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 manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard.

The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on websites?

EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd see today, where most content follows the same patterns to achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could not be successful today.

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 crowdsourced model.  For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting people from the mire to function

  - Gaming the system:  One of the things that made SU great was that there wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there.  If you 'stumbled' on a thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or otherwise *actually valuable*.  These days, I can't imagine a successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO vultures.

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.

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.

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.

Five Tips to Make Meditation Easy and Enjoyable - Video Five questions that beginning meditators…

Not exactly what I was hoping for.

May I suggest inclusion of the following snippet in the

The same SEO mindset/paradigm is used to make sure someone's spam surfaces on any variety of platforms, not just Google Search. We can argue about the specific semantics of "SEO" (Search Engine Optimization) not being the right word to use for gaming TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, or Snapchat algorithms. Perhaps a different word is needed.

But the above poster's sentiment is not flawed, even if you think it's overreaching within a specific meaning of "SEO".

For example, consider what the UX on mobile would be like. A modern SU would often send you to the major social media sites since that's where the content is. But you'd either constantly encounter login walls or "download the app!" banners OR you'd have to constantly shift back and forth between apps. As a user why would I put up with that, when I could just stay in one app and see so much of the same content?

This effect was apparent back before smartphones became ubiquitous, where desktop users (especially more casual/less technical) were spending disproportionate amounts of time on Facebook and YouTube. It's where we first started seeing people sourcing their news exclusively from social media.

Some qualities of apps may bolster this effect, but the root problem lies in the addictiveness, convenience, endlessness, and network effects of large platforms.

These major platforms offer a much more streamlined UX for passively consuming content than a web browser, and most people seem to prefer that simpler UX.

The thing is though, with the amounts of money involved even small improvements in engagement and retention justify considerable expenditures. Their willingness to spend on things like native apps is not necessarily representative of the impact of those things.

Google is in large part to blame for this, if not the main reason.

Many years ago, Google started updating their search algorithm to heavily prefer specific domains like govs, edus, or handpicked ones like Reuters or Microsoft.

I used to run my own blog and forum, and it used to be on the top of the search results for the niche it occupied. After the changes, it fell off the front pages and I'd often see the top search result being a link to a random reddit comment mentioning the search phrase and no other content.

It was at that point I realized that there was no point in running your own website to create "content". You can't compete with domains whitelisted by Google unless you have a lot of money to spend on SEO.

Some people point to the "Panda" update as when this all started happening.

I doubt it is even that, or close, if you take any average reading.

> I don’t understand why some of these small blogs on niche topics even have ads.

I think in many cases they have the ads there just in case one day they randomly get mentioned in a high-profile place, get a pile of traffic, and that makes them an amount in ad revenue worth caring about. Of course, they probably underestimate the effect of such a glut of traffic, most likely their site will grind to a halt long before much ad revenue is totted up, and their “15 minutes” will be over before it is back up again.

In some cases it is simply that they've chosen to host somewhere “free” where they have little or no control over the ad content, and probably never see a penny of any revenue from it (the host takes that in exchange for the “free” services).

It seems a bit wild if those two could make any difference in costs. I mean, if you have one visit a month and pay per megabyte then sure, Google would maybe show up in stats, but otherwise?

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

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 content platform.

That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things.

Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.

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 crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake.

Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.

Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.

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.

I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.

I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts.

I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149

It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility.

It's just sad.

Wasn't the internet solely the domain of the (techno) elite for a very long time? It's the masses that have wrecked what we had, the the "new" elite profiting off of them. Maybe the societal gains outweigh what we lost, but if you were part of the original elite 20+ years ago, you're now in a much worse place.

For example: the New York Times ran an editorial in the 90s about how the internet would have a similar effect to fax machines. They are an elite organization and didn’t care about the internet much then. Now, twenty five years later, they do care a lot about what’s on the internet.

Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.

Those users were large numbers of mainstream non-geeky people, but they used websites on desktop computers, not through the walled garden of facebook on a phone.

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.

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 censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).

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.

This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.

  1. National law
  2. Facebook TOS  
  3. Group rules

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.

And that's never going away.

Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.

That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals".

People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.

It is sad that the popularity of internet has reached such proportions that people are no longer responsible for what they read by their own choice, but rather people seem to be responsible for what they write, regardless of the fact that anyone can choose not to read it.

Internet posts are just text, yet people act as if we're forcing others to read what we write. Imagine if writing books that make other people feel bad was banned - what a culture would that be.

Between death threats and insults directed at real people - and a fictionary book, there is usually a difference, even though books can be bad as well, if they are directed against certain people (e.g. Mein Kampf).

See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.

But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees.

But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.

I'm not sure what "most opinionated" would mean or how'd you determine relative levels, but I would bet whatever metric you chose wouldn't find the most opinionated people on 4chan. Also just because people say things online doesn't mean they actually hold that opinion.

> I 100% agree with them that child and human trafficking is a big issue in this world and some of the most powerful people are definitely involved

Oh, ok, you weren't actually responding to the parent comment at all.

If only you’d considered this yourself before posting.

No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead.

> But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.)

4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them.

Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states:

    You will not post any of the following outside /b/:
        [...]
        b. Racism
        [...]

Please refrain from personal insults. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

    When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

It, like every other community, has an aggregate identity built from the contributions of the individuals within the community.

> Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states [racism is only allowed in /b/]

If you honestly believe that /b/ is the only place on 4chan where you will find racist sentiment you need to have your head examined.

On /b/, all legal (in the US) content is permitted. It serves as a sort of containment board for the degenerates to shitpost, leaving other boards alone. Nobody takes any content from /b/ seriously, and the nickname for /b/ users is "/b/tards".

In fact, /b/ is just a small part of 4chan, one that most users actually loathe, but which seems to be the most highlighted in public consciousness. Probably due to its complete lack of censorship, which seems to be frowned upon in this day and age.

That's a bold claim. It requires a single counter-example to disprove. I take it seriously, so your statement is empirically wrong. Please retract it.

Perhaps you have some kind of impairment that prevents you from understanding subtleties of informal speech, but I think it's more likely you're just taking a piss.

> I take it seriously

Then you should check out the text under the title on /b/ :)

    The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
    Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

What evidence would it take to change your mind?

EDIT: you changed your reply to make it less obnoxious, but I won't come back to this discussion regardless.

I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).

Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad

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.

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.

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://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ for this.

I'd love to see more of these.

Link blogs are different though: posting to those genuinely takes a couple of minutes per link. I've maintained my link blog happily while having a full-time job.

Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great websites therefore have a start and an end. We should be archiving these websites, not telling people to "just post anyway" so that the site doesn't disappear from Google Search.

For a Gen Z parallel to this, look to any Reddit thread about how some Youtuber they worshipped a decade ago has either disappeared or is making low-quality content to pump affilliate links. We wouldn't want that happening to our favorite writers of yesteryear. There's no shame in calling time on something.

20 years ago, maddox.xmission.com was my go-to place for rants and laughs. The site is still around, but I've changed, so my interests are elsewhere. Similarly, I can't expect the site's author to still be playing the same character that made me bookmark the site all those years ago.

It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.

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.

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.

But, also as an answer to your first question, no, there is no money in this that will show up on the next quarters income sheet.

As it is, the biggest way to deal with Google is regulations of breaking up search engines and ad networks. As long as Google controls the money making on the internet they'll be near unbeatable.

For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.

Surely there are more than ever. Just difficult to find, as you say.

On the flip side, it doesn't matter how many great websites there are if you can't find them. If we want a thriving ecosystem of smaller and more personal websites, then it needs discovery tools.

My efforts with Marginalia Search, wiby.me, ooh.directory, neocities; it's all a decent start, but I think we can do even better.

> there were printed magazines dedicated to the passtime.

  1. (1) pastime, interest, pursuit -- (a diversion that occupies
  one's time and thoughts (usually pleasantly);

https://wmw.thran.uk

Everything that get's created, gets commercialized and swallowed up by whatever product roadmap that commercial entity has. The soul of the internet, from my point of view, can be simply stated as "connection."

Where do we go when we want to connect further and wider than our feet can take us? The internet. What is the point of connection? To share who we are through a wide variety of means: games, text, images, music, voice, etc.

The internet as a protocol supports that endeavor, but the layers that were built on top of the internet started swallowing up human attention. Now there are a few large leaders who have built application layers on top of the web, and that's where people go for their connection. This very website is one of them.

Recent developments with ActivityPub and mastodon are promising. Personally, I'd just like to find my way back to a universal protocol for connection. At the root of it, there's a need for infrastructure which will always cost money. I think that's the main hurdle that needs overcoming.

Interesting take

Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.

And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3, way too late, and still with little support. The reason a lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm not accusing you of that attitude! I'm commenting on others I've seen many times over the years)

In a business selling software, if you're willing to take some sales loss/mad customers, you can just say in software 2.0, you're going to protocol 2.0.

On the open web/OSS the rest of the world can tell you to screw off... or they can just not upgrade and your software that's a step ahead breaks. Then you also have commercial interests that shove FOSS/1.0 on some device and want to change users to upgrade the firmware so users stay on the old stuff forever.

Commercial software tended to get more features because the software was based on monopolies they had full control of.

I have taken a look at hyperview and tried it out. That's probably the only way I'll ever do another mobile app.

Same goes with old phpbb forums - everyone sits on various discords, and places-pockets of knowledge dies one by one, recently lot of 3d-design related people mourned closure of cgsociety forum.

I used to like giving CDs to friends and family at Christmas: here is some music that you might like that you probably don't know about. I'm sure it was a frog in a boiling pot phenomenon, but it seemed to happen all at once: the recipients all said, "Thanks, but I don't have a CD player."

The same thing with app development -- people want to click a link and immediately start interacting and not need to install anything. I've written a few emulators for old computers that weren't popular to begin with, which already limits the audience to a handful of people who care at all. Even among that narrow selection of people who visit my sites, probably 95% of them can't be bothered to download and install an emulator, and I get it. It would be a fun exercise rewriting them to be web apps, but the inability to seamlessly save/restore disk images to the user's space really harms the experience.

Anyway, I have to attend to my guestbooks and curate a webring.

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 local filesystem, etc. They can do everything desktop apps can. With WASM, they can even handle high-performance workloads. The web is just a better way to distribute software.

IMO, operating systems should go all-in on web apps. ChromeOS basically does that. The capyloon project [1] aims to do that for mobile devices. There should be no downloadable apps. "App stores" should just be CDNs. Browser caching can enable offline use. There's no technical reason why the web can't be just as user-friendly as downloadable apps. It's just culture.

And, hopefully making the web more usable would also soften the power of the platform silos.

[1]: https://capyloon.org/

Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.

There's no technical reason apps can't be designed to connect you more meaningfully to individuals that you resonate with. The problem for them is once that starts to happen, you don't need the platform as much and your engagement with it drops. It requires a company that focuses on that, and not engagement / pure revenue, as a focus. I'd wager the main reason those companies haven't taken off is people like money. If you are good enough to build such a platform, you're also good enough to make 250k+ _today_. If you are currently making 80k, it is a very hard thing to turn down.

A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard.

The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system.

Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.

Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.

Web blogging was fragmented across independent web sites, Blogger and walled gardens like Tumblr, Medium and Twitter and it couldn't thrive on all of them and at the end it didn't thrive on any of them. The best solution is open web and that is independent web sites. Open web provides you freedom to customize whatever you want and you can play with Atom, RSS, comments section etc. Some people are not tech savvy enough to blog but Blogger seems like a good solution because it is easy to use and it is open but unfortunately Google didn't invest in it for years and will probably shut it down sooner or later.

/rant

Everything online reads like a magazine.

It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.

Of course excessive advertising and counter measures are always a cat and mouse game but this is once instance where I can blissfully ignore it as a user very easily.

* Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard

* Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers

* Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.

I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.

TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it?

(I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)

Web3 as a brand is probably dead having been tarnished by association with the cryptoscam community, but there is some hint that the zeitgeists is for both creators and consumers wanting a more direct relationship that can only really come via more decentralization of control.

Yes, it is. It's only superficially similar (technically "user-generated" content). It's a qualitative difference. The fundamental difference is human-curated vs algorithmic. You go on youtube or instagram or tiktok and all you see is what the algorithm pushes: usually the shittiest most junk content imaginable. It's a qualitative difference from having your blogs and following links and etc.

The other main difference is of course that it's now all commercial. Everything everywhere, be it a google search for "best blender" to a youtube frontpage, is trying to sell you stuff or to make you click on ads. It contaminates everything.

And then everybody started using that to add trackers and push ads.

Web 2.0 was all about networks and sharing. Heck, one of the biggest ideas at the time was "mashups". If-This-Then-That (IFTTT) got its start there. Yahoo! Pipes was a thing. Websites would freely provide RSS feeds you could not only subscribe to in your Reader but also use to create your own news feed in your dashboard that also showed you the latest issue of your favorite webcomic, the weather forecast and a stock ticker. Everything was beta. Most of it was free. Much of it could be fed into other things. Scraping was for hobbyists, not startups.

If anything, the walled gardens were Web 2.1. When companies realized that keeping data inside the platform rather than sharing it makes it easier to monetize.

I think if we're going with version numbers it also makes sense to describe the dot-com bubble as Web 1.0 as the biggest change that led to it was the massive increase in the number of people with Internet access making the Web commercially interesting (or viable). What some HNers fondly remember as the old Web is either the late pre-Web 2.0 days with webrings, Geocities and personal hobby websites (the latter eventually being supplanted by blogs, tumblr, livejournal and so on) or the pre-Web 1.0 days when most websites were hyperspecific hobby projects written by technophiles and hosted on Internet connected potatos or their university's web server.

Until a more equitable society exists, we will likely not see a legitimate Web 3.0+, in my estimation.

Full disclosure: I'm a cusper Xillenial who thinks Elon Musk is an idiot and hopes he can find some actual value somewhere hidden in the depths of his colossal failures, plural.

Then Web 3.0 was coined by a bunch of crypto grifters who tried to inherit credibility by extending the x.0 numbering scheme.

It's all rather meaningless. See also: Industry 4.0.

For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points | 6 months ago | 1960 comments)

“What blogs did you post to in the last month?”

I tried to sign up for Facebook to make a business page and was instantly banned for no reason. My appeal was denied after uploading a picture of myself. It just doesn't make sense from a consumer or SMB perspective to continue to promote this path but most can't afford not to participate.

Funnily enough though, on New Years Eve 2023 I was talking to a few people about a website that I'd made. The only criticism that I received was that there was no app... it is a one-time-use experience that takes less than 5 minutes, then you never have to use it again except to check order status.

But -- going back to "most can't afford not to participate" -- as I write this I figure that I might as well relent, make the app and start checking into the possibilities with social commerce as to not be left behind screaming about an open internet.

So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to.

The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards.

And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.

For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out).

I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.

There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks relatively speaking.

> There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.

For a proof of concept try https://wiby.me/ -- which seems to be curated more like Yahoo's catalog of yore.

You can find traditional web content we just need more applications that index it properly.

The Google index is dominated by SEO-optimized [sic] clickbait and social media content is well understood to be low bar.

I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was Thursday, January 1st, 2009.

Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least.

It is hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in college.

I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything, "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we did.

At my dayjob we do women’s health, actual clinics with real doctors. Many of our users come from Instagram and TikTok ads. Because yes people will in fact choose their doctor based on a good Instagram/TikTok presence. In fact any time I mention the brand to female friends who live in our target markets they go ”Oh yeah! I’ve seen your ads on Instagram”. It’s never search, or a billboard, or a blog, or youtube, or even me telling them about it. They recognize us from Instagram and Tok.

It’s a wild world out there my friend. Makes me wanna yell at clouds every day.

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 perfect commercial and entirely crowdsourced.

That’s the new internet. The kids only know ‘content’. They don’t know what the fuck an HTML file is.

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.

You have to take the serious consideration that winning customers from tiktok is going to be a wildly different persona than from google.

Churn and burn practices are for folks who've not seen the 5th year of their used to be sustainable market crash when arbitrary platform dynamics change and they don't realize they've been working with the wrong type of client that whole time.

I work in Healthcare as well. It's just a giant farm so folks will take anyone who is alive and insured. I could see TokTik do well there.

Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift

Another angle is Google's algo making people too scared to link out to other sites which was happening around the early 00's.

on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered failures because the definition of success has radically changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in your domain then your site is failure.

We’ve gone.

Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.