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I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes was

I do remember those websites. For me, the difference is that now the Web is much more useful, but back then it was a lot more fun. True, you could sometimes waste hours following random links hoping to find something good, but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal. Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. That makes the Web on the whole much more useful, but the thrill of the hunt is gone -- that's what Jakob Nielsen was referring to all those years ago when he talked about "information scent". https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/ https://www.nngroup.com/articles/information-scent/

KGIII 9y ago
Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.
- ambrosite 9y ago
  >> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Is that any different from spending an hour finding links on Wikipedia or HN or Reddit or Facebook or whatever you're into?
    - jackyinger 9y ago
      Invested effort yields quality. It was/is different: folks who are excited enough about something to build a website to share it have more interesting and deep content than you typically find on social media. These days The same goes for people with personal blogs (or website) as opposed to medium and other one design blogging platforms.
    - Boothroid 9y ago
      People don't seem to build personal websites in the same way anymore - back then they weren't doing it to generate clicks, page views, passive income, build their profile etc, and everything wasn't all slickly styled and presented on a modern blogging platform. As a result websites were more amateurish, idiosyncratic, original, and sometimes charming, and I think the essence of the creator's motivation or interests often came across more strongly. The web doesn't have the same magic it used to for me. My god though some things were crap about it back in the day. If only we could have have kept the old web preserved alongside the new.
      - krapp 9y ago
        The thing is, people do build personal websites, and that old web still exists. Do you really believe that, with (according to Quora) ~140,000 new sites being created per day, no one is putting amateur, personal stuff on the web anymore? It's just that the web has gotten bigger and more mainstream, and most of us now limit our browsing to a few silos and then act as if everything that no longer bubbles up the filter must have ceased to exist.
        Boothroid 9y ago
        But so many personal websites are just self promotion of one kind or another, and that's fine, we all have to make a living, but I'd far rather read something where someone just wants to share what they know/love. And everything looks like the same set of off the shelf web design templates. I liked the weirdness of the old web. Kind of like games on the Amiga, every site was different, and that was part of the charm. But perhaps you are right. Any tips on how to find the new gems?
  - sebtoast 9y ago
    Some websites used to have a "webring" where they would link to each other and you could just click on "next" and it would take you to another site on the same topic. I used to like those.
- pier25 9y ago
  I'd go further and say: browsing vs scrolling. I remember 10+ years ago we designed websites so that important content was "above the fold". Today people are addicted to scrolling their Facebook feed.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    Sites that cared about "above the fold" were part of the problem, not part of the solution. The primary reason one would be actively interested in putting content "above the fold" was if one wanted to "capture audience", which is generally not the first thing on the mind of a person posting deep information as a labour of love.
    - HelloNurse 9y ago
      The Facebook feed is necessarily long (in fact infinite) and low-density, so scrolling it is a necessity. But individual entries are definitely advanced examples of "above the fold" design that is good for advertisements, not for pages.
- always_good 9y ago
  > We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. Dunno, how much of this is also just getting older and set in our life routine? When was the last time I explored my own city on a bike like I would as a kid? Our interests and patience for browsing change. How old are you now vs in this "golden era of the web"? Most of those stories just sound like nostalgia to me. Like suggesting that games these days aren't as good as they used to be because look how less time you spend gaming these days.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    When I first used networked computers, you paid someone to do searches for you and got a reply in 3 to 7 days. It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did. It was pretty terrible. Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great. Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject. It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer. If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage. One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork. Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.
  - spc476 9y ago
    As for games, in the 80s, no one knew what worked or didn't work as far as computer games went, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. And you ended up with some memorable games [1][2]. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous games. It's the same with the web. When it went big in 1994, no one knew what they were doing, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous pages, only this time with so many ads that it takes 500 requests to download your typical page these days. What I think people are missing is this original, outrageous and anything goes type of experience. But I suspect the Cambrian explosion of web expression is dead for the time being. [1] Qix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix). An abstract game that was mainstream and quite popular at the time. Haven't seen much like it sense. [2] "The Earth Dies Screaming", a game I've never seen but the name alone is so evocative that I still remember it to this day. I think it was in the "alien invasion" genre popular back then.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  i don't think browsing's that rare, actually, it's just different, having been centralized by facebook, tumblr, wikipedia, reddit, and the like. it's less like going out and exploring the web and more like just living there.
  - HelloNurse 9y ago
    Living there and watching TV instead of going out.
- freeflight 9y ago
  > I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. I sometimes still do that with Wikipedia articles and their sources, it's a fun way to kill a couple of hours and can lead down some really interesting rabbit-holes.
inetknght 9y ago
Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.
- jgtrosh 9y ago
  Please do ! I'll gladly remove this comment if you give an outline to your argument.
  - inetknght 9y ago
    Okay, I'll clarify. Is it more useful? Yeah, depending on what you want to do. But it's also a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's especially more dangerous if you're not careful. + Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed. + Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too. + 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display. + Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes. + Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged. + Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason. + Reddit/HN are pretty neat. Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook). Let's look at some of the downsides. - Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing. - Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit. - Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay. - Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well. - Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email. - Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens. - The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier). - Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen. - Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things? I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.
NicoJuicy 9y ago
Stumbleupon ? :P
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- kkmx 9y ago
  Do a lot of people actually use it? It seems like you could just as easily replace that site by simple tweets when you actually stumble upon something worthy. Which is what most people do IMO.
  - NicoJuicy 9y ago
    I use it less then before, mostly because there are a lot of old articles
  - retsibsi 9y ago
    Based on some very perfunctory research: they certainly used to have a lot of users, but I get the feeling they have declined over the past ~5 years. Anecdotally: I used to use StumbleUpon, and found it fun for a while. I'm not sure what caused me to drift away from it, but the reason I have no interest now is primarily that I am drowning in interesting content. (I have enough articles saved to Pocket to keep me going for years.) Getting recommendations tailored to your interests is nice, but unless the personalisation algorithm is really good, I think you can do better by cultivating your own set of sources and intermediaries.
Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
It would be kind of cool to make a modern network of sites robots.txt'ed out of search engines.
- tfha 9y ago
  It'd also be cool to make a search engine that catalogged all of the websites that other search engines politely did not. Is there any proper enforcement of robots.txt or is it just polite? Because I don't see how one search engine could maintain an advantage if others start catalogging every site.
  - Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
    Well, most sites want to be discoverable, so the incentives are aligned for the time being.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    It's polite, but the teeth behind it is that it's much easier to secure a CFAA conviction for scraping if you can show evidence that you specifically forbade a scraper from accessing your site (via robots.txt, authentication, or IP blocks) and they circumvented that restriction than if you gave them no notice that you dislike what they're doing. Legit search engines and aggregators have a strong incentive not to kill the golden goose by getting sued, particularly when the vast majority of sites actually want to be indexed.
dbrgn 9y ago
I found http://lygte-info.dk/ http://lygte-info.dk/ (website about batteries, chargers, and more stuff like that) through a search engine when looking for specific information about a LiIon cell. But then I started clicking through that maze of links and found so much useful information that I would never have thought of searching for. I spent hours "trapped" on that page. The navigation is crappy (randomly interlinked handwritten HTML-pages) but the content makes up for it. The article by tttthis very much resonated with me. Many modern sites look great but don't have all that much actual content.
- userbinator 9y ago
  If you're interesting in electronics and software in general, and can read German (or can stand the surprisingly good Google Translate), another site I recommend: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/ https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    For Dutch, try tweakers.net.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Jesus, that website must have taken years to make. The reviews are so in-depth, fantastic. I've been looking for someone that reviews USB chargers, as they go into mains voltage and are dangerous if not shielded properly. Amazing resource, thanks for linking it!
userbinator 9y ago
Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all. To add insult to injury, if you do try very hard to seek the latter by carefully repeating similar search queries with slight word tweaks, quotes, and trying to dig through all the pages of results to see if you've found what you're looking for, Google will quickly decide that you're a bot and either give you a CAPTCHA or just ban you for a little while entirely.
- at-fates-hands 9y ago
  >> Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all. This. A thousand times, this. I really feel is the unfortunate consequences of our short attention span and everyone marketing towards an insanely short attention span is you get the firehose of information, but zero depth to any of it. If I want to dig; really dig into a subject, 99% of what Google pukes at me is not helpful at all. A few times lately, I've ran into something I've found through Google, but trying to dig any deeper is futile. I've had to go down to the local library and start digging through news clippings, books and magazines. Actual, real old fashioned leg work. I've come to feel like the internet has no depth anymore, everything is just enough to satisfy a .001 second attention span. Sad when you really stop and think about it.
  - hexane360 9y ago
    As someone who grew up with Google and is now trying to get into niche interests, I have basically no idea how to do the real, old fashioned leg work. I still don't know exactly how much of this is Google's fault, because it remains great for providing information on a lot of more broadly accessible subjects.
plcancel 9y ago
Rather, nowadays, the search engine has a basic understanding of you and obliges you with what you think you want.
dEnigma 9y ago
I recently tried to search for certain Nintendo 64 ROMs because I wanted to try out an emulator. The first couple of results on Google all lead to horrible, ad-infested websites that claimed to offer a download but either kept on redirecting me to more ad-filled sites, or tried to get me to download some sort of "download helper", "media codec" or "PC cleaning software". Then there were the sites with dozens of fake "Download" buttons surrounding the real one. I'm still not sure whether any of them actually offer any ROM downloads (I found trustworthy sites on the second page of the results). It's no wonder that many users struggle to keep their PCs free of adware, toolbars and similar junk, when it is shoveled into your face every step of the way.
- jstarfish 9y ago
  This was the case back in 1997 as well. The only thing that's changed about shady emulation sites in the last 20 years is that they no longer give you ill-conceived legal advice about ROM ownership being legal if you delete the ROM within 24 hours and/or are not affiliated with law enforcement.
- randyrand 9y ago
  bittorrent would probably have been easiest since it's already ranked by popularity.
- ashark 9y ago
  archive.org is the unofficial official source for ROMs on the Internet now, FYI.
  - dEnigma 9y ago
    Ah yes, I didn't even think of that. But now that I've checked it out, it seems like they only have ROMs up too the SNES, and none for the Nintendo 64 ("only" videos, soundtracks and manuals)
    - ashark 9y ago
      You wanna search by obscure-to-outsiders collection names. “No intro”, “tosec”. That kind of thing. Pretty sure they have n64, in with the rest of a large multi-system collection.
maxhallinan 9y ago
>Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. But now I'm less likely to find stuff that I didn't know existed and don't quite have a name for. This kind of stuff was/is usually discovered by following hyperlinks. But I'm not sure why I have this experience less often.
_pmf_ 9y ago
> but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal. To be fair, this feeling is very similar to what you feel when finding something really great in your Twitter queue.
keypress 9y ago
I remember the days pre-google when Yahoo was king. And most sites were filed under a topic/category. That was the default way to find a group of somethings. It's also a little suggestive and explorative, whereas keyword based search engines relied more on you being more specific. Crowd stoked search results and AI have bridged the divide these days. What the author failed to mention was web rings. Basically authors with like minded material would link to each other. So once you found something you could hop to something else and bypass the search engine. These days you are almost crippled without the search hand.

KGIII 9y ago

Browsing vs. searching. We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Now, I search a term and click on the first few results, at most. Sure, there are exceptions but they are rare. As you say, it's much more useful.

ambrosite 9y ago
>> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. Yep, that's exactly what I used to do. That's really what "surfing the web" meant back in those days -- that you would spend hours just clicking links, seeing where they would take you. And of course, they would quite often take you to completely unexpected but cool things that you never would have found or even thought to look for otherwise.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Is that any different from spending an hour finding links on Wikipedia or HN or Reddit or Facebook or whatever you're into?
  - jackyinger 9y ago
    Invested effort yields quality. It was/is different: folks who are excited enough about something to build a website to share it have more interesting and deep content than you typically find on social media. These days The same goes for people with personal blogs (or website) as opposed to medium and other one design blogging platforms.
  - Boothroid 9y ago
    People don't seem to build personal websites in the same way anymore - back then they weren't doing it to generate clicks, page views, passive income, build their profile etc, and everything wasn't all slickly styled and presented on a modern blogging platform. As a result websites were more amateurish, idiosyncratic, original, and sometimes charming, and I think the essence of the creator's motivation or interests often came across more strongly. The web doesn't have the same magic it used to for me. My god though some things were crap about it back in the day. If only we could have have kept the old web preserved alongside the new.
    - krapp 9y ago
      The thing is, people do build personal websites, and that old web still exists. Do you really believe that, with (according to Quora) ~140,000 new sites being created per day, no one is putting amateur, personal stuff on the web anymore? It's just that the web has gotten bigger and more mainstream, and most of us now limit our browsing to a few silos and then act as if everything that no longer bubbles up the filter must have ceased to exist.
      - Boothroid 9y ago
        But so many personal websites are just self promotion of one kind or another, and that's fine, we all have to make a living, but I'd far rather read something where someone just wants to share what they know/love. And everything looks like the same set of off the shelf web design templates. I liked the weirdness of the old web. Kind of like games on the Amiga, every site was different, and that was part of the charm. But perhaps you are right. Any tips on how to find the new gems?
- sebtoast 9y ago
  Some websites used to have a "webring" where they would link to each other and you could just click on "next" and it would take you to another site on the same topic. I used to like those.
pier25 9y ago
I'd go further and say: browsing vs scrolling. I remember 10+ years ago we designed websites so that important content was "above the fold". Today people are addicted to scrolling their Facebook feed.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  Sites that cared about "above the fold" were part of the problem, not part of the solution. The primary reason one would be actively interested in putting content "above the fold" was if one wanted to "capture audience", which is generally not the first thing on the mind of a person posting deep information as a labour of love.
  - HelloNurse 9y ago
    The Facebook feed is necessarily long (in fact infinite) and low-density, so scrolling it is a necessity. But individual entries are definitely advanced examples of "above the fold" design that is good for advertisements, not for pages.
always_good 9y ago
> We don't seem to do much browsing anymore. We search and selectively pick what we consume. It's faster but, as you say, I don't think it is as fun. Dunno, how much of this is also just getting older and set in our life routine? When was the last time I explored my own city on a bike like I would as a kid? Our interests and patience for browsing change. How old are you now vs in this "golden era of the web"? Most of those stories just sound like nostalgia to me. Like suggesting that games these days aren't as good as they used to be because look how less time you spend gaming these days.
- KGIII 9y ago
  When I first used networked computers, you paid someone to do searches for you and got a reply in 3 to 7 days. It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did. It was pretty terrible. Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great. Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject. It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer. If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage. One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork. Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.
- spc476 9y ago
  As for games, in the 80s, no one knew what worked or didn't work as far as computer games went, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. And you ended up with some memorable games [1][2]. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous games. It's the same with the web. When it went big in 1994, no one knew what they were doing, so everybody was pretty much throwing everything against the wall and seeing what stuck. But over time, people learn, genres develop, budgets rise and you get less original and more homogeneous pages, only this time with so many ads that it takes 500 requests to download your typical page these days. What I think people are missing is this original, outrageous and anything goes type of experience. But I suspect the Cambrian explosion of web expression is dead for the time being. [1] Qix (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qix). An abstract game that was mainstream and quite popular at the time. Haven't seen much like it sense. [2] "The Earth Dies Screaming", a game I've never seen but the name alone is so evocative that I still remember it to this day. I think it was in the "alien invasion" genre popular back then.
pasquinelli 9y ago
i don't think browsing's that rare, actually, it's just different, having been centralized by facebook, tumblr, wikipedia, reddit, and the like. it's less like going out and exploring the web and more like just living there.
- HelloNurse 9y ago
  Living there and watching TV instead of going out.
freeflight 9y ago
> I used to enjoy picking a subject and then clicking all the DMOZ or Yahoo! links. I'd dig through webrings and and link aggregators with wild abandon. I sometimes still do that with Wikipedia articles and their sources, it's a fun way to kill a couple of hours and can lead down some really interesting rabbit-holes.

inetknght 9y ago

Useful? I would argue that it's actually a lot less useful today.

jgtrosh 9y ago
Please do ! I'll gladly remove this comment if you give an outline to your argument.
- inetknght 9y ago
  Okay, I'll clarify. Is it more useful? Yeah, depending on what you want to do. But it's also a hell of a lot more dangerous. It's especially more dangerous if you're not careful. + Google Search is about as good now as it was back in 2007. I like that its interface has (largely) changed. + Google Maps with smooth scroll is nice, and its integration to 3d street view is nice too. + 1990s MapQuest without AJAX was nice though, in its own way. Even with Google's smooth scrolling, the only real thing Google Maps has going for it is IMO a cleaner display. + Wikipedia's generally better today than 10 years ago, yes. + Airline websites are a nightmare to use. Try getting an optimal route that doesn't use a single airline; and try getting that optimal route without ended up getting spammed or surcharged. + Youtube having virtually every song is nice for some people. It's not so nice for me. The songs on there are usually pretty boring or low quality audio or video or both. I pay for a music service (di.fm) for a reason. + Reddit/HN are pretty neat. Okay, that's about where we agree (along with your comment on Facebook). Let's look at some of the downsides. - Personally, I find Reddit's method of linking to articles vs loading comments to be counter intuitive and confusing. - Ebay is still about as trustworthy as you can spit. - Amazon.com is among the crappiest web interfaces I've seen, and that's ignoring the company's history of abusing compensation and livelihoods of their employees and contractors. It's slow, extremely noisy (which contributes it to being slow), difficult to navigate, and I definitely never intend to buy from the marketplace specifically because I might as well have bought stuff from ebay. - Just about every website has tracking up the wazoo. That contributes to a slower web experience both in bandwidth cost as well as hardware performance. Not everyone has a wonderfully new computer to handle all that. And if you're in America, chances are pretty good that your bandwidth is sub-par as well. - Email. Why do we still have to deal with phishing and tracking? This is something that has been around pretty much since HTML was introduced to email. - Instant Messaging. Slack and Discord are the newcomers but they're also somehow the best. They're popular because they get it "right"; it's super easy to text, talk, video, share files, share screens, etc. But they also get it wrong. That Electron UI has got to be the one of the biggest memory behemoths I've ever seen. Both are yet more walled gardens. - The newer versions of Skype are absolutely dysfunctional compared to the older versions, MSN was better, AIM is (was) better, even IRC does file transfer better more reliably (although optional and clunkier). - Mobile Apps. JFC banks going to mobile apps when the marketplaces are full of fake apps. This is absolutely not user friendly. Build on top of that the fact that phone numbers are super easy to fake or steal and you've got a clusterf!@# personal security nightmare just waiting to happen. - Phones, operating systems, applications which track absolutely everything you do. It eats up my bandwidth, my system resources, and provides no visible benefit to me whatsoever. What happens when someone figures out how to track what I say to whom and when, and use that to "guide" me to buy things? I could go on and on about more stuff but I don't care to at the moment.

NicoJuicy 9y ago

Stumbleupon ? :P

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
kkmx 9y ago
Do a lot of people actually use it? It seems like you could just as easily replace that site by simple tweets when you actually stumble upon something worthy. Which is what most people do IMO.
- NicoJuicy 9y ago
  I use it less then before, mostly because there are a lot of old articles
- retsibsi 9y ago
  Based on some very perfunctory research: they certainly used to have a lot of users, but I get the feeling they have declined over the past ~5 years. Anecdotally: I used to use StumbleUpon, and found it fun for a while. I'm not sure what caused me to drift away from it, but the reason I have no interest now is primarily that I am drowning in interesting content. (I have enough articles saved to Pocket to keep me going for years.) Getting recommendations tailored to your interests is nice, but unless the personalisation algorithm is really good, I think you can do better by cultivating your own set of sources and intermediaries.

Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago

It would be kind of cool to make a modern network of sites robots.txt'ed out of search engines.

tfha 9y ago
It'd also be cool to make a search engine that catalogged all of the websites that other search engines politely did not. Is there any proper enforcement of robots.txt or is it just polite? Because I don't see how one search engine could maintain an advantage if others start catalogging every site.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y ago
  Well, most sites want to be discoverable, so the incentives are aligned for the time being.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  It's polite, but the teeth behind it is that it's much easier to secure a CFAA conviction for scraping if you can show evidence that you specifically forbade a scraper from accessing your site (via robots.txt, authentication, or IP blocks) and they circumvented that restriction than if you gave them no notice that you dislike what they're doing. Legit search engines and aggregators have a strong incentive not to kill the golden goose by getting sued, particularly when the vast majority of sites actually want to be indexed.

dbrgn 9y ago

I found http://lygte-info.dk/ http://lygte-info.dk/ (website about batteries, chargers, and more stuff like that) through a search engine when looking for specific information about a LiIon cell. But then I started clicking through that maze of links and found so much useful information that I would never have thought of searching for. I spent hours "trapped" on that page. The navigation is crappy (randomly interlinked handwritten HTML-pages) but the content makes up for it. The article by tttthis very much resonated with me. Many modern sites look great but don't have all that much actual content.

userbinator 9y ago
If you're interesting in electronics and software in general, and can read German (or can stand the surprisingly good Google Translate), another site I recommend: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/ https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  For Dutch, try tweakers.net.
StavrosK 9y ago
Jesus, that website must have taken years to make. The reviews are so in-depth, fantastic. I've been looking for someone that reviews USB chargers, as they go into mains voltage and are dangerous if not shielded properly. Amazing resource, thanks for linking it!

userbinator 9y ago

Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. Almost anything popular and rather insipid, yes. Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all. To add insult to injury, if you do try very hard to seek the latter by carefully repeating similar search queries with slight word tweaks, quotes, and trying to dig through all the pages of results to see if you've found what you're looking for, Google will quickly decide that you're a bot and either give you a CAPTCHA or just ban you for a little while entirely.

at-fates-hands 9y ago
>> Try to find more detailed information on very specific topics, however, and you'll discover that search engines like Google have been optimising more and more for the former content, making it harder to find the latter. I don't think that's a good thing at all. This. A thousand times, this. I really feel is the unfortunate consequences of our short attention span and everyone marketing towards an insanely short attention span is you get the firehose of information, but zero depth to any of it. If I want to dig; really dig into a subject, 99% of what Google pukes at me is not helpful at all. A few times lately, I've ran into something I've found through Google, but trying to dig any deeper is futile. I've had to go down to the local library and start digging through news clippings, books and magazines. Actual, real old fashioned leg work. I've come to feel like the internet has no depth anymore, everything is just enough to satisfy a .001 second attention span. Sad when you really stop and think about it.
- hexane360 9y ago
  As someone who grew up with Google and is now trying to get into niche interests, I have basically no idea how to do the real, old fashioned leg work. I still don't know exactly how much of this is Google's fault, because it remains great for providing information on a lot of more broadly accessible subjects.

plcancel 9y ago

Rather, nowadays, the search engine has a basic understanding of you and obliges you with what you think you want.

dEnigma 9y ago

I recently tried to search for certain Nintendo 64 ROMs because I wanted to try out an emulator. The first couple of results on Google all lead to horrible, ad-infested websites that claimed to offer a download but either kept on redirecting me to more ad-filled sites, or tried to get me to download some sort of "download helper", "media codec" or "PC cleaning software". Then there were the sites with dozens of fake "Download" buttons surrounding the real one. I'm still not sure whether any of them actually offer any ROM downloads (I found trustworthy sites on the second page of the results). It's no wonder that many users struggle to keep their PCs free of adware, toolbars and similar junk, when it is shoveled into your face every step of the way.

jstarfish 9y ago
This was the case back in 1997 as well. The only thing that's changed about shady emulation sites in the last 20 years is that they no longer give you ill-conceived legal advice about ROM ownership being legal if you delete the ROM within 24 hours and/or are not affiliated with law enforcement.
randyrand 9y ago
bittorrent would probably have been easiest since it's already ranked by popularity.
ashark 9y ago
archive.org is the unofficial official source for ROMs on the Internet now, FYI.
- dEnigma 9y ago
  Ah yes, I didn't even think of that. But now that I've checked it out, it seems like they only have ROMs up too the SNES, and none for the Nintendo 64 ("only" videos, soundtracks and manuals)
  - ashark 9y ago
    You wanna search by obscure-to-outsiders collection names. “No intro”, “tosec”. That kind of thing. Pretty sure they have n64, in with the rest of a large multi-system collection.

maxhallinan 9y ago

>Nowadays, anyone with a basic understanding of search engines can find almost anything they want within seconds. But now I'm less likely to find stuff that I didn't know existed and don't quite have a name for. This kind of stuff was/is usually discovered by following hyperlinks. But I'm not sure why I have this experience less often.

_pmf_ 9y ago

> but the thrill of discovery when you stumbled across a gold mine of information was a huge part of the appeal. To be fair, this feeling is very similar to what you feel when finding something really great in your Twitter queue.

keypress 9y ago

I remember the days pre-google when Yahoo was king. And most sites were filed under a topic/category. That was the default way to find a group of somethings. It's also a little suggestive and explorative, whereas keyword based search engines relied more on you being more specific. Crowd stoked search results and AI have bridged the divide these days. What the author failed to mention was web rings. Basically authors with like minded material would link to each other. So once you found something you could hop to something else and bypass the search engine. These days you are almost crippled without the search hand.