything the designer did to make this site unique and personal, which was t…

If you name your site "A website to destroy all websites" you're basically inviting people to judge it with extremely critical standard.

My blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham radio” has received the most hits out of all of my other posts. It got me an interview with IEEE Spectrum and basically cemented my name as a ham radio influencer.

Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#238

Post by nine_k »

ceroxylon wrote: post #205
nine_k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations. Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiri…

> The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web This is what the article / indieweb mean with POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

POSSE is a great principle, but I'm talking about a different phenomenon: being voted onto the front page of HN, /., or featured on a huge subreddit, a tweet by some influencer with 100k subscribers, etc. The 15 minutes of fame, which hopefully leave a bit of a lasting audience, connections to sister sites mentioned in the resulting threads, etc.

The biggest problem of any indie publishing is obscurity; not that nobody cares, but rather nobody has an idea, and has no way to have an idea.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#239

Post by nine_k »

nativeit wrote: post #68
nine_k wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The site indeed is trying to be an artistic treatise, as opposed to being a clear, easy-to-read manifesto. It touches many themes I have read about many times, so I skimmed most of the content. It came to the expected indie-web conclusions and recommendations. Indie Web, while nice and fascinating, lacks the large audience. You write things down, and nobody cares. Well, maybe a few friends who keep an eye, and a hiri…

> Sites that are true works of art and craft, like https://ciechanow.ski/ , will get remembered more widely, but true works of art are rare. This is a really nifty website.

I'd say that "nifty" is an understatement; "a masterpiece" would be more proper.

Re: A website to destroy all websites

#240

Post by signatoremo »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #67
palata wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone. How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?

Each year the gambler spends more time, money, and energy on slot machines. Obviously his gambling habit is getting more and more useful to him. /s

Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.
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