Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest?
I can’t even really think of any other sites to visit.
Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”?
There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already.
I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (or at least, new to them) and post it. Most of that new stuff is dull, because most stuff is dull.
You can always hit up Wikipedia's random link and start galumphing about from there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I got Guy Nadon, an actor in nothing I've ever seen, though he provided French dubbing for some video games I've heard of. Don't care? Me neither. That's life. The vast majority of it is dull.
That means it's time to turn off the Internet and go outside.
In the meantime, go read an old gem, seat61.com and reflect on what we have all lost.
Just because strip malls are plentiful, doesn't mean good architecture no longer exists.
And I remember the old days. For every hand-crafted gem of a site, there were a 100 with little more than a grainy photo of Slipknot and an "under construction" animation.
Nah, it was always a small group of people making cool internet things. Now they are just drowned out by the commercial internet.
>Now everything on the internet is "content," a hyper optimized form of human intellectual output that is devoid of art, minimal on information, excreted instead of created, measured to the lowest common denominator, monetized yet worthless, just enough bait on the hook for the next lizard brain click.
I could not have said it better myself !
The Internet has become a place to publish/share every trivial thought that has ever popped into every mediocre mind. There is no self-regulation/self-censoring anymore. The Noise is just overwhelming and it is extremely mentally fatiguing just trying to get at any kind of Signal. You just give up and start numbing your mind with all the junk available.
PS: Here is Veritasium explaining the insidious effects of "Youtube Platform" Algorithms - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 Now extrapolate the same idea to other dominant platforms like Facebook, Google etc. and you realize that "The Internet" has become a platform for Expression and not necessarily Information.
PPS: The book Networked Life: 20 Questions and Answers by Mung Chiang gives an inside algorithmic view of how the above platforms work.
How exciting! You might discover a movie or series nobody in your bubble has ever heard of! It might be cinema of a kind you've never even dipped your toes in!
Whether something is boring or exciting is almost completely subjective and it doesn't really matter how much you already know, since there's just so much stuff.
It is a high bar to produce something truly innovative and different, and not just the same old with a shinier interface. Same goes for all the creative arts: television, music, movies, art, etc. You always come up against the law of diminishing marginal utility so very little ever feels as good as it was to begin with.
Do you have a favourite band but now only ever really listen to their first few albums? Do the majority of movie releases basically not excite you? Can you really be bothered to watch season n of some show you enjoyed initially?
The only way to escape that cycle is to be a creator (with yourself as an audience of one).
Sorry I must've misunderstood: is it a requirement that the audience is an audience of one?
So yes, it’s true, I’m my own audience of one. And I like it that way.
nothing curated, nothing directing you toward a particular book other than the title
it gives you a chance to reckon with something that's not for you, to actually stumble upon something and try to reckon with it as you find it
Loved it. Brilliant ending. Sounds almost like a great super short novel.
Internet really boomed and flourished in mid 2000's, and then the mobile and the app space took off in mid 2010s, where we had new content/ideas/innovation. Even way before then, VHS kicked off a video golden age in the 1980s.
Kind of curious to see the next frontier that gets propped up by a technology this decade. I thought it was going to be consumer robotics but it's probably still too soon for that.
All of the stuff I used to do is still there but it’s boring now. Just like most of the games I used to find fun seem to basic and limited now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Brown
gonna go for a walk. bye.
The Internet, as you remember it, still very much exists. Some forums have shut down, but there are still small personal websites, blogs, all that stuff. They're just really hard to find with Google and facebook/reddit/twitter.
Here are some cool and creative things I've discovered recently. I have no affiliation with these projects, I just thought they were cool:
I think you hit the nail on the head. Google used to prioritize forum posts in their search results. They even had a feature to limit search results to only forum posts via a "Discussions" option on the results page.
These days, Google prioritizes social media content, click bait and blogspam that has a lot of ads. The "Discussions" option is gone, and even recent forum posts are nowhere to be found on the first few pages of search results.
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=steak+recipe&profi...
This thread is actually a good example of that, and OP isn't the only one who has noted that the Internet seems to have turned into a soulless mall where nothing has any effort or thought put into it. Well, it hasn't, but when you engage with the Internet through certain tools it sure looks that way.
There is a problem known as the multi-armed bandit problem[0]. The problem deals with situations where you have to chose between different options you could take, but you don't start off with full knowledge of the options. You can spend time learning the options (exploring) or you can spend time using the best option you already know of (exploit). Importantly, you can't do both at the same time.
In general, good strategies start with a phase of exploring followed by exploiting.
Humans follow this pattern as well. For us, it seems we spend our late childhood, thru our teens, and into our early 20's in a heavily explore-biased state then switch to exploit biased for our 30's and later.
So the thing that happened to "exploring the internet" is you got older. Exploring for the sake of exploring is no longer as innately desirable to you know as it was when you were younger. You can still do it now. In many ways there are new tools that make it easier (see other posts) but it will likely feel more like work in a way which wasn't true when you were younger.
I personally know some quite old people who seem to be into exploring all the time with periods of exploitation and all of them are people with mundane jobs that end when it ends. Their mental capacity is at their hobbies and they sometimes invest into their hobbies a lot, however they would come up with other hobbies all the time.
That’s in contrast to the white collar folks who’s life becomes work and all they do outside of work is to pay for some curated experience like vacation to Paris or Cooking lessons. They never have time for anything, they deeply specialize at something like building systems that catch people engaging in known money laundering schemes.
After some age you are in track to specialize a lot, make a lot of money and spends that money within the acceptable framework with your peers.
Also, the effects of the algorithms could be strong too. I noticed that it has been quite some time since the last time I was bored deeply. At the slightest sign of boredom I find myself getting entertained on one of the few apps and website I visit. It makes me feel like I’m exploring but in reality, I rarely see anything that is not a variation of something from the narrative of the platform.
My personal experience is that I've shifted away from "exploring the Internet" to exploring other domains of lived experience. I suppose in this sense, I am now "exploiting the Internet", but I would not say that I have overall shifted to a more exploit-focused regime.
Does it mean that young people are still exploring the internet and computer today the way I use to back when I was young?
Yes, but they're exploring TikTok, YouTube and to a lesser extent, Instagram. There are oceans of content to explore on those platforms.
This is essentially the reason advertisers tend to target the young - those over a certain age are more set in their ways and not looking for new options.
https://www.amazon.com/Algorithms-to-Live-By-audiobook/dp/B0...
The wikipedia article also briefly mentions that it is observed in animals.
It can sound a bit simple at first, but the human - algo stories are terrific.
Arguably a web comprising a large number small, diverse websites, where each user may be visiting a variety of different websites, is less suitable for advertising than one where all web users are funneled through a few large websites that survive by selling online ad services, like Google. It stands to reason that those large, online ad services sites would have little interest in showing users an undiscovered portion of the web. They want users to congregate on "popular" sites. Good for advertising.
OTOH, using zone files instead of a search engine, social media or news aggregator site in the online ads (or VC) business, one can see all websites that have registered an ICANN domain name. No filters. No advertising-related algorithms. Popularity is irrelevant. The user determines relevance, not a third party.
Anyone know if something like this exists?
There are, e.g., search engines that search for strings in the page source, e.g., to detect use of certain Javascript files. These are slow and not free.
Requesting zone files from the registry was the traditional method. ICANN tries to require registries to provide them to the public, with limited success. Downloading com.zone/net.zone from Verisign should be relatively straightforward (not sure if edu.zone is available anymore). However with gTLDs there are hundreds of registries now, with potentially hundreds of different rules on zone file access; some registries like ccTLDs never had zone file access programs. Even registries that seem like they would be easy to deal with can have silly restrictions, e.g., the .org registry used to have a requirement that the requester needed to have stable IP address.
Sometimes larger TLDs take a bit longer to respond to requests, whereas some others automatically accept all requests.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/czds-2014-03-03-en https://czds.icann.org/home
Back when we used things like the Yahoo directory as our main method of searching, we'd travel down different categories, finding unexpected websites as we went. That felt like exploring, because you were making choices about which direction to go, and that would determine what you saw next.
With a search engine, you tell the search engine what you want, it takes you there. There's no browsing there, so very little discovery.
The other main method of finding things today is aggregation: places like Hackernews, or Twitter. The reason using those sites doesn't feel like exploring is because they're just pushing new things right at you. It's not a matter of you seeking anything out, or making any choices, so it doesn't feel the same.
You can get that feeling of exploration on Twitter or (e.g. YouTube, Twitch, etc.) by using the relationships of individual people or channels as a path to travel down. But, that's not the most common way to use those sites, nor what they're optimized for: they want to show you a list of recommended new things based on an algorithm, and that won't feel like you're exploring, because you aren't; you're on a guided tour.
I think these companies gave us what we want most of the time, and one consequence is that the idea of a directory-based interface to the web went away, along with the feeling that using such an interface evoked.
Wikipedia is one of the only sites many people still use that is still organized like a hyperlinked directory, and meant to be used to serendipitously explore and find unexpected information yourself.
One thing that can enhance browsing is to look up key terms and concepts if they are not hyperlinked.
I recently donated to Wikipedia. They deserve it.
Instead, copyright turned Google Books into a worse version of Amazon's "look inside" feature, depriving the internet of immeasurable substance.
I never really got to explore the website in depth but the few articles I've read I remember to have been very interesting. More important he had some tips on how to make better searches to uncover websites that might not be high on the results list. Granted this information might be outdated now but I think it is worth a look.
[1] www.fravia.com
Written content on the Internet are much lower in terms of quality than before. SEO has taken over and so written content tend to be wordy or salesy. There is no mechanism for users to flag low quality content to Search engines or other users, so it is a free for all.
Online forums are long gone. People migrated to Reddit where discussion is much more shallow, or private communities on Facebook.
We could still find interesting stuff on YouTube, for now.
Most interesting content is indeed either
(a) on 5 or 6 sites, or linked from there (b) on professional news or media websites
This is because only a tiny proportion of people have the skills, or need, to build their own website with their own domain. 99% of people - including 99% of people with interesting things to say - will say them on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Substack. Then there are people paid to be interesting. You'll find them on the NYT, or (for my region) the Eastern Daily Press.
This is fine! Web browsers are read-only. Certain websites, built on the web, provide services for writing. People use them.
Many people do give up on computer problems if they take longer than a few minutes to solve, or do not want to spend time piecing together fragments together, domain, hosting, dns, email, etc.
It feels really to be "exploring the internet". In a glorious quality and extent that I could have never imagined when my dad brought home a modem in 1995.
Result: When you're surfing you see so much of no interest that it's no longer fun.
(There is good stuff out there it's just so hard to find.)
2. The search engines also actively destroyed all those people who used to list interesting sites. Now the replacement for finding interesting sites is often some half witted algorithm, that's definitely not human, definitely hasn't the slightest clue and won't even let you take charge to get what you want.
3. People used to write their own material, experiment with program driven sites, be interesting. Now so many, even those who used to be interesting, make regurgi-posts all the time. They provide a link to an article that they've often not really read. That article is produced by somebody under time pressure who thinks the web is some text and a stock image or two, but mostly 100 times as much code as anything useful, so they can watch your every move, extract your money.
That's enough for now. If you want you can recreate the web as something that increases your intellect, not this destroyer abomination thing, choice is yours. If you have say five or so friends similarly inclined you can do it. Your choice.
Search is orthogonal to exploration. At first Google/yahoo/etc we're so bad that improvements in their systems made everything better.
But at some point they started trading one against the other because the easy wins were gone.
Because Google is the market leader (at least by the time this becomes relevant) everyone tried to compete with them and follow their path. Google optimized search really strongly over exploration. So much so that most users only interact with the very first result these days.
And thus exploring the internet is dead because there's not a good way to do it. This had knock on effects where nobody designs to be explored like they used to (or are explicitly hostile to it), so it's probably actually quite hard to build an internet explore engine at this point
Put simply, the dominating means of navigation and discovery on the internet switched from directories (transparent, easy to explore) to search engines (black box, returns result tailored to your input). And each website you ended up at might have had its own directory inviting you to explore further! Though maybe that bit hasn't changed too much.
However, the internet is also what you bring to it. I took up playing synths last year and it's a whole new community of makers, hackers, and artists that was invisible to me before participating in that art. The same is true for any instrument. I have other pursuits that are almost completely unrepresented online other than some rich technical how-to's, which are great. Doing things whose online communities aren't representative of the real world activity makes me optimistic that the real world isn't like reddit.
Learn a thing and do it often, if not eventually even well, and it changes the lens you see the world through.
Most of the popular content you see on FB or other aggregators are simply "preview"s to get your money. A "thoughtful" article that just mentions half-way through a book you should buy. A blogpost on some technical matter that just mentions they are looking for new hires. A funny video to get you to see ads. And so on, and so forth.
It is still possible to find interesting communities, like HN, but you should probably dig around the niche that you enjoy. Discord has some good servers. IRC is still around. It all depends on what you are interested in.
[1]: https://search.marginalia.nu/ [2]: http://www.nomilk.com/ [3]: https://bwo.life/org/index.htm [4]: http://www.valdostamuseum.com/hamsmith/TShome.html
> Despite all this life and death, I doubt whether anyone would be tempted to describe the embryo’s cells as “red in tooth and claw”. Nor do I think anyone would appeal to “survival of the fittest” or natural selection as the fundamental principle governing what goes on during normal development. The life and death of cells appears to be governed, rather, by the developing form of the whole in which they participate.
This is precisely the sort of BS you get when you do not participate actively in a field, but instead go off on the side to live in your own world. During development, suvival of the fittest is very much at play; we have evidence for this, for example in the developmental trajectories of stem cell niches. Cells outcompete each other, and make it difficult for other varieties of cells to "live" along side them (this does not necessarily result in apoptosis, it can also cause re-differentiation in the less "successful" cells). A crucial reason for this is error correction: sometimes, new cells are defective in various dangerous ways (e.g. cancerous, or have problematic genetic information), and "survival of the fittest" helps to error-correct for this, as usually such defective cells are "less fit".
What's surprising here is that cells can change their fitness, "on purpose", in ways that do not make evolutionary sense. They might be programmed to reduce their fitness, or entirely explode, if they receive certain inputs. So, clearly this is an emergent process where we must take into account cellular programming along side "naive" natural selection.
"Old hat" to biologists, really, in that they have been studying this. They're studying it until today. New things are discovered all the time. There is no sense of certainty, only that there are some general outlines emerging.
Coming back then to this article: saddening, if not disgusting in its pretentiousness. Link [4]is even more depressing. I don't know if people understand how dangerous quackery is: it destroys lives. Most importantly, it destroys the lives of children whose parents fall into this.
The broader internet (being difficult to explore given how modern internet ecologies box us in) is thankfully not made up primarily of this kind of..."garbage", but it is often painted as being that way.
So, for anyone who came across this: please don't think the un-popular internet is a cesspool of "people speaking their minds, in a convenient vacuum". Rather, there are websites where people who are humble about their understanding, even if it is substantial compared to the average person's. For example: John Baez's homepage (https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/) is far richer than link [4], and actually gives you useful knowledge.
+Fravia's lore on internet searching (and reverse engineering in general) are masterpieces; showcases of what the internet can produce, while also working as effective vaccination against disinformation: http://biostatisticien.eu/www.searchlores.org/indexo.htm
His strategies for how to search for useful information on the internet remain relevant today.
But regarding bwo.life, I think you are missing the forest for the trees. I read quite a lot of articles on that site and your comment in no way disagrees with anything written there. Honestly speaking - I got the impression you just wanted to highlight some details you happen to know about development due to your field of work. And you disagree in the first paragraph, saying that there is some natural selection between cells. But then, it seems obvious that survival of the fittest cells cannot explain development alone, so you backtrack and say that this is not the full story while somehow remaining in disagreement with the author. I don't get it.
Computing evolved up the point of Multics. The military has always been a driver of computing research to some extent. The deployment of computing resources to help plan airstrike missions showed a critical need for developing a system in which a single computer could handle multiple levels of secure data. The research resulted in capability based security, which was in the process of being folded into Multics.
The folks at Bell labs happened to have a spare DEC machine, and having seen the complexity of Multics, decided to eschew capabilities, and instead relied on a much simpler, and quicker to implement system based on group and user IDs into Unix. This quickly spread to be the defacto multi-user model of security across the academic world.
Over time, PCs came to dominate the low end of computing. When it came time to implement multi-user and network systems, the Unix model, or a slightly upgraded model, based on access control lists (as in Windows) effectively ate the world.
Eternal September happened, and the internet went commercial. With this, we now have persistent internet, and are stuck with the oversimplified security model from Linux and Windows dominating everything. As such, no computer is actually secure.
Because computers aren't secure, you can't trust programs that run on them to be secure. Because of this, you can't trust the web browser on your computer to not get you into trouble if you click on the wrong link. This results in a very strong tendency to avoid clicking on links from unknown domains and sites among the general public.
Because the audience has settled into a few walled gardens, most of the authors of content have had no choice but to move to do the same.
And here we are, because capability based security is seen as too complicated (it doesn't have to be, in fact it can be simple to use), we're all stuck with facebook, twitter, etc.
The author did not mean tortious, but instead tortuous. But one immediately gathers this from the context anyway. Who cares what the spelling is?
Just as an example: in the last few days all i wanted to find was a single Dockerfile setup that worked out of the box. and nearly every single example I could find in the top 20 results was broken.
I mean, try looking up subjects that many people have written about. For example: "Why does climate change matter?" Nearly every single top 20 search result sucks really bad with barely 3 to 5 paragraphs not even going into depth. We know for a fact there are hundreds of extremely in-depth articles that cover this subject with great depth and examples, and explanations.
The modern web was designed to rope you in and keep you there. Look up random stuff that interests you, not using a big name search engine. Then if you find a site on a webring, and look at connecting sites.
Listen to these words and think about what they actually mean: Internet Explorer, or Web Browser, even Netscape Navigator with its nautical theme has such connotations.
A little further back it advertising called it the "Information Superhighway"
I've also been having a lot of fun on minus which is a minimal social network that gives each user a lifespan of 100 posts max:
Look for communities that are built around the humans in them, vs a single company. Web rings, Gemini, IRC are all great places to start.
"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
Back in the days we had dial-up. I remember the rush. The excitement. The thought that every minute I was paying 6 cents. The monthly bill my parents received, and the (justified!) speech I got for being online too much. I remember downloading entire Usenet groups, reading them offline (cheap!). I also remember my browser crashing after I logged off [from the internet], while it contained various windows (tabs didn't exist yet), and it couldn't handle it for whatever reason. Session Restore? Haha, no, that didn't exist yet. It'd be like a reinstall of an OS: fresh. You'd have to put effort and patience into a post, too. Because you had to dial-in to post it, and who knows what might've been posted in the meantime?
Now we got always-on. Everything is very graphical, Web 2.0. You can get any content you desire. Any movie, any music, any book. Its all available, without any issue. It devalues the works, as does Web 2.0 with templates and what not. Its the same with synthesizer-based music. Everything is VST now. Back in the days, you needed an expensive hardware synthesizer (e.g. a 303) which was a specific investment. Its like the difference between the bioindustry daily and eating a piece of free-range meat every once in a while. Not to mention, search engines have become so good, it defeats the purpose of manually exploring in your own way. Efficiency killed curiosity.
And you grew up. As you grow up, things become less new and exciting. You can still explore though. For example, you could go to HN's newest submits [1] and upvote of the few which were worth reading. If a few do this, and its a match, interesting content gets more coverage on the HN front page. But that's the thing, too: you're doing work for other people. That's also part of what exploring is about: sharing your findings.
I check about 20 sites regularly even when I have other interesting things to do.
> Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest?
Search engines?
> Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”?
It sounds like you would like to find lists of recommended sites that people used to have on their homepages. Most people don't maintain such lists anymore, because 1) nobody reads them 2) they are busy pushing updates and consuming those of other people. Most people find more interesting stuff than they have time to consume already. (Who even needs entertainment industry anymore?)
Also I don't frequent social media, unless HN counts.
Edit: Sometimes when I want anything to read, I search "is java dying" or "why c++". There has always been something new, albeit I do it only two or three times a year.
It's fun to assemble link lists, it has a sort of scrapbooking quality to it, and as long as the links are of high quality, they can be very enjoyable to browse through as well. That's the benefits beyond the service they provide for the personal website ecosystem which is really struggling with serious discoverability issues.
The Internet can host public debate where everyone can participate equally well in a way that was never before possible, whereas mainstream media is mostly a relic from a time when writing was ink on paper, and publishing was therefore expensive.
People could commend blogs and articles they think you should read (and publish their own too!). They should be able to do so without fear of losing friends or being kicked from the platform when they find something objectionable in them.
Blessed is he, whosoever shall not be offended in me. -- Jesus the Christ
But the tongue can no man tame; it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison. -- James 3:8
Which search engines in 2021 give you real, interesting websites and not SEO gamed content pages that exist only to serve ads?
You could try https://searchmysite.net/ which only includes user-submitted and moderated websites, and tries to keep out spam by detecting pages with adverts and heavily downranking them in the results.
Marginal search engines may be better at avoiding it, as optimizing for them wouldn't be that profitable, but I haven't tried any.
You could try checking out lower results, or search the SEO gamed content for hints that help you dig deeper.
Sometimes, I like visiting the older corners of the internet using the above link. I feel nostalgic somehow. It also helps you see how far we've come in terms of web design and development.
Nowadays, all the top results of Google are websites which are already popular so it's not possible to 'discover' a new community through Google. Other less popular search engines use very similar algorithms based on backlinks so they all show more or less the same results as each other.
VCs aren't interested in funding Google competitors, unfortunately. I'm sure there exists algorithms which are good at finding relevant websites and which are different than the one used by Google but it would disrupt the current economic order.
Here?! HN is a collection of references to articles from the most varied www sources...
n submissions per day over m different sites, from l users which provide partial indirect profiles: you think one may not find new interesting sources? It would be a job in itself, to check where the submissions lead you.
(n, m, l: maybe dang could provide stats, it would be interesting. Edit: since we are here: most common www sources; www sources with the best upper quintile of upvotes in submissions (i.e. when they are noted, they really are)...)
Most likely, straight to the comments section.
It's not with technical intention: the frontpage currently open clearly lists, with appropriate highlighting: thisworddoesnotexist.com ; nature.com ; twobithistory.org ; michielborkent.nl ; wired.com ; flowingdata.com ; arxiv.org ; techspot.com ; crunchydata.com ; lukasz.langa.pl ; gabrielgambetta.com ; science.org ; thisiscolossal.com ; lambdaland.org ; sparkfun.com ; rongarret.info ; archive.org ; eetimes.com ; axios.com ; theinformedcompany.com ; easypost.com ; austinvernon.site ; heap.io ; reuters.com ; disneyresearch.com ; leadedsolder.com ; fermatslibrary.com ; cnx-software.com ; medium.com/sequoia-capital. It is one's own internal direction (post-perceptual filtering) to ignore that.
Imagine a Facebook or Instagram not mining your data to show you what they think you want - the results in your timeline will be a grand hash of all the think that's new and happening.
That would have been a vastly different experience.
Except for perhaps Reddit, every other big site today personalizes your content and this has made the internet boring for me.
The only place i discovew new content is Reddit, but again its front page is full of memes and American content.
The Reddit apparent algorithms I experienced create a very biased content proposal: browsing its content with an account has the effect of increasing restrictions in the offer instead of its expansion. (Again a huge basic fault: it "corners" you into a claustrophobic virtual reality, instead of enhancing freedom (today this should be a theoretical tenet) and "pluralism with relevance". Not only that: it seems to decide your affiliations with the dumbest prejudice.)
Hacker News?
Or Twitter, at least half of my feed consists of people who frequently share links to a variety of tech-related sites. Also many people have an interesting site linked in their bio. (If you prefer just your feed without Twitter's ads and suggestions try https://tweetdeck.twitter.com).
and its part of a successful assumption I've been able to make for new ventures.
Basically, you do explore and visit plenty of sites, but you click through to them from timelines and what your friends shared in groupchats.
My successful assumption has been this: the URL does not matter. or more specifically, the TLD does not matter. .coms do not matter. By proxy, SEO usually does not matter either.
Your client base is going to click through to your domain name from seeing it shared somewhere else.
Or, lets get even more specific or perhaps grim: if your business model relies on people randomly finding your service from a search engine, or typing in the direct url, you have failed. if "failure" is too strong, then pointing out how much time and effort is being wasted from the strategy and how much alpha is being missed from better more relevant business models is more accurate.
so back to you, you explore from the timelines and chat rooms. if thats not good enough you need more exciting communities to be a part of.
For some reason, "discource" has taken over as the forum software, but I don't ever remember finding it engaging or interesting.
Sure, the old forum software were kind of "old", pre-ajax. You had to click all the time. But somehow, it was engaging. People would post there, and threads could go on for days, and I would come and check every so often for new replies.
This all seems to have gone. Most programming discussion now takes place on HN and Reddit.
Almost all the discource based programming forums are mostly just Q&A (aka support).
Some discussions happen on Twitter, but Twitter is not really a good platform for discussions. I mean, it doesn't even have a good way of navigating all the comments on a thread!!
I think what killed it for me is that by design, discussions just fade into the "next" page after about two days, so you never see the kind of thread where comments keep pouring in for days and weeks.
There's something satisfying in browsing some site, and following a link to the next.. That's really what I think of as "exploring". Exploring only works when you link to your friends sites (and when your friends has sites you can link to) and they link back.. The interlinking has probably weakened somewhat, I don't know why, but I suspect it to be partly because we've gotten so used to link rot, and nobody wants to have a site full of dead links..
That said, I still link to others. And I must shamlessly plug https://geekring.net/ as a tool for exploring (though, it's only about a hundred pages), you could add yours! :)
Pretty much all that stuff is just gone now.
The closest thing I do like this today is probably Twitter: follow someone interesting, and you'll start discovering people/projects/sites/etc they find interesting. Similarly, HN/Reddit are maybe the closest thing to randomly browsing the "directory", but otherwise everything is via organic search results for a specific topic.
It’s called consolidation. Strengthen large corporations, weaken individuals. With internet advertising, this can be done imperceptibly over time.
You can't passively explore. You can't go to one or two sites and just consume a feed.
Think of interests you have, things you are curious about, cultures you want to know more about - and seek those out. That is what exploring is: navigating the unknown.
Windows 98 was the first OS I used, played games on and explored internet on. At that time exploring the windows itself use to feel fun let alone finding all those new websites. Yahoo and MSN were a thing back then for the same reason I think. They were big and each had so much to explore and enjoy.
Now days with improved search experience and better internet speeds everything is more accessible and there is more of everything. You don't have to stick to one thing and explore it from A to Z.
I use to explore features of Windows 98 even XP but that all stopped and now I don't have those interest anymore.
Maybe your idea of why we are not "exploring" is just maturity and growth in this domain. We now don't need to explore like the way we use to because we have probably grown out of it.
Basically the premise was it was a new way to explore the web. An actual web. One topic lead to another, not just a series of web pages. See data stats, zoom into high res ads; zoom in further for what print could never give us.
Pretty sure there was an impressive Ted talk on it, at one point.
Edit: it’s called pivot https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_poin...
May have gotten it confused earlier with a ms photosynth talk.
HN has 30 or so unique sites linked from its front page that constantly are swapped out for other ones. You probably have never heard of many of them before. Why isn't this "exploring"?
https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/26/22738125/adobe-photoshop...
and I stumbled on this (no idea what it really does)
https://www.adobe.com/products/aero.html
and from HN this
https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/
and
https://www.thisfuckeduphomerdoesnotexist.com/
I don't find that any different than it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago really.
https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370
I don't know if there are any replacements for it.
Most of the archive.org links are still working and the directory is still worth exploring:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140927131133/https://dir.yahoo...
There was DMOZ (which Google has previously used to seed it's crawl) and now there's https://www.curlie.org/
Backing the late 1990s, I was lucky to have (although I didn't appreciate it at the time) an unfettered always-on internet connection at work. I had to jump through some hoops to get it[1], but it was there, and unmonitored.
I spent most of my free time, wandering around FTP sites seeing what was there. It was a magical doorway to so much random stuff; source code, images, text documents... Most of which has now been lost to time.
I even managed to get a the source of Mosaic for VMS, and then compile it so I could use it on a VAXStation that was also in my office.
Anyway... So I've been exploring anonymous FTP again... They are a shadow of their former selves I think. There's a few nice nuggets out there, but mostly it's just mirrors of Linux distros, and fragments of the old SIMTEL and Walnut Creek collections.
What I did find out is that there are no Archie servers anymore. There's a few Web based FTP search engines, but that just not the same. So I'm toying with building one.
---
[1] Crawl under the floor of my office, splice a CAT3 cable to another one, then configure SLIP on my Windows 3.1 PC using Trumpet Winsock.
So a rotation of a small number of sites. Because who wants to click through hundreds of bookmarks when 99% of the time there is no new content. Not a complaint, just that most sites don't update every day.
Some daily download feeds from hundreds of sites: it's not really a «disappearance». Where there are lacks (some sad cases are surely there), one should probably push and be vocal to request the service.
Since the signal to noise is higher than just manually going over search engine listenings you have fallen into the pattern of just checking the same websites over and over. I’m sure the fact that this is more time efficient has reinforced this behaviour.
The disadvantage is that others are effectively acting as gatekeepers to your knowledge acquisition now. There might be things on the internet that you find incredibly interesting but will never see because the majority of other people don’t find them interesting.
HN comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29071855
calendar story : https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
Then google came in and started penalizing web sites for outbound links.
Then everyone stopped the blogrolls and the webrings disappeared - and people even got stingy with linking to a site in a blog post.
Sure, blame 'shady seo' or what have you - and yeah that became a thing, but the real blame is google. Pushing sites down google was such a scary thing that wordpress took the previously-in-core linkroll out in future updates - even if you have a blogroll with just friends - it was removed - many did not know - and if you did, you had to go install a plugin to bring the functionality back.
Of course the better options would of been to just auto-nofollow tag all the blogroll links - share the web and not to worry about a google penalty or being associated with 'spooky sounds "bad nieghborhood" in google's alog-eyes'
I'd love to see web rings brought back with auto-nofollow added - and a stats system that was open to all who installed / used it for webring X Y or Z - and blogrolls that are easy to nofollow.. better with hover preview / a note about why you love site Y or what have you.
It would be better for the web, but it's not easy to do currently and not a big benefit for the work right now.
Anyone remember when the search engines had a web ring to try the search at other engines at the bottom?
For example I tried to find a video of Dave Chappelle talking about Hollywood forcing black actors to dress in drags for some movies. Instead I get a lot of the Dave Chapelle on Netflix making fun of Transgender people. It is all in the SEO.
Then again there is a lot of crap on the Internet it is better to avoid with fake news and silly videos so you stick to 5 or 6 sites you know are good.
I feel like web rings or something like that could be a nice thing to have again. I am not sure what format it would take these days, but I like the idea of sets of curated sites that are "opted in" to being part of a collection.
Apart from that though, I personally find that Hacker News itself is a great source - either from the stories themselves, or usually the individual comments have some great links.
All of that to say: I think it's more about habits (and breaking out of the search engine hole) than anything else. It's still very possible (and easy) to explore the World Wide Web; you just need to overcome the gravity of the big sites.
When I search, I no longer default to Google. It's great for some things & awful at others. I try & think what communities might be better to search. I read random blogs or forums & those (even the popular ones) often lead me to additional niche (but still large) communities.
I'm constantly finding new niche communities.
I find the resurgence of newsletters really interesting, reminds me of fanzines/textfiles from years ago.
Some subscriptions I find interesting:
- Stratechery
- Suma Positiva (Spanish)
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Unsupervised Learning
My suggestion to refresh the feeling of wonder is to go to site directories instead of the search engine of choice, like: https://dmoz-odp.org
RSS is still viable, combined with link aggregators and newsletters for discovery of new material, but it's a very different experience.
I also visit only a few sites nowadays but I jump to dozens of random sites with either Google, DDD or HN.
The Internet to me does seem to have settled on an equilibrium level of variety which is quite narrow and perhaps to some degree stagnant, whereas in the past it seemed to represent a universe of more opportunity.
This is not dissimilar to how markets can sometimes price in the value of optionality. For example, I remember reading somewhere that the share price of a pharma co which has a wide pool of R&D avenues available for further investment can actually shrink when the co settles on a particular choice, setting its budget and strategy for the next few years on following that single (hopefully) star even though this is a necessary step for latent potential to actually be realised into practical reality.
The Internet has collapsed into a tool which serves the functions that are most in demand for the audience, and to some degree it has sacrificed possibility (who pays for that?) for utility.
Even the appetites of the masses (who provide the demand for what is most prevalent on the net) for fresh content are perhaps stabilising around particular 'centres of mass'. With large numbers of viewers, patterns and uniformity are now predominating which may have been muted when the internet was a platform for explorers and non-standard viewers.
The same thing could have happened with other forms of media, too. For example, movies now seem to increasingly rely on special effects to the extent that I sometimes now find it more of a disappointment than otherwise. Sure, it might be pretty to see whirly colours of space or magic, or fascinating to see buildings and glass facades bursting under shockwaves, or planets colliding, but only for a while - we can move on now. Even literary fiction quite often starts to feel same-y when browsing.
Also, it takes more work now for content providers to produce something that can escape from the gravitational field of established content platforms. Newness and optionality has value (ask Black-Scholes), and when it does raise its head, it is quickly mopped up by 'fast followers' with deep pockets.
A consequence of this, too, is that the reticence of content providers to share anything new without a pay wall has also increased.
Unintuitively, it may be that tides of people and attention associated with a platform's maturity tend to homogenise and flatten the landscape of original thought (even making it harder to find valuable newness).
https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620...
I want some randomness back into my internet browsing.
Another excellent place where you can start your exploration is https://are.na
Does anyone know why they killed off StumbleUpon? It was probably the best part of 2005-2015 for me.
Edit: I like your link but it seems to lack the interest-targeting algorithms that SU used to have.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20030207162038/http://www.k10k.n...
You can go to John Deakins' website and talk about cinematography. No money, no subscriptions, no ads, just make an account and log in and he talks to people who have an interest in amateur photography and film about his tricks and gadgets in his forum.
[0] thinking-about-things.com
[1] essays.findka.com
This website has helped me find new and hidden gems. It was posted to HN last month.
You might like this. https://twitter.com/wayback_exe?lang=en
If you want interesting stuff you’ll have to go to the fringe.
My exported bookmarks.html is 4 MB and that's probably on the small side, because some I lost, some I went through and deleted a few years back. There's also a lot that I saved on Reddit.
But it's pretty apparent that proper blogs a few and far between now and if you have some obscure knowledge, then you're better of writing Wikipedia pages about it, not starting your own site.
Might be you: You're bored and you're searching wrong. For a feel similar to geocities try the 'gemini' protocol. Its a text-only web that really feels like the 90s'. Lots of personnal passionnate content, new world to discover !
Might be the internet: There is a classic article "Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths" that present a classic subculture cycle [0]. 1:Passionate people start it. 2:It gains traction and looses some of its original taste. 3:Someone finds a way to make a profit out of it and optimizes it for money. Maybe the internet is just in stage 3 and we're going to move forward ?
Might be both: There are websites that still have this old feel. I discovered some niches where things are like that. (Banjo playing, forging, local botany, local archeology) The common factor seem to be that the authors are usually neither young, nor technologically oriented. So they tend to do old-looking websites and cross referencing SPIP pages instead of "creating content" on a famous platform.
Can someone explain how one used to “explore the internet?”
Today, personal websites are still by far the most interesting finds. They exist, they're just difficult to filter through the noise of social media. When using the search engines, shy away from anything on a major social media site and tend towards the modern tucows/geocities equivelants.
If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com to change your username we'll be happy to do that for you. (Same offer for anyone of course.) Until then, I'm going to ban the account for the time being since it's the only way to take care of this short of renaming.
EDIT: IRC/XMPP/Matrix chatrooms are still doing well, too!
The "cool" internet was largely populated by two things: People screwing around creating content in their spare time, with no expectation of profit ("Hobbyists"), and eager entrepreneurs burning through tons of money trying to find the "one weird trick" that would make them rich on the net. Most of #2 failed, but while it was happening it provided a host of interesting things to see, and spaces to hang out in online.
Then 2008 happened and it all came tumbling down. People tend to think more of the 90s ".com" crash, but there was another after the "recession." Suddenly there wasn't as much money to throw around, so #2 became more and more rare, and those that did exist were less casual and more dogged in their attempts to extract money. At the same time, #1 also collapsed, because people were losing their jobs, downgrading to worse paying jobs, working longer hours etc. People didn't have time for hobbies, and self-starters didn't have money for wild new experiments.
So innovation and expression on the web kind of ground to a halt. This happened culture-wide by the way, but certainly it was obvious on the net. What had once been a space for fun and experimentation became a wasteland ruled over by the handful of tyrannical companies that could survive the harsh conditions. That's why there are only 6 sites. Outside of SV, people aren't doing so well. They haven't been doing so well in a while. Maybe you noticed the protests and riots and crazy elections? People have other things on their minds besides having fun on the internet these days.
Some interesting subs
r/KremersFroon r/HilariaBaldwin