I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: https://neocities.org/browse

The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's still a lot of web surfing going on.

I would actually argue that having a web site gives you more exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack/Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way.

To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet. It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.

If you look at this story from anyone else’s perspective, right up until the last few moments this is a story about a man with untreated schizophrenia or temporal lobe seizures escalating his illness to the point of kidnapping someone and transporting them across state lines.

Almost every company in the dot com boom was convinced the headlights at the end of their story would be vindication, not the ambulance coming to take them to a psychiatric ward. Almost all of them were wrong.

I really think there’s something in schizophrenia beyond the illness. A lot People with it normally get symptoms around 27-28 but achieve insane amounts before then (same as my mentor)

I don't think there needs to be any special association. "Predisposed to schizophrenia" necessarily implies "not neurotypical", and the outcome distribution for individuals who are not neurotypical is much, much broader than neurotypical.

The pinnacle of success in society has a pronounced overrepresention of neurodivergence, in the same way that pro athletes as a group have freak physical genetics.

But I would expect that there are equally many people predisposed to schizophrenia who, rather than overachieving prior to symptom onset, end up dysfunctional and battling a variety of substance addictions.

(and also I'd expect that the relative probability of these outcomes is highly affected by the strength of support networks and socioeconomic status)

My pet theory is something like, my brain's dials for "avoid risk" and "recognize patterns" are turned up too high. So I breezed through a software engineering degree without ever partying, but I spend a lot of my time sitting in my house unable to motivate myself to go outside, and I'm not very empathetic (other people's words) and not very outgoing.

It's not that schizophrenia makes you smart, but that "smart" and "schizophrenic" are both functions of some high-dimensional space, and the same underlying differences can easily cause both.

On the other side, I have an elder relative who has paranoid schizophrenia and below normal IQ. Us in the tech industry are definitely going to get survivor bias from the "Beautiful Mind" cases around us.

And of course sometimes you meet those people who are smart, beautiful, rich, and friendly, with no downsides, and all you can think is ... "You son of a bitch" :P

After reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix I wondered how many of {Cantor, Frege, Gödel, Hilbert, Moore, Poincaré, Russel, Turing, Whitehead, Wittgenstein} would —given a modern DX— have been said to be "on the spectrum".

Sure, looking back some of the ideas look silly. But when you look at where were are today and the wide range of what's popular and sustainable, some of that looks silly as well.

I almost got off of NeoCities recently because I thought I wanted to start adding dynamic parts to my website, but as history has shown me, whenever I start doing that I fall down a rabbit hole and get nothing done. So I buckled down and figured out how to overcome some stuff that was driving me nuts about Hugo and I'm back at it!

NeoCities definitely has a yonger-feeling crowd for the most part, but I quite like it. It's nice having the feed and discovering all the weird stuff people put on their sites. It does very well at bringing back the feeling of GeoCities. I also love how someone brought back the 88x31 buttons!

I also really appreciate the Sinatra + Sequel backend :)

This hasn't been true for a long time, thanks to social media downranking posts with external links, and Google downranking any site that doesn't post daily updates or heaven forbid, doesnt have SSL enabled.

A good site with good content takes time and effort to produce. And even then it will simply act as a feeder for people who will regurgitate the same information in simplified terms on a content blog (without a backlink of course) or social media. Worst case scenario, they'll try to productize that knowledge that was made available for free.

After this happens enough times, people simply stop maintaining those sites.

Out of curiosity, do you make any metadata available? Would be a very interesting resource to have, working on making the rest of the web discoverable as well ...

https://github.com/topics/awesome-list

That's a different use case than what the GP is describing. Many people use social media, including Facebook, as a platform to build an audience of strangers.

That movie was a remake of a much older movie.

Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger.

It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies.

But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process.

Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking.

That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.

+ the webrings.

Nowadays if it's not on the first "page" of Google (well, whatever the first group of infinite scrolling results is called) it might as well not exist. Makes the web feel flatter and less like a, well, web.

Oh, internet was so muuch better.

I quite love it, especially when it fits with the site's aesthetic.

I remember this but I also remember it wasn't called this. (Because in my local English that sounds like bog roll, meaning toilet paper, so I'm sure that would have stuck).

https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/readings/

But I am not a prolific blogger and haven't updated it anyway for a long time.

For the average internet user, small websites don't exist. Very few Instagram and TikTok profiles feature links to handcrafted sites. Google increasingly funnels all queries to the same 500 giant SEO'd sites.

I think that a problem for some people is that the straightforward solutions to discoverability, such as simply browsing the web in the manner you described or even what is given in the marginalia.nu article, do not solve the desire to be seen as urgently as more technologically coordinated processes.

I used Digg a lot for that, StumbleUpon was also really nice for this type of discovery, then early Reddit had a similar effect.

Nowadays? I don't know where to go, I can do all this effort of clicking around to find them but honestly I don't have the time, I'm in my mid-30s, I won't be jumping around hyperlinks searching for breadcrumbs of potential good content... A lot of people are doing that work already, like you, we are lacking a good place where we can pool this curation work collectively so others can discover it.

Though I did find https://cloudhiker.net/ recently, which is aiming for the same thing, and I'm optimistic.

I've posted my language practice website on HN, LinkedIn, blah blah blah several places, and I can't get people to care. I've finally got some traction on slav facebook, but only just barely. Joining a web ring maybe kind of helped?

It's free, actually really free, because it's something I love and want to share. If I post it to several places and nobody clicks on it... What am I supposed to do ?? Buy ads to hopefully get people to use my _free website_? I have tried doing stuff from SEO articles -- open graph tags, descriptions and stuff. I've posted it on social media to lukewarm reception.

Someone else mentioned something like delicious. Maybe stumbleupon. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe some federated bookmarking thing. I think there's just been a cultural shift to "if it's not on FaceBook it might as well not be on the internet", and I don't know how to get back from that. I think most people use their computers and phones as bootloaders for instagram.

If you have to buy ads, this means that the content you are producing already has large enough pool of competitors. Nothing wrong there, as long as you have a sustainable biz model.

Understand that at the end of the day, no matter how much HN users disparage Google as a advertisement company, their core product is still search. Search is the process of bringing users to the content which satisfies their queries. We can dispute the quality of results or pine for the search landscape of yesteryear, but the core premise remains. Google still needs to produce a modicum of relevant results.

SEO games will come and go. At the end of the day Google will always have an incentive to deliver the meaningful results users crave. The metrics they use to measure satisfaction will change, but the need for satisfactory content will not. RSS feeds, sitemaps, structured data and other essentials are only tools. At the end of the day the content is what you build. Many high traffic sites have completely bungled these basics and do well.

Simple to say, harder to execute, but entirely within the realm of the possible. Think more about the value you are providing to the user.

In one, search engines are advertising platforms, and list reams of content, which is also an advertising platform, designed to solicit revenue in one way or another.

In the other, search engines are for finding information, and they list sites that publish helpful/interesting/weird/fun/whatever information for free, in case someone other than the author might like it.

Confusing the two leads to disappointment.

The small number of people who have read it will further disseminate it themselves if they truly believe it to be valuable. As long as this is more then a few dozen people, then that should be sufficient.

I'm planning soon to start releasing some videos where I read some of the old stories in English! There's not enough of it out there. It's important to me to preserve it, and the best way to preserve culture and language is to disseminate it.

and edit -- I'm sorry you got downvoted. I think your question was a very good one, and I don't think the answer is obvious at all.

In fact, it's probably more of a positive signal for the really interested folks.

I'm not quite sure how the language/culture intrinsically having value or not relates though. Surely it would be the relative strength that impacts the successful rate of sharing?

And there are many hundreds or thousands of such languages and cultures competing on the internet.

Though there's probably a tragedy of the commons where high rep folks start selling signature space for advertising/influencer marketing.

Link for people lazier than me: https://whatisnuclear.com/

I would be fine with paying Reddit for the ability to (tastefully?) promote in my comments

But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.

They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.

As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad. But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will get curious about my profile and check stuff out.

Sigs on HN soon pls?

A boon for search is knowing intent and know who wrote something certainly helps in that regard, if a strong enough signal of course. Without knowing who intends what, you basically rely on the topic and words.

You're supposed to "growth hack" AKA post on popular subreddits, forums and sites pretending to be a casual user (or use bots) that links to the site while talking about how great it is.

Most probably your website is not good enough to attract a public.

Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.

My ~15 year old blog has, according to Google Search Console, 15 indexed pages, and 174 ‘Discovered - currently not indexed’ pages. The number of indexed pages is going _down_ over time, despite occasional new posts.

The Search Console page says “Examine the issues […] to decide whether you need to fix these URLs.” But about the only suggestion I can find is just to wait for them to be indexed - which doesn’t seem to ever happen.

I wouldn’t argue my blog is the best or most exciting content in the world or anything, but I can’t believe anyone would say it’s worse than the often-incorrect SEO-informed duplicative nonsense that fills the first few pages of Google search results for anything technical nowadays.

I run a SaaS to help site owners get their content indexed. We're seeing an influx of users, I think a lot of the issue is simply because of AI.

New web page additions were pretty linear over time, and then AI copywriting tools came out. Suddenly page additions basically went "hockey stick"/vertical.

Now, you can publish thousands of pages in a few minutes, and it's created a huge backlog in Googles crawl queue, thus increasing overall time to get indexation, disproportionally affecting smaller sites.

I think that google just isn't interested in putting resources into their search engine anymore. They used to need it to gather data on people and what they were doing online, but chrome gives them people's internet histories now and android lets them collect endless amounts of data on people's lives offline. Google doesn't need search to spy on us anymore. It's only natural that they'd let it stagnate.

If they actually wanted to improve it, the key would be to move away from the advertising funded model - as Larry Page and Sergey Brin warned in 1998 "advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers"[0]. Personally I think they could at least pay running costs with a paid support model - it might not earn as much money as advertising, but as a gateway to the internet and other Google services it could still be very valuable to both Google and their users.

[0] "The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine", Computer Networks, vol. 30 (1998), pp. 107-117, (noting that the quote is in Appendix A which seems to be missing from some more recent online versions).

It's really hard to rank a website if there are no links or traffic to it.

[1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web

The "small web" search engines might well be the way to go. Apart from Kagi, some I know of are:

https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://wiby.me/ https://searchmysite.net/

Also, clicking trough web rings (yeah they still exist), you discover a bunch of cool sites from strangers all around the world. I joined Indie Webring (https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/) and Fediring (https://fediring.net/) a while ago.

Edit: oh almost forgot. I have a few hundred links in my personal bookmark archive at https://bookmarks.kovah.de

What about that is more modern?

What could be more modern than that?

A better model is to have a list of bookmarks, to specific pages if needed, with a small description of why it's worth looking at it. That's the model of shared bookmarking behind shaarli (and others before it), and it's much more amenable to serendipity: I can subscribe to your rss feed, you probably don't add an entry every single day so I will have time to look at it, and I'll get to discover other websites.

Once that takes off, we can scrape bookmarks list and descriptions. We assign webpages with lots of incoming links as more interesting (bonus if it's updated often). A "page ranking" so to speak. Then everyone can discover pages based on simple searches.

Has anyone else thought of this?

    A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”.

Here's the repo where you can find more info (see the file DEPLOY.md if you want to launch an instance on the web): https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links

And here's my own instance, whith over... 4000 links: https://links.l3m.in/

Want to be surprised? Open this link on a new tab: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/

> The model is as recursive as it is simple. There is nothing preventing a list of bookmarks from linking to another list of bookmarks.

This + friend-of-friend commenting on shared bookmarks = Google Reader's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet + friends shared items[1] feature.

For the people who used shared items, the RSS feed reader part of Reader was just another way to generate shared items. The shared items list could be public and positive engagement was broadly open, but commenting on shared items was limited to designated friends and their friends.

This made the sharing aspect sticky. Sharing and commenting on items helped you expand your friends list, which exposed you to more shared items, for which you could be the aggregating conduit that shared unique items (including bookmarklet-captured items with no corresponding feed) for people on the other side of the friendship wall.

Those groups grew organically and were socially insulated from abuse. By definition everyone involved knew or had to vouch for each other, even without real names. And aside from blocking individual users, severing a mutual friend connection effectively cut them off from visibility to others.

It was fantastic.[2]

1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-readers-gets-more...

2: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network

There's a book I love, Daemon. I love it so much that I'm willing to bet you money that you'll love it. How about I buy you a copy of the book, and if you love it, you have to buy a copy for two other people?

Or... how about, I bet you $1 that you'll enjoy this website. If I'm wrong, you keep the money - or maybe it goes to a charity of your choice? If I'm right, I get my money back... and maybe you have to give me $1...? and you have to pick two other people to gamble?

I dunno - the thought has been tickling my brain for a while...

I don't see this at all: my feeds contain so-called "long form" post and sometimes single-line comments.

AFAICT Gemini is essentially "add non-HTML files to your feed experience". Umm...OK? Certainly this blog post didn't suggest more, and to me wasn't particularly convincing given that I don't even experience (IMHO) the "problem" the author decried.

Discovery is and will ever be a problem, but comments on sites like HN expose interesting things all the time.

mybook marks https://b.hatena.ne.jp/aoi_sora_siroi_tsuki/ myfavorite bookmark users https://b.hatena.ne.jp/aoi_sora_siroi_tsuki/follow

Articles that point out similar things https://togetter.com/li/2259440

But also yes, I can't believe how many great, small blogs and other useful websites I've found only from HN

There were also "web rings" which was a club you could join. You put a widget on your site that would randomly link to other pages that were part of the same web ring (and you'd get back links from other sites).

I haven't really seen any of those things in probably 10 or 15 years though.

This would be true for anything that has a critical mass of users which would make it a target for astroturfers and spammers.

The likely reason Gemini has managed to escape that is because it's a text-only alternative protocol that only a very few people would be interested in joining.

Yes, that output exists primarily on services and yes that presents issues with control over data, data mining, AI training, etc. But the premise that the internet is no longer a creative space simply because people use it as a tool to publish to, rather than an expression of programming and design in and of itself, to me seems to miss the forest for the trees.

There seems to be a really exciting incentive to share lots of links, to regularly hit a hotkey to add the current page to a link list, because there is a kind of graph traversal thing that can emerge, akin to recommendation engines spotify or youtube use, whereby your (anonymized) "like history" -- might be interesting to include some metadata, including when it was liked, how you arrived there, whatever -- will connect you with other people who have intersecting likes, and then blow open entire other leaves of search trees you didn't know you wanted.

I have this feeling on the net recently where I feel like starved, it just feels so stale and bland, hard to find actually good content, going back to HN or Twitter or Reddit or whatever, these little linear "feeds" with discussions etc.

I want a feeling of opening-up, branching, discovery, excitement.

I feel like if a bunch of people shared their like histories in a pseudonymous fashion, you could see these fascinating interest clusters emerging and if there was a compelling UI for navigating them, it could really be self-perpetuating and awesome.

Sort of like visualizations of LLM embeddings, showing regional clusters of information domains, but with a navigable, social aspect, and where because it's pseudo-anonymous you don't mind running AI recommendation engines on it for you and others.

Does this exist? Should it? I would love something like this!

Bingo. This isn't just the blogosphere, I see it in research papers, on GitHub pages, on social media, and elsewhere.

I could speculate, but I don't really know what causes this...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

Linking to a specific article on a single topic seems relatively safe, but linking to toplevel websites or blogs seems more risky.

That was a good social bookmarking site. I wonder if anything similar exists now?

> This site is a ghost, haunting the internet. It is a read-only archive of the bookmarking website del.icio.us.... This project is a labor of love (or more accurately, a labor of like). Del.icio.us was founded by my friends in 2003, sold a whole bunch of times, and when it was about to get sold again to spammers in 2017, I took the opportunity to buy it back.

For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

Publicly shared bookmarks was a great way to discover new sites, and I feel like delicious died because it was acquired, not because it was a bad or unpopular idea.

Geocities and MySpace had webrings, so once you landed on something you could generally find similar stuff.

I'd love to see a good "home page" with curated feeds, bookmarking and search across it (and with LLM + Graph you can have your own semantic search)

It's manually curated though so not the most scalable thing I've put together. Wish I had more time to expand on this, seems on the cusp of being pretty cool.

https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/PublicData/blob/master/s...

and I'll poke it into the DB.

If you don't want to dirty your hands with github, you can send me an email at [email protected] :-)

It was a tool for an exciting experimental internet.

Nowadays I can only imagine it’d be flooded with odd numbered list articles.

I'm not surprised given how much "influencer economy" marketing there is (also, I advertise the site on Tiktok/IG/YT) but I'm over-joyed when I see good ol' fashioned websites.

Even then, they seem to be older sites :/

Other good sources for small website discovery: - https://cloudhiker.net/ - https://theuselessweb.com/ - https://www.boredbutton.com/

Here’s the economically viable answer. It could be a job in the same sense as a YouTuber. I imagine lists being distributed through releases, not an infinite, always-on feed. Releases would not consist of links only, but actual context. A well known curator could use his reach to leverage smaller projects, the political factor of course would be present. It’s not so different than what people already do on social networks, and that’s a good sign. The main difference would be that the linked content would be sourced from around the web, not only from within a particular network. Ad business could also flourish in this context. Ads can be really useful. For people with interest in a given topic, it is valuable to get access to offers regarding the activity. You could have people literally making a living just by thoughtfully wandering on the web and collecting media with a niche public in mind. The mere act of selection from the curator would be an expression of individuality, even more so if they enrich the published volume with their view. It would reach a point where you would simply submit your content to the curator network, bypassing search engines entirely. I would also add that a fully curated internet would feel extremely safe, since you’d always know what to expect from the sources you subscribe to, and also considering media would flow downstream in a parallel fashion, so no intersection of undesirable content. It would be beautiful if it all happened through a torrent or torrent-like protocol.

1. my firefox browser has an extension

2. if I think a website is interesting, I bookmark it to one of N bookmark lists (which can be arbitrarily categorized, whether topical like "tech rants" or Google+ style "IRL friends only")

3. the browser extension does some API calls to flush/fill each bookmark list to one or more of publicly accessible websites like my github bio, my HN profile, my blog listicles for one or more federated bookmarks, publishes an RSS entry, whatever

This approach does not require an account (except that I give the browser extension credentials/tokens to wherever it publishes), and it results in one-click blogroll sharing.

PS: the problem with this is the temptation for feature bloat.

Feature 2: on known websites with user profiles like HN, reddit, github, check the user profile for all users on the page and list out discovered shared blogrolls by username

Feature 3: reports such as 'most shared blogroll links' based on your own personal browsing history, calculated offline in your browser

Feature 4: ability to block blogroll links with a comment as to why you do so

Feature 5: ability to share your blocks with a given blogroll list

Feature 6: ability to follow shared blogroll link blocks from other blogroll lists, then editorialize that shared list yourself

Feature 7: ability to share your editorialized block list with others who trust you more than whoever you are editorializing

...and so on.

Though I'm pretty sure I'm reinventing lots of lost features from the web of trust and semantic web era.

Pinterest has a very strong visual bias, and often a selling-things bias with the stored links being to things you can buy, so there might be a niche for something like that with features geared around links more generally, or features specifically to help editorialising links to nows and other reading matter, though preferably without deliberately poisoning search results to over-favour the link storing site like Pinterest does.

----

[1] at least in part, there may be other factors like what-you-have-looked-at-before, advertising, etc.

I should do this to pay back the favor. I already have a list of bookmarks!

Problem: it has 7328 bookmarks because I save everything good I come across, not just small websites.

Give me a few hours. :)

The idea of trading "discoverables" is solid. Like in the zine or warez culture it's great to trade a big cache with others. There is a trust issue, that some will poison the well with their malware or spam, but many new solutions do seem to take-off out of mutually motivated sharing. Perhaps something as simple as a library/standard for "exchanging trusted link collections" - and there almost as in-built webserver function would be a game changer.

Like if https://links.example.com/json always returned a most recently verified bundle.

The algorithm is basically incorrect in that it keeps rewarding something that was already rewarded. You can't say that this channel deserved it most for the simple reason that the rest wasn't even seen at all.

In fact, even if you'd list 3 accounts below each other that we hypothetically consider to be of identical value, the one on the top will get 80% of the followers/engagement.

And that's why blogrolls and link directories also do not help.

https://rubenerd.com/blogroll.opml

Wow... I never really knew when I was visiting a website transformed by XSLT

This is really cool

Here is my link list: https://pablo.rauzy.name/links.html

I tried to come up with a spec for listing bookmarks in an easily handled format for both humans and machines, and just ended up with using .json files; here's mine for example: https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph.json which all follow a very loose specification. Because it just requires a single file to connect to others using the same system its really easy to implement.

I've been slowly pushing for folks I know to add to the sources that the search engine can idly spider, slowly building up a large searchable list of user-selected links.

I think a writer should include all the references that lead to their thoughts expressed in the texts. This way the reader could follow these links to explore more adjacent topics. To me, it seems like the ecosystem of small website could improve on that. I'd rather explore other writers based on some topic than on a blogroll.

In scientific writing this has a long tradition called related work. In some fields it degraded a bit into a section that merely lists all the works that should be named rather than a deep discussion of their contents.

Obviously, this is also the original idea of Berners-Lee for the web.

A good example that comes to my mind is this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-a...

For example, the bookmarks list the author links to (https://www.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks/) has 48 URLs annotated only by category. That's too many for my tiny brain to handle and I move on.

A webring like Hundred Rabbits' (https://webring.xxiivv.com/) has 203 entries. For me, this is in the same category as 48. (It also reminds me of those "Awesome X" lists on GitHub that end up flooded with hundreds of links.)

To attempt an example of what I mean, here's the bookmark list I publish on my website:

- Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/) • interaction and abstraction

- Craig Mod (https://craigmod.com/) • long walks, atmospheric photos

- Hundred Rabbits (https://100r.co/site/home.html) • physical and digital minimalism from first principles, extensively documented

- Mu-An Chiou (http://muan.co/) • rhythm, space, movement, color

- Steven Wittens (http://acko.net/) • 3D sorcery

(edit: formatting)

del.icio.us

Which I believe Yahoo bought off and killed.

But saving tags--what was called folksonomies at one point--never really became a mainstream way of sharing links as opposed to just bookmarking them for your own use.

At the end of the day, a lot of this is lamenting that a hand-curated Internet doesn't scale.

As I say, I am sympathetic, but I would like to have more confidence in the claim, and better ways to test proposed solutions.

I do like this idea. But it begs a few questions:

- Where?

- And then what?

The problem statement is that its hard to discover small websites. If I publish my bookmarks on my small website then the problem has not been solved. It seems like there needs to be some aggregator which of course ventures directly into the problem of centralized distribution and algorithms making the little guy undiscoverable. Whats the solution? A site with “friends” whose lists you can see with no overall aggregation?

Personally, I actually think it would be interesting to aggregate these lists. In particular I think it would be interesting to find the most common domains below a certain threshold of popularity. Pretty sure you can do this on google already, although youd have to save the string and copy paste it in all the time.

And then discoverability is what HN does - although scalability is not there.

That is, it's not all that important that someone has a personal site with travel photos. If in there they have 3 awesome reviews and summaries of economics books then I'd like to find THOSE. There is no or there should be no obligation of consistency, body of work, or overall project in discovering worthy single essays.

Something like "long form cooperative bookmarking"?

- bookmarked entries https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database

- mostly domains https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

- all 'news' from 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023

I am using my own Django program to capture and manage links https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive.

What do other HN'ers think about the UX of using email for accepting comments? Sort of like a form submission. Details linking the comment and the parent post could be stored in mailto links. I posted an Ask HN before seeing this post that has more details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278697

I always figure, if someone wants to talk to me, they can send me an email, and popular blog posts, like the one we're discussing now, generally end up having comment fields on sites such as Hacker News.

A much more suitable replacement is like you said, sending an email.

They weren't called "bookmarks" though. Wracking my brain to think what it was usually called.

> on gemini-scale it works pretty well

This might be the problem in a nutshell. Maybe discoverability doesn't scale, and (overlapping) villages are the only solution.

The search engine is an extension of the pop culture treadmill. It determines what is popular.

Some sites inherently deserve to be popular, like "horses' mouths" primary sources of important information.

For others, it's just a popularity crapshoot.

It's the same like in music or anything else. A million equally talented singers cannot all simultaneously get to be popular idols; you cannot introduce that many people to a nation. At some point it's a lottery.

That doesn't amount to a "crisis".

The reason we have such concentration of popularity today is that we use popularity to direct traffic. That starts feeding into itself fairly rapidly, and the result is inevitably that the same few websites eat virtually all of the traffic.

Possibly something based on the dewey system.

If I'm interested in making shoes, I want to see a list of relevant sites (or videos, etc) that have been vouched for (possibly with comments) by actual humans. Obviously rating/review abuse is a hard problem, but imagine if most subreddits had a list of quality sites as determined by users of the subreddit. Then imagine it without the reddit bit.

Embedding RDFa metadata seems potentially useful for forming a graph and helping with exploration as well, but it does not seem to be used much.

We still have that now. Only it's how to get the YouTube algorithm to share your content or how to optimally use Steam's tools to promote your game. It's all within the walled gardens.

Even Google, a search engine of yore, is a walled garden now much more like a social network than it's prior iterations when it was an indispensable tool for finding new content on the web.

This kind of thing is so crucial for discoverability, I want to do more with it and I hope this topic gets discussed more on HN.

Really good for finding personal pages, niche blog posts, etc.. Algorithm doesn't at all weigh website popularity explicitly.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the cofounders)

Disclaimer: I know very little about machine learning.

The best way to use the internet is to distribute information for everyone to see. Yet, that's not the direction it seems to be heading towards.

I really believe that the fun part of the interner is in small sites, and I think we need more projects that try to find these small, but important corners of the internet.

Interestingly google used to have a per-user, user-controlled domain blacklist that go excised around ~2008 or so—presumably because this would have enabled automated blocking of high-value clients.

[0] https://brynet.ca/

> A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”.

For federated content, we could use ActivityPub if the site content units are posts. At some point, there should be a searchable taxonomy of the federated groupings and sources.

Keep in mind that overall traffic on the internet was orders of magnitude lower back in the heyday of quirky personal sites.

What I'm missing and would like to see more of, are feeds about hobbies/activities other than computer-related stuff. I might be in a bubble or I'm dealing with early adopters, but the only quality feeds I encounter are from programmers who write about... programming. I put my money where my mouth is and added a microblog/timeline to my website about building a bicycle caravan (see theredpanther.org).

What I also miss are more 'photo feeds'. Every update in a feed can have a picture included, why not make more use of that!? It sparks some live into the dull text-only format. Adding a photo now and then also makes the webview of the a timeline more interesting. Just as Twitter-posts can have a picture attached. I make extensive use of photos on a niche site of mine about beautiful cars. Go check Artomotive (https://www.heyhomepage.com/site/artomotive).

The technical side of these things isn't new or innovative. And that's the beauty, it's proven technology. No hype, just natural growth. The technology behind 'feeds' (it's called RSS, I call it 'Really Social Sites') is twenty years old now. It's not tainted by surveillance capitalism, commercialism, algorithms, platforms or AI. But to get the most out of it, you have to do some things. Like collecting interesting feeds/websites to follow, clicking to read the whole article, playing the algorithm yourself by curating the stream of content, etc. But if you want to stay sane on a changing internet, it seems the only way.

In all seriousness though I have forgotten the name of this site at least 5 times, and have to look it up every time (and sometimes it is hard to find)... perhaps a rebranding is in order.

To show how old I feel, my friends and I had a vision for where the web was going in the 90s. We wanted a shareware future where anyone and their grandma could save their MS Word file to a shared drive on their computer and point a domain name at it for a few dollars per year. Then use a real version of PayPal with no transaction fees to accept micropayments. To maybe write casual games priced at $10 and sell a few hundred copies per month to enter pretirement. Or make pottery and sell it themselves rather than on Etsy, and actually get found and paid.

Of course that future never materialized, or more accurately was quickly overshadowed by the attention economy which makes nothing and sells nothing.

Through that lens, it's easy to see where search engines went wrong. There should have been a public domain database of the web and its metadata like archive.org, but fully indexed and queryable through SQL. Search engines could be built above that with clever queries, but the database would always be available to all of us. Then we could have search that does the opposite of what corporations do, and actually make long tail results the most prominent. Instead we got the ensh*ttification of the very best stuff like Google, bringing the worst aspects of capitalism to what should have been a free human economy of ideas on its way to delivering a moneyless society.

I would very much like to work on all of this and help bring us back to the bright future of 1999. I'd also like to write declarative stateless programming languages and AI that actually does people's work for them to get them paid instead of robbing them of their creative opportunities. Basically put real effort and resources into undoing whatever all this is and get back to the real work of solving the prerequisites needed to roll out UBI. Instead like most of you, I'll likely spend the rest of my life throwing all of my energy at the hardest problems with the smallest rewards to make rent. A tragedy of the commons on such a vast scale that we can't even see it.

I still have faith that AI will deliver the semantic web and maybe this could all materialize, since human-curated metadata was always a pipe dream. But I worry that the trillion dollar tech status quo will stop this. Mainly because revisionist history has turned what were once deep insights and winning strategies into easily discreditable flights of fancy and idealism. That's why search engines were corrupted in the first place.

I agree. I've often thought of people publishing a list of bookmarks in a way that everyone can see. I even created DownloadNet originally based on this idea. I wanted a way to publish one of my bookmark folders as a server for people.

But then, as so often happens, the simple idea evolved, and I got carried away by who knows what (technical challenges? I don't know) and ended up creating a personal archive and search engine with only a scant integration with bookmarks.

This article is a good reminder of what originally seemed to me a good idea. Perhaps I should add it there. Also, perhaps p2p could be an easy way to federate these things? Not everyone can just create their own server, nor do they want to host it on big providers always.

I've been tossing around the idea of p2p as a way to "solve" this, but it's still rather formless: new and vague. Over the last 3 days I created a p2p blog (and again, got carried away -- perhaps with technical challenges -- and added p2p chat). But I think there's something there.

Perhaps I should listen to that idea that keeps recurring for me. To that first version of it anyway.

Something simple, that unifies, publishing a bookmark folder (I have some chrome bookmark reading code^0), over p2p (I have janus^1), and possibly uses either the popularity of DownloadNet, or even some of the search/archiving stuff -- without getting carried away -- to assist in delivery or marketing.

I don't know. A clear synthesis right now escapes me, but that's OK. I think there's something there: bookmarks (maybe a special bookmark folder, something referential, like "/var/www/html"), into which bookmarks go and then become public; a lightweight p2p server (that perhaps in some limit future could be federates effortlessly for p2p discovery, but who knows how?). Ugh...still too complex perhaps.

Bookmark folder + p2p + transitive (my bookmark folder includes a link to another person's bookmark folder ~~ somehow).

So it's like that article recently on the homepage "We need webrings" or sth. I didn't think that was particularly a good idea, but now I see at least a partial appeal.

The "link" to another person's p2p bookmark "folder" will instead be a normal www hyperlink that links to the "signalling access point" where you can do the ritual to make the connection.

People may think the weirdness, unavailability (you have to be running the little service in your terminal or as a daemon), and difficulty makes it a non-starter. But I think these "backward" elements, could be a paradoxical strength.

I don't know. I think there's something there. I definitely want to keep pushing in this direction, anyhow.

0: https://github.com/00000o1/Bookmate 1: https://github.com/00000o1/janus

If small websites were a good idea, myspace would have won - it was the ultimate 'create your own little website' 'thing'.

The real crisis is app discoverability. Unless you're put on the front page by Google or Apple - good luck getting your app to gain traction without giving half your company away to get venture funding to afford to spam people's lives with advertising.

That's the real crisis - we don't have discoverability services and rely on spam because the companies that control the internet profit from selling ability to spam people. Websites - I don't even know the last time I visited a new website multiple times (aka none of them have provided any lasting value) - it must've been years ago and I'm on the internet all the time.

Idk what will solve it. My bet is on a specialized web-scraped database specialized for OS software with an LLM frontend.

But like, what's the point of all those bookmarks? Outside of implementation details that are captured on stack overflow in convenient question - answer format, I feel like everything that exists on the internet already exists better in books. Even my own blog is basically just me stumbling though photography and philosophy and travel destinations, writing out information that's much more easily understood from published materials.

Well, I suppose one thing small sites are good at is condensing information that should be condensed elsewhere but isn't. My most popular article (gets tons of organic traffic from Google) is titled "How to Rent a Motorcycle in Taiwan." If you searched that on Google I think the top few links should end in .gov.tw but none of them do.

I've been running a website for over 15 years, something popular, on a specific topic. It has no ads; I only have Patrons who give me between 100 and 200 dollars per month. I don't get many visits (between 800 and 1200 per day, except on special days with some news where I can get many more).

I grew up in the era of web rings and old websites, and aside from being very nostalgic, I would love to go back to that. And I know that if I don't start, others won't either. But I have this constant debate about whether I should do it and follow my desires or what the audience wants. I feel that if I do that, people will stop taking the website seriously. Unfortunately, visitors come to my website, and if they don't see something modern and well-done, they won't take it seriously.

So I'm between a rock and a hard place: do I follow my desires and do what I like, knowing that it may cost me an audience? Or do I adapt to trends to try to get more visits and new readers?

I don't know if anyone has the answer, but I would like to hear your opinions (any type of opinion is welcome).

Besides, what people count as modern or usable varies a lot depending on the niche, and if your content is good enough... well, you can get away with a lot of archaic design there. I mean, look at Serebii.net. Biggest Pokemon site in the world, probably the defacto source for information for many people in the community... and it's barely updated its layout in the last decade or two.

Heck, in more niche subject areas you have literally every website sticking to fairly traditional web design principles. Retro gaming and computing sites (like those about 8-bit computers, video game mods or demoscene stuff) tend to look about as retro as their subject area, and very few people care about that.

So, either mix them together since these things aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, or do whatever knowing that if your content is good enough, the aesthetics won't exactly matter a huge deal.

It's hard to say without being able to understand your visitors, their expectations, and how much wiggle room that leaves you to be you.

What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me.

What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.

I find this one of the worst parts of ChatGPT. Recommendations are full of advertisements/astroturfing/marketing. If you know any industry with aggressive marketers(For me, its Video games and seeing Nintendo/Stardew Vally populate those lists. Or iceland as a top vacation destination. Or recommending Apple products.)

Honestly sucks really hard. Nothing you can do because the AI is dumb and can't figure out marketing makes words appear more often.