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> I would regularly see personal sites pop up on my searches through the web, but I'm finding less and less non-commercial content. That's because personal hom
by DaiPlusPlus 10y ago
> I would regularly see personal sites pop up on my searches through the web, but I'm finding less and less non-commercial content.
That's because personal homepages have died off, to be replaced with better replacements - not because Disney and TimeWarner have paid Google to rank their results higher.
For example, Wikipedia (and Wikia) have replaced personal museum websites for all kinds of esoteric information - ditto fansites. For "Prof. Smith's computer science examples webpage" we have GitHub; Reddit has replaced "Links" pages and Webrings, and Google itself has rendered curated directory sites completely obsolete.
The only thing on Geocities and Angelfire/Tripod that Facebook has replaced are those insufferable "The Baker Family Homepage" websites.
- ori_b 10y ago> That's because personal homepages have died off, to be replaced with better replacements Is it really a replacement if it's private and stuck in some walled garden? I don't care about the platform used, I care about the surfacing and availability of non-commercial content.
- DaiPlusPlus 10y agoWhy do you consider Wikipedia a private walled garden? Arguably it's freer and less commercial than older personal home pages because of the mandatory copyleft license.
- ori_b 10y agoWikipedia has heavily curated content that must be presented in a certain way, protected from editing by trolls, and is reverted regularly. Try making a significant change or writing a new article without being mired in beaurocracy. It's not an example of diverse user-generated content any more. For good reason -- it can't be, if it wants to be considered a useful source on anything.