7 ms·

I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about

by tal8d 6y ago

I've been around long enough to remember a time when the web was full of content that didn't originate from profit motive. Just a bunch of people talking about their interests and sharing their creations. Even the stuff that was commercially motivated was largely innocuous, because they were focused more on brand awareness - which doesn't need a surveillance system. All that personal interest stuff is still out there, despite all the insistence that the only alternative to the ad-supported-spy-machine paradigm is a subscription model. I really wouldn't mind seeing all the click seeking platforms get wrecked, because they incentivize the most useless and annoying noise.

spicyramen 6y ago
This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.
- alexgmcm 6y ago
  Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it. But man, I really hate Medium.
  - geek_at 6y ago
    not true, I have started a blog and hosted it on blogspot at first but wasn't satisfied with the style in general and the lack of customization so I built my own in bootstrap + php and hosted it on a 5€/month Server. No tracking, no ads, no external libraries, no referral links, no monetization. After switching to my own I re-wrote one of the articles of my old blogspot posts (word for word) and because my custom solution was so much easier on the eye, the post picked up and I got TV and Radio interview requests, etc. Even reddit and hn hugs and thousands of concurrent users didn't bring it down. You don't need Medium, you need to write stuff that people are interested in reading. https://blog.haschek.at https://blog.haschek.at
    - alexgmcm 6y ago
      Wow, your blog is beautiful! I had used Hugo before, but I'm learning some Full Stack dev now (I work in Data Science, so it isn't my main work) and making a blog could be a good exercise.
    - tal8d 6y ago
      heh, I had a little project hosted on an nslu2 wedged between the water heater and the wall of my utility closet. Never had a problem, even after several major sites picked up on it the same day, because responding to get requests for static files isn't hard. Thankfully, most sites only become hard to self host after they start doing annoying things - like dynamically generating oversized embedded junk.
    - duckmysick 6y ago
      Can't a person write interesting stuff on Medium/Blogspot/Wordpress? Telling a person, who wants to blog about fruit preserves, to learn php and selfhost is a bit too much.
  - pmlnr 6y ago
    > Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. To be honest, this sounds like profit thinking as well. Why would one need "wide audience" when it's about their interest and hobbies? They need sincere search engines, that's all.
    - duckmysick 6y ago
      Some people are proud of their work and they want to show it to others. The more people see it and appreciate it, the more validated and important the creators feel. It's like sending invitations to your birthday party. It feels bad when just one person shows up. > They need sincere search engines, that's all. What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators?
      - pmlnr 6y ago
        > The more people see it and appreciate it, the more validated and important the creators feel. That is called vanity in one word. > What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators? If it really is a hobby, one enjoys it on it's own. The "showcase" part shouldn't be essential for one to take joy in the process. My recommendation is to find a space where one can share what they achieved, but it really doesn't (shouldn't) need to be a "wide audience", rather the opposite: a group of people who actually enjoy the same things. Enthusiasts, maybe even fans.
        rapnie 6y ago
        Sharing your hobby with as many others as possible, hoping maybe more people join the fun is not vanity. The birthday party analogy has validity too.
        duckmysick 6y ago
        I wouldn't call it vanity; it's too harsh and unfair. It paints people who are enthusiastic about their accomplishments in a negative light. People shouldn't be ashamed to be proud of their honest work. Showcasing isn't essential, but it can increase the enjoyment and it can benefit the others. That's why we have art galleries, trade fairs, talent shows, and Show HN threads. I specifically asked about how "They need sincere search engines, that's all." What exactly content creators should do about it? Make their own, sacrificing time from their main hobby? Maybe one already exists. But then they need to tell their potential fans about it. How would they contact them? They might not even be aware they exist. I guess they could wait until the new sincere search engine reaches critical mass. But what until then? As for the "wide audience", consider this. At one point in their lives, fans were part of the wide audience. They weren't born fans; they became them over time. So why shouldn't the content creators try to capture new fans from the larger audience? They don't have to - becoming too mainstream is a thing after all. But if they choose to do so, why not? Unless you oppose the creators growing their fans and popularity, in which case I don't know what to say.
  - tremon 6y ago
    the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. Isn't this is a problem that search engines were intended to solve? Before they went into the ad business, I mean?
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      People seem to stream more than they'll search. Google's daily search stats are getting harder to find, but with 3.8 billion Internet users and probably a few billion searches/day, it's likely single-digit searches per person per day, as a mean. Algorithmic/stream discovery, as on Facebook, or HN, is at least an order of magnitude higher. https://ardorseo.com/blog/how-many-google-searches-per-day/ https://ardorseo.com/blog/how-many-google-searches-per-day/
rebuilder 6y ago
The web was that way because there wasn't much profit to be made. With enough users, advertising becomes viable and becomes the driving factor in content production.
- tal8d 6y ago
  That is debatable, but what isn't is the fact that the third option exists - which never gets mentioned in the tired old "If you don't disable that pesky adblocker - you'll be forced to pay!" posts.
  - rebuilder 6y ago
    Yes, the hobbyist web still exists. But it's hampered by the much larger commercial web IMO. The influx of members to any non-commercial web community is disturbed by the commercial entities that draw so much of the attention that to most people, it seems like there isn't anything else on the web. The big fish use up so much oxygen that the little fish in the pond shrivel up. They live, but in a stunted form.
    - tal8d 6y ago
      Well you're going to have a hard to reasoning about it when you stick with the predator/prey, attention economy, zero-sum game analogies. A man running a site cataloging ancient internally generated IBM typeset documents... what higher unstunted form is he aspiring to - despite the machinations of unshriveled fish?
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        Attention is zero-sum. There are 24 hours in a day. People only spend so much time online. There is no bigger bag or truck.
        tal8d 6y ago
        And? I mean, obviously if you're going to correct me then you know "zero-sum game" refers to game theory. What game is Mr. Typeset playing here?
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Hobbyist stuff still exists. But even back then, you're still talking about a small fraction of internet content. We don't want just the fruits of everyone's hobbyist weekend warrior free-time. We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content. Also, most things aren't hobbyist cheap. Even in the era you're looking upon nostalgically, consider message boards. You'd either use a freemium solution like Proboards/Ezboard or you'd pay for hosting which could cost you $100+/mo if your forum was popular. I have a feeling every time people talk about the old hobbyist internet, they're talking about brochure Angelfire websites they themselves never spent all that much time on. Most people want better content than that just like most people want to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, not hobbyists on Youtube. Yet these threads always sound like "remember the good ol days before Breaking Bad when it was just hobbyist vlogs on Youtube? ahh, those were the days even though I didn't watch vlogs, they were boring." Maybe things were different before the AOL era back when there was almost nothing online that we want to do online today, but I'm in my 30s and first got internet in the 90s with AOL and "profit motives" were always the driving force for why there were compelling things to do online, like playing Age of Empires multiplayer through MSN's Internet Gaming Zone platform in 1997.
- tal8d 6y ago
  These rebuttals always sound like "But if I didn't pay AWS $1k/yr I wouldn't be able to host my family photo album powered by a 15 stack frame deep Nodejs nosql-backed container!" > We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content. We, huh? The most enriching content you've ever encountered on the web, was it churned out by the likes of about.com? The places you've had the most meaningful conversations, were they on platforms that regularly purge and actively censor content they deem not to be advertiser friendly? What you are describing sounds a lot more like network television to me. If you just want to zone out in front of the latest episode of "Dancing with the Stars", you already have that option. I get the kneejerk assumption that if something even approaches the potential of being nostalgic, it must be the product of delusion. But that really isn't applicable here, as we all know the ways that technology and infrastructure has been twisted to benefit commercial interests at the expense of everyone else.
spoonjim 6y ago
There are plenty of personal HTML pages out there, probably more than in 1997. But the fact is that commercial entities have created far more streamlined and addictive experiences.
pjc50 6y ago
The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive - you're looking at some - but it's wrapped up in and presented on for-profit sites. The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.
- i_am_proteus 6y ago
  Hosting, curating, and moderating Hacker News is certainly adjacent to YC's business and ostensibly has some profit motive. I appreciate that it's also a dark-pattern-free public service, but it's not a coincidence that one of the best tech news and discussion boards is hosted by one of the premier incubator/accelerator shops.
- hilbert42 6y ago
  "The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive" Very true but with a few notable exceptions - successes such geek_at says he's had, others have pointed out that self-funded, self-hosted sites don't get the large visitor coverage of the big conglomerate/commercial sites. This stands to reason and it's a damn shame. It seems to me a way around this would be to have a common universally-wide index type site where all the free, no-ads, no spying sites would be listed. Similarity, this index site would be spy-free, no ads and free for visitors to use but those listed would pay a small listing fee to cover site running costs. To keep listing costs to a minimum the site would be non profit, revenue-neutral and run as a cooperative society or similar non profit structure. To stop cohersive pressures from commercial interests, commercial, for profit sites/businesses would not be allowed to list. The site itself would be indexed and cross referenced along topic lines using the Dewey Decimal Classification system or similar schemes that libraries use to classify books. This would have the advantage of grouping likemined/likekind websites together in ways that were easy for visitors to browse from one to another. The listing for each site could also include a short description. This index site would cover just about every topic imaginable and thus attract many sites for listing which would provide economies of scale. For example: - Trades/Woodworking/Cabinetmaking - Science/Physics/QM/Quantum Field Theory/Yang-Mills - Philosophy/Utilitarianism/Jeremy Bentham Right, the site could easily contain interests as diverse as any book library, and it could even have its own internal search engine. It seems to me that we desperately need such an independant nonprofit site on the web. It's our only reasonable hope of escaping the centralization created by Facebook, Google, etc.
greggman3 6y ago
I certainly remember when most blogs were about sharing and not making money. Still, the explosion of tutorials, how tos, cooking lessons, math lessons, science shows, etc on youtube is all arguably because there is a money incentive. The bad parts of youtube (leading to conspiracy videos/fake news) are bad but the good parts (the large number of relatively well produced indie content) feels to me to be pretty awesome and that's arguably because of money. On the other hand, I only have my experience to go on. I have no idea what youtube is like for everyone, only myself. I hate all the tech blog posts that seem not about actually sharing useful info but instead about reputation building. I have no idea how much of youtube is that or if it will degenerate to that at some point. Maybe because the tech blog posts don't make money, only rep, they're being used to farm rep. note: i'm not dissing all tech blogs. There are tons of people who write great and informative posts. I'm just saying that I run into enough that seem like they aren't about sharing, they're about rep farming, and it seems like a phenomenon

by tal8d 6y ago

spicyramen 6y ago

This is very true, I know this has been discussed over and over, but I definitely prefer reading a personal HTML old style based blog than a Medium blog post which I need to access in incognito.

alexgmcm 6y ago
Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. I mean, even if you don't want to make money from your cool project or tutorial or whatever, you still want people to see it. But man, I really hate Medium.
- geek_at 6y ago
  not true, I have started a blog and hosted it on blogspot at first but wasn't satisfied with the style in general and the lack of customization so I built my own in bootstrap + php and hosted it on a 5€/month Server. No tracking, no ads, no external libraries, no referral links, no monetization. After switching to my own I re-wrote one of the articles of my old blogspot posts (word for word) and because my custom solution was so much easier on the eye, the post picked up and I got TV and Radio interview requests, etc. Even reddit and hn hugs and thousands of concurrent users didn't bring it down. You don't need Medium, you need to write stuff that people are interested in reading. https://blog.haschek.at https://blog.haschek.at
  - alexgmcm 6y ago
    Wow, your blog is beautiful! I had used Hugo before, but I'm learning some Full Stack dev now (I work in Data Science, so it isn't my main work) and making a blog could be a good exercise.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    heh, I had a little project hosted on an nslu2 wedged between the water heater and the wall of my utility closet. Never had a problem, even after several major sites picked up on it the same day, because responding to get requests for static files isn't hard. Thankfully, most sites only become hard to self host after they start doing annoying things - like dynamically generating oversized embedded junk.
  - duckmysick 6y ago
    Can't a person write interesting stuff on Medium/Blogspot/Wordpress? Telling a person, who wants to blog about fruit preserves, to learn php and selfhost is a bit too much.
- pmlnr 6y ago
  > Yeah, I think the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. To be honest, this sounds like profit thinking as well. Why would one need "wide audience" when it's about their interest and hobbies? They need sincere search engines, that's all.
  - duckmysick 6y ago
    Some people are proud of their work and they want to show it to others. The more people see it and appreciate it, the more validated and important the creators feel. It's like sending invitations to your birthday party. It feels bad when just one person shows up. > They need sincere search engines, that's all. What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators?
    - pmlnr 6y ago
      > The more people see it and appreciate it, the more validated and important the creators feel. That is called vanity in one word. > What exactly are you suggesting to the content creators? If it really is a hobby, one enjoys it on it's own. The "showcase" part shouldn't be essential for one to take joy in the process. My recommendation is to find a space where one can share what they achieved, but it really doesn't (shouldn't) need to be a "wide audience", rather the opposite: a group of people who actually enjoy the same things. Enthusiasts, maybe even fans.
      - rapnie 6y ago
        Sharing your hobby with as many others as possible, hoping maybe more people join the fun is not vanity. The birthday party analogy has validity too.
      - duckmysick 6y ago
        I wouldn't call it vanity; it's too harsh and unfair. It paints people who are enthusiastic about their accomplishments in a negative light. People shouldn't be ashamed to be proud of their honest work. Showcasing isn't essential, but it can increase the enjoyment and it can benefit the others. That's why we have art galleries, trade fairs, talent shows, and Show HN threads. I specifically asked about how "They need sincere search engines, that's all." What exactly content creators should do about it? Make their own, sacrificing time from their main hobby? Maybe one already exists. But then they need to tell their potential fans about it. How would they contact them? They might not even be aware they exist. I guess they could wait until the new sincere search engine reaches critical mass. But what until then? As for the "wide audience", consider this. At one point in their lives, fans were part of the wide audience. They weren't born fans; they became them over time. So why shouldn't the content creators try to capture new fans from the larger audience? They don't have to - becoming too mainstream is a thing after all. But if they choose to do so, why not? Unless you oppose the creators growing their fans and popularity, in which case I don't know what to say.
- tremon 6y ago
  the problem with self-hosting vs. Medium is that it is harder for the authors to reach a large audience. Isn't this is a problem that search engines were intended to solve? Before they went into the ad business, I mean?
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    People seem to stream more than they'll search. Google's daily search stats are getting harder to find, but with 3.8 billion Internet users and probably a few billion searches/day, it's likely single-digit searches per person per day, as a mean. Algorithmic/stream discovery, as on Facebook, or HN, is at least an order of magnitude higher. https://ardorseo.com/blog/how-many-google-searches-per-day/ https://ardorseo.com/blog/how-many-google-searches-per-day/

rebuilder 6y ago

The web was that way because there wasn't much profit to be made. With enough users, advertising becomes viable and becomes the driving factor in content production.

tal8d 6y ago
That is debatable, but what isn't is the fact that the third option exists - which never gets mentioned in the tired old "If you don't disable that pesky adblocker - you'll be forced to pay!" posts.
- rebuilder 6y ago
  Yes, the hobbyist web still exists. But it's hampered by the much larger commercial web IMO. The influx of members to any non-commercial web community is disturbed by the commercial entities that draw so much of the attention that to most people, it seems like there isn't anything else on the web. The big fish use up so much oxygen that the little fish in the pond shrivel up. They live, but in a stunted form.
  - tal8d 6y ago
    Well you're going to have a hard to reasoning about it when you stick with the predator/prey, attention economy, zero-sum game analogies. A man running a site cataloging ancient internally generated IBM typeset documents... what higher unstunted form is he aspiring to - despite the machinations of unshriveled fish?
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Attention is zero-sum. There are 24 hours in a day. People only spend so much time online. There is no bigger bag or truck.
      - tal8d 6y ago
        And? I mean, obviously if you're going to correct me then you know "zero-sum game" refers to game theory. What game is Mr. Typeset playing here?

hombre_fatal 6y ago

Hobbyist stuff still exists. But even back then, you're still talking about a small fraction of internet content. We don't want just the fruits of everyone's hobbyist weekend warrior free-time. We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content. Also, most things aren't hobbyist cheap. Even in the era you're looking upon nostalgically, consider message boards. You'd either use a freemium solution like Proboards/Ezboard or you'd pay for hosting which could cost you $100+/mo if your forum was popular. I have a feeling every time people talk about the old hobbyist internet, they're talking about brochure Angelfire websites they themselves never spent all that much time on. Most people want better content than that just like most people want to watch Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones, not hobbyists on Youtube. Yet these threads always sound like "remember the good ol days before Breaking Bad when it was just hobbyist vlogs on Youtube? ahh, those were the days even though I didn't watch vlogs, they were boring." Maybe things were different before the AOL era back when there was almost nothing online that we want to do online today, but I'm in my 30s and first got internet in the 90s with AOL and "profit motives" were always the driving force for why there were compelling things to do online, like playing Age of Empires multiplayer through MSN's Internet Gaming Zone platform in 1997.

tal8d 6y ago
These rebuttals always sound like "But if I didn't pay AWS $1k/yr I wouldn't be able to host my family photo album powered by a 15 stack frame deep Nodejs nosql-backed container!" > We want it to be profitable to make the stuff we want to consume so that we get better content than hobby/charity content. We, huh? The most enriching content you've ever encountered on the web, was it churned out by the likes of about.com? The places you've had the most meaningful conversations, were they on platforms that regularly purge and actively censor content they deem not to be advertiser friendly? What you are describing sounds a lot more like network television to me. If you just want to zone out in front of the latest episode of "Dancing with the Stars", you already have that option. I get the kneejerk assumption that if something even approaches the potential of being nostalgic, it must be the product of delusion. But that really isn't applicable here, as we all know the ways that technology and infrastructure has been twisted to benefit commercial interests at the expense of everyone else.

spoonjim 6y ago

There are plenty of personal HTML pages out there, probably more than in 1997. But the fact is that commercial entities have created far more streamlined and addictive experiences.

pjc50 6y ago

The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive - you're looking at some - but it's wrapped up in and presented on for-profit sites. The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.

i_am_proteus 6y ago
Hosting, curating, and moderating Hacker News is certainly adjacent to YC's business and ostensibly has some profit motive. I appreciate that it's also a dark-pattern-free public service, but it's not a coincidence that one of the best tech news and discussion boards is hosted by one of the premier incubator/accelerator shops.
hilbert42 6y ago
"The web is still full of content that didn't originate from profit motive" Very true but with a few notable exceptions - successes such geek_at says he's had, others have pointed out that self-funded, self-hosted sites don't get the large visitor coverage of the big conglomerate/commercial sites. This stands to reason and it's a damn shame. It seems to me a way around this would be to have a common universally-wide index type site where all the free, no-ads, no spying sites would be listed. Similarity, this index site would be spy-free, no ads and free for visitors to use but those listed would pay a small listing fee to cover site running costs. To keep listing costs to a minimum the site would be non profit, revenue-neutral and run as a cooperative society or similar non profit structure. To stop cohersive pressures from commercial interests, commercial, for profit sites/businesses would not be allowed to list. The site itself would be indexed and cross referenced along topic lines using the Dewey Decimal Classification system or similar schemes that libraries use to classify books. This would have the advantage of grouping likemined/likekind websites together in ways that were easy for visitors to browse from one to another. The listing for each site could also include a short description. This index site would cover just about every topic imaginable and thus attract many sites for listing which would provide economies of scale. For example: - Trades/Woodworking/Cabinetmaking - Science/Physics/QM/Quantum Field Theory/Yang-Mills - Philosophy/Utilitarianism/Jeremy Bentham Right, the site could easily contain interests as diverse as any book library, and it could even have its own internal search engine. It seems to me that we desperately need such an independant nonprofit site on the web. It's our only reasonable hope of escaping the centralization created by Facebook, Google, etc.

greggman3 6y ago

I certainly remember when most blogs were about sharing and not making money. Still, the explosion of tutorials, how tos, cooking lessons, math lessons, science shows, etc on youtube is all arguably because there is a money incentive. The bad parts of youtube (leading to conspiracy videos/fake news) are bad but the good parts (the large number of relatively well produced indie content) feels to me to be pretty awesome and that's arguably because of money. On the other hand, I only have my experience to go on. I have no idea what youtube is like for everyone, only myself. I hate all the tech blog posts that seem not about actually sharing useful info but instead about reputation building. I have no idea how much of youtube is that or if it will degenerate to that at some point. Maybe because the tech blog posts don't make money, only rep, they're being used to farm rep. note: i'm not dissing all tech blogs. There are tons of people who write great and informative posts. I'm just saying that I run into enough that seem like they aren't about sharing, they're about rep farming, and it seems like a phenomenon