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> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct. I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor webs

> we don't even link to other websites anymore. blog rolls and guestbooks have gone extinct. I've felt this too. Example: I made a pointless little humor website that got mentioned on HN once. I got a bunch of nice replies, and a few thousand visits that day. Since that day, none. Zero other than robots, literally. I'm not complaining that it didn't go viral, I'm saying, in the old days, a brief spurt of popularity translated into a trickle of ongoing traffic, because people shared links to sites in a way they don't really do now. Links pages don't exist anymore (unless they're SEO spam). Slashdot and boingboing are just news now. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet used to be a valuable thing, and now it isn't.

jefftk 7y ago
Alternate explanation: the competition is better now. In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable thing (and more or less the premise of HN, Reddit, etc) but the bar is higher. (This is a good thing!)
- ineptech 7y ago
  You've misunderstood. I'm not saying "my site is so awesome that you should be surprised no one goes to it!". The thing I'm saying is surprising is the disparity between the reaction on day 1 and on day N. I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.
reroute1 7y ago
Maybe this was a more novel thing to discover 15-20 years ago? Perhaps it is people and their opinions that have changed?

jefftk 7y ago

Alternate explanation: the competition is better now. In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M. A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable thing (and more or less the premise of HN, Reddit, etc) but the bar is higher. (This is a good thing!)

ineptech 7y ago
You've misunderstood. I'm not saying "my site is so awesome that you should be surprised no one goes to it!". The thing I'm saying is surprising is the disparity between the reaction on day 1 and on day N. I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.

reroute1 7y ago

Maybe this was a more novel thing to discover 15-20 years ago? Perhaps it is people and their opinions that have changed?