13 ms·

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext cr

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: * https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/ https://marijnflorence.neocities.org/linkroll/ * https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/ https://neonaut.neocities.org/directory/ * https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/ (which led me to this gem: https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/) Competing with Google in search has become an insurmountable task. Personal directories attack from the opposite direction (human curation, no algorithm) in a way that actually puts Google far behind. It's kind of exciting and unexpected.

tomc1985 6y ago
If DMOZ could have held on for a few more years...
- kickscondor 6y ago
  I'm not certain DMOZ is the way to go. The big centralized directories are too hard to keep current. They get slammed with submission. And you end up with so many editors that no one has a sense of ownership. I mean - maybe it's possible. Perhaps a really focused team could figure it out. (The 'awesome' directories have kind of figured that out, by having specialized directory.) But these personal directories are really sweet because they don't have to cover a topic. They can just be a collection of good stuff, who knows what.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    A solution would need crowdsourced collective vetting of sites along with a reputation system to keep out spam and bad actors without devolving into Wikipedia style personal fiefdoms.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    Federation largely solves these problems. The biggest interop issue is sticking to a common/interoperable classification wrt. topic hierarchies, etc. and even then that's quite doable.
- duskwuff 6y ago
  DMOZ started stagnating around 2005. By the time it closed, it was already considered irrelevant, and much of the index had been unmaintained for years -- there was really nothing left to hold on to.
- tdeck 6y ago
  I remember checking out DMOZ 15 years ago and it was already irrelevant.
- Tiltowait-- 6y ago
  DMOZ were jerks. Insular little commies who didn't want anyone interfering with their control over what people got to see. They killed themselves.
nextaccountic 6y ago
What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. There are so many possible viable methods for ranking search results! Particularly now with higher level textual analysis using AI/ML/[buzzword], and perhaps more importantly, the resurgence of interest in curated content. People are getting better at discerning curated-for-revenue vs. curated-with-love.
  - the_other 6y ago
    > It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results were best when PageRank was the dominant metric. As they moved more and more in the direction of prioritising news, commerce and the aspects we call SEO, “number of links pointing TO the resource” became less and less important in the ranking. And as that happened, the quality of results dropped, and the content silo-ing rose up. PageRank was peer-review. SEO is “who shouts the loudest”.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      SEO with Google was about gaming PageRank. A lot of work happened in the 00s trying to prevent that, but it requires an army of moderators and others to identify good/bad links and link sources. Is HN a good source? Sure. Are HN comments a good source? Not once spammers realized they could drop links in comments to boost their site's results. How do you tell the difference? Plain PageRank is weak against this, and that's what motivated a lot of changes to the ranking system.
renewiltord 6y ago
The alternative to Google for discovery is Reddit. Reddit is the modern web directory: - Directories are Communities defined by their link rules - Human-curated - Easy to start a new one - SSO across all communities - Built-in forum technology - Unified comment technology for every website You can get communities like reddit.com/r/Sizz for instance or larger ones like /r/esp8266 or massive ones like /r/sanfrancisco or planet-sized ones like /r/pics. And reddit itself plays the role of a meta-directory, with little directory networks (SFW-Porn being "the pretty pictures of the world" directory network) sitting between Reddit itself and the subreddits. Reddit is an amazing amazing thing.
- nkozyra 6y ago
  I don't find reddit particularly navigable nor user friendly. It's a social media platform, not a discovery or search one. Even the communities I care about have limited utility.
  - mech422 6y ago
    I thought it was just me... Every time I end up on a reddit (from a search result), its a click fest trying to see anything except 'top comments' and ultimately ends up very unsatisfying.
    - Tiltowait-- 6y ago
      They did that on purpose. Too many icky normals with dangerous ideas, and too many articles got ripped to shreds as misleading in the top comments. So they had to discourage comments.
- kickscondor 6y ago
  Except: - Most subreddits are hostile to self-promotion of Web stuff. If you're unknown, you're going to have to be socially involved there enough that people know your name. (Though I agree that small subs like /r/esp8266 are begging for self-made content.) - Related: people don't know your name because it's in small gray text. You're just another comment. - You need upvotes. A personal directory requires only one upvote. - You need to be on-topic. Your work may not fit Reddit's categories. - Reddit mods are generally more like forum mods than librarians. - Agreevotes do not equal quality. I don't want to overstate this, but I like that I'm not seeing vote counts on personal directories. Reddit is cool - but it has its own rules and its own culture that goes with it. I personally wouldn't call it 'the modern web directory'. I do think it's less hostile to the Web than many other platforms - and certain subs like /r/InternetIsBeautiful and /r/SpartanWeb do good work.
SilasX 6y ago
Wow, those sites are blazingly fast and usable compared to most that I see these days. (With the possible exception of the third not making it visually obvious that the list items are links and having to figure it out from the context.)
ozfive 6y ago
Damn, this is all classy. I started writing html in 1996. My first job was at a boutique web shop building vertical portals in Coldfusion. Thanks for the great links. It's inspired me to put up a plain old html/JavaScript homepage again!
- kickscondor 6y ago
  Hey this is great. Post the link here if you like.
killjoywashere 6y ago
Well, sheeeeit. If we're going for fever dreams, don't forget the electric sheep! https://electricsheep.org/ https://electricsheep.org/
Tiltowait-- 6y ago
Wow...it's like that "yahoo" email list of links that I used to subscribe to. Wonder what happened to them? Last I heard they stopped sending out the email and started putting it a web page for convenience.
Blaiz0r 6y ago
Yeah strangely the web ring has become back into value.
yosser 6y ago
It's still all indexed by google. For example; all you need to do is search for a unique seeming piece of text from your dreamwiki gem, and the site will appear on the first page of googles' results: https://www.google.com/search?q=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT&oq=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT https://www.google.com/search?q=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT&o...
stockstreaks 6y ago
Developers should come together and build an open-source curated platform where you can find 'only good - interesting, well-written'articles on all topics can be found. Actually on the Hacker News guidelines it kind of describes this. And although it seems like the articles posted here are higher quality, they eventually get lost after 2-3 days.
gspr 6y ago
2020 has given us a lot of crazy stuff, so I guess I won't be too surprised if it also gives us the return of webrings :-) I'm calling it now, the hottest startups will be "disrupting search using artisinally crafted rings of websites"!
- tmh88j 6y ago
  >I guess I won't be too surprised if it also gives us the return of webrings You're in luck! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549471
- skoodge 6y ago
  Honestly, I don't think that's as crazy as it sounds. AI/ML-driven feeds often promise more than they actually deliver and by now more and more people are starting to realize that AI/ML is not the holy grail it was made out to be, at least in situation where you cannot throw massive resources at the problem. Maybe not exactly in the form of webrings, but who knows, why wouldn't it be time for the pendulum to swing from the whole AI hype back in the other direction? There is a lot to be said for conscious curation on your terms and your devices vs algorithmic decisions made in the cloud for you.

tomc1985 6y ago

If DMOZ could have held on for a few more years...

kickscondor 6y ago
I'm not certain DMOZ is the way to go. The big centralized directories are too hard to keep current. They get slammed with submission. And you end up with so many editors that no one has a sense of ownership. I mean - maybe it's possible. Perhaps a really focused team could figure it out. (The 'awesome' directories have kind of figured that out, by having specialized directory.) But these personal directories are really sweet because they don't have to cover a topic. They can just be a collection of good stuff, who knows what.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  A solution would need crowdsourced collective vetting of sites along with a reputation system to keep out spam and bad actors without devolving into Wikipedia style personal fiefdoms.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  Federation largely solves these problems. The biggest interop issue is sticking to a common/interoperable classification wrt. topic hierarchies, etc. and even then that's quite doable.
duskwuff 6y ago
DMOZ started stagnating around 2005. By the time it closed, it was already considered irrelevant, and much of the index had been unmaintained for years -- there was really nothing left to hold on to.
tdeck 6y ago
I remember checking out DMOZ 15 years ago and it was already irrelevant.
Tiltowait-- 6y ago
DMOZ were jerks. Insular little commies who didn't want anyone interfering with their control over what people got to see. They killed themselves.

nextaccountic 6y ago

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

slfnflctd 6y ago
It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. There are so many possible viable methods for ranking search results! Particularly now with higher level textual analysis using AI/ML/[buzzword], and perhaps more importantly, the resurgence of interest in curated content. People are getting better at discerning curated-for-revenue vs. curated-with-love.
- the_other 6y ago
  > It's a fuzzy concept, but I think you're pointing toward something there's a need for. PageRank is/was useful in a lot of ways, it's just not enough by itself. Its weaknesses have been ever more apparent, and it has become less effective over time. Would you speak to why you think this way about PageRank? What are its shortcomings? To me, who only paid surface-level attention to this, it seemed like Google results were best when PageRank was the dominant metric. As they moved more and more in the direction of prioritising news, commerce and the aspects we call SEO, “number of links pointing TO the resource” became less and less important in the ranking. And as that happened, the quality of results dropped, and the content silo-ing rose up. PageRank was peer-review. SEO is “who shouts the loudest”.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    SEO with Google was about gaming PageRank. A lot of work happened in the 00s trying to prevent that, but it requires an army of moderators and others to identify good/bad links and link sources. Is HN a good source? Sure. Are HN comments a good source? Not once spammers realized they could drop links in comments to boost their site's results. How do you tell the difference? Plain PageRank is weak against this, and that's what motivated a lot of changes to the ranking system.

renewiltord 6y ago

The alternative to Google for discovery is Reddit. Reddit is the modern web directory: - Directories are Communities defined by their link rules - Human-curated - Easy to start a new one - SSO across all communities - Built-in forum technology - Unified comment technology for every website You can get communities like reddit.com/r/Sizz for instance or larger ones like /r/esp8266 or massive ones like /r/sanfrancisco or planet-sized ones like /r/pics. And reddit itself plays the role of a meta-directory, with little directory networks (SFW-Porn being "the pretty pictures of the world" directory network) sitting between Reddit itself and the subreddits. Reddit is an amazing amazing thing.

nkozyra 6y ago
I don't find reddit particularly navigable nor user friendly. It's a social media platform, not a discovery or search one. Even the communities I care about have limited utility.
- mech422 6y ago
  I thought it was just me... Every time I end up on a reddit (from a search result), its a click fest trying to see anything except 'top comments' and ultimately ends up very unsatisfying.
  - Tiltowait-- 6y ago
    They did that on purpose. Too many icky normals with dangerous ideas, and too many articles got ripped to shreds as misleading in the top comments. So they had to discourage comments.
kickscondor 6y ago
Except: - Most subreddits are hostile to self-promotion of Web stuff. If you're unknown, you're going to have to be socially involved there enough that people know your name. (Though I agree that small subs like /r/esp8266 are begging for self-made content.) - Related: people don't know your name because it's in small gray text. You're just another comment. - You need upvotes. A personal directory requires only one upvote. - You need to be on-topic. Your work may not fit Reddit's categories. - Reddit mods are generally more like forum mods than librarians. - Agreevotes do not equal quality. I don't want to overstate this, but I like that I'm not seeing vote counts on personal directories. Reddit is cool - but it has its own rules and its own culture that goes with it. I personally wouldn't call it 'the modern web directory'. I do think it's less hostile to the Web than many other platforms - and certain subs like /r/InternetIsBeautiful and /r/SpartanWeb do good work.

SilasX 6y ago

Wow, those sites are blazingly fast and usable compared to most that I see these days. (With the possible exception of the third not making it visually obvious that the list items are links and having to figure it out from the context.)

ozfive 6y ago

Damn, this is all classy. I started writing html in 1996. My first job was at a boutique web shop building vertical portals in Coldfusion. Thanks for the great links. It's inspired me to put up a plain old html/JavaScript homepage again!

kickscondor 6y ago
Hey this is great. Post the link here if you like.

killjoywashere 6y ago

Well, sheeeeit. If we're going for fever dreams, don't forget the electric sheep! https://electricsheep.org/ https://electricsheep.org/

Tiltowait-- 6y ago

Wow...it's like that "yahoo" email list of links that I used to subscribe to. Wonder what happened to them? Last I heard they stopped sending out the email and started putting it a web page for convenience.

Blaiz0r 6y ago

Yeah strangely the web ring has become back into value.

yosser 6y ago

It's still all indexed by google. For example; all you need to do is search for a unique seeming piece of text from your dreamwiki gem, and the site will appear on the first page of googles' results: https://www.google.com/search?q=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT&oq=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT https://www.google.com/search?q=WHO+ROAMS+THE+KIRUGU+NIGHT&o...

stockstreaks 6y ago

Developers should come together and build an open-source curated platform where you can find 'only good - interesting, well-written'articles on all topics can be found. Actually on the Hacker News guidelines it kind of describes this. And although it seems like the articles posted here are higher quality, they eventually get lost after 2-3 days.

gspr 6y ago

2020 has given us a lot of crazy stuff, so I guess I won't be too surprised if it also gives us the return of webrings :-) I'm calling it now, the hottest startups will be "disrupting search using artisinally crafted rings of websites"!

tmh88j 6y ago
>I guess I won't be too surprised if it also gives us the return of webrings You're in luck! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549471
skoodge 6y ago
Honestly, I don't think that's as crazy as it sounds. AI/ML-driven feeds often promise more than they actually deliver and by now more and more people are starting to realize that AI/ML is not the holy grail it was made out to be, at least in situation where you cannot throw massive resources at the problem. Maybe not exactly in the form of webrings, but who knows, why wouldn't it be time for the pendulum to swing from the whole AI hype back in the other direction? There is a lot to be said for conscious curation on your terms and your devices vs algorithmic decisions made in the cloud for you.