9 ms·

So true, so sad. These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me. Wheneve

So true, so sad. These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me. Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Usually it’s some obscure personal or academic site, but for a moment I feel like I’ve found a gem in the desert and I browse happily for a while…then I promptly add to a list of non-crap-peddling sites. I long for a curated list of such sites.

spikej 5y ago
Sometimes you need the content and for that I use browser reader mode or if the content is really good, subscribe via rss. If they don't have rss, use a service to build one for the site
themodelplumber 5y ago
> I long for a curated list of such sites. I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases. Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the touch target for their menu is annoyingly small, or they are a little bit cluttered, or use more CPU than I'd like (specific mapping sites). So it's not easy to fit a perfect list, but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is. (Also I try to make my own obscure personal sites all the time as my contribution to this mess...)
- leavenotracks 5y ago
  > …but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is. Would that there were a search engine out there that prioritised the indexing of these high quality ‘well behaved’ sites.
  - simonmales 5y ago
    That would be a joy to have.
  - fouc 5y ago
    Interesting it occurs to me that google search could do this, but they have a conflict of interest - adsense.
    - abhinavsharma 5y ago
      Million short sort of does this
  - WA9ACE 5y ago
    You’re looking for https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ I’ve found very many niche sites, blogs, and information dumps with this engine. It’s astounding how much is never surfaced on google or DuckDuckGo.
    - asdff 5y ago
      How do you use it like that? I typed in "falafel" as a test and the first result was JS heavy foodnetwork.com.
      - WA9ACE 5y ago
        You have to tell it how many of the top sites you want removed from the results. For instance you can remove the top 1000 sites and it will remove that foodnetwork.com result.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
  My god, the web has become so garbage that we're going back to web directories...
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Maybe we should have never left. It's Google search and their advertising that destroyed the web we all used to enjoy.
    - abraxas 5y ago
      This is not the case. At least it wasn't the case in the late nineties and early naughts. The web then was full of banner and popup and pop under ads (punch the monkey, remember?). Google was a breath of fresh air then with a clean site and text only ads. No question they strayed from that early vision but they are still far from the worst offenders.
      - gunapologist99 5y ago
        Exactly. After they bought Doubleclick and promised they wouldn't merge the two third-party cookies and the associated data, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. No display advertising ever again! And the web smelled like roses ever since.
      - rapnie 5y ago
        > but they are still far from the worst offenders. Maybe in the type of ads they show. But don't forget increasingly garbage search results that are also indirectly related to the whole ad-tech business they facilitate.
        mr_mitm 5y ago
        Which search engine do you find shows better search results? I keep coming back to Google because no one else even comes close to the quality of search results. That was true even more so when Google started out. Their competition was Yahoo and AltaVista, which were practically useless. I'd argue that Google has done a lot for the web. But I can agree with the sentiment that they took a turn for the worse at some point.
- asdff 5y ago
  Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.
  - freediver 5y ago
    Did that here https://teclis.com https://teclis.com Very fun project and still working on expanding the index. The condition to get into the index is no/low bloat/tracking/spam.
    - eloisius 5y ago
      I was interested to check this out but it looks like it's offline
      - freediver 5y ago
        Try http://teclis.com http://teclis.com
  - hardwaresofton 5y ago
    But would anyone pay for it? Basically a relatively closed and essentially almost manually curated web ring seems like it'd offer a lot of value, but who pays? Maybe it could work if you charge users a super small base fee (let's say $1/month), and charge commercial sites that want to be listed in certain verticals?
    - asdff 5y ago
      I'd be happy to pay per month but if a commercial site can just buy sponsored posts I'm out.
      - hardwaresofton 5y ago
        Well I didn't think about it too much but the idea is that the more "salesy" the site (i.e. the further they stray from the ideals of the webring/directory), the higher the price. Also, I wasn't thinking of a stream-of-posts type thing -- more like private, curated search but I guess having a stream makes sense too. Either way, the question then becomes would enough people pay whatever monthly fee would keep the site viable (pay for the curation, bandwidth, etc) to prevent the people running the service from making compromises on the vision...
- fjfaase 5y ago
  I have an old style HTML (and a little CSS) personal website, but making it responsive (mobile compatible) is a lot of extra work. It would take me a few months spare time to fix all my hunderds of pages.
  - z3t4 5y ago
    Even if your site design consist of static table td cells - modern smartphones should be able able to read it, for example Opera mobile browser will realign the text. Old sites tend to be designed for 800x600 screens and that will also be fine on a modern smartphone. Making a site mobile friendly is tricky as you need to allow users to zoom and change the text size - no element can be static in size. Often old web sites does that by default - while many modern sites think they are printed media.
  - zo1 5y ago
    As an alternative suggestion: don't. The web was fine when you had to zoom in and out. If anything, make it "responsive" with dynamic font-size scaling.
danuker 5y ago
Here's mine: https://danuker.go.ro/ https://danuker.go.ro/ Tip: add your site to your HN profile, and look at others' profile.
- leavenotracks 5y ago
  Thank you - great tip, and great site! I like that you also mix in articles in, what I presume, is your native Romanian.
- SilasX 5y ago
  It has a fixed floating header though.
tpoacher 5y ago
This is why I love the gemini space. It feels ... unadulterated somehow.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Gemini is awesome, but it's lack of ambition is what really kills it for me. I appreciate their minimalist take on the web, but if their implementation is less robust than what we currently have, I have very little incentive to host a site there.
- droidist2 5y ago
  Are you talking about this? https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    yes. My favourite gemini browser is Lagrange. Makes a nice experience even better.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  Gemini is a dead end. If it was backwards compatible with gopher, with added TLS I might even consider it a good idea, but this is just plain text with links. The true power of web used to be self expression. This is why geoticies was a big thing, why myspace worked, and why Flash defined an era. It's not a great idea to reduce options for creativity; instead, we should encourage it again.
  - tpoacher 5y ago
    > but this is just plain text with links. I think this unnecessarily reductive. I disagree for two reasons. 1. Technical. The restrictions are on the protocol side. Not the browser side. It's up to the browser to convert links to "more than" links. The Lagrange gemini browser is a good example of that. E.g. if it detects a link to an image, it adds that image inline. 2. Behavioural. Protocol restrictions do not immediately equate to inability to be creative. In my short stint in geminispace I've already witnessed some wonderfully creative content, ranging from writing, poetry, ascii art, a tictactoe/chess server, and even interactive fiction games.
rchaud 5y ago
I keep a list of personal/small websites as well. Sites that don't have this endless amount of marketing and tracking cruft. Unfortunately it makes for pretty boring reading. So many sites out there have like 4 or 5 blog posts, and that's it.
bpugh 5y ago
I'm still amazed that https://gail.com/ https://gail.com/ is still just a pleasant personal website that reminds me of the early days of the web...
- turadg 5y ago
 The HTML is delightfully retro, Q: Interested in selling gail.com? A: Sorry, no.
arp242 5y ago
> These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me. I find that disabling JavaScript often helps. I have it enabled by default, but disable it in uBlock on a per-site basis if some crap pops up. A lot of the times that fixes things. For example for some reason the BBC thinks it's helpful to display a big fat "Register for an account today!" every fucking time I visit their website, but with JS disabled you don't get it. I think missing out on all BBC content would be too high of a price to pay, especially since most news sites do something similar (or worse). Downside is that sometimes stuff like images no longer work. It's usually not a big deal.
- MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
 I tried disabling Javascript by default, but there are too many important sites that require it. My browser's "disable javascript" extension can disable on a per-domain basis, but really what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that <google.com> is disabled but not <google.com/maps>. Sometimes disabling scripts is not enough, so I also disable CSS. This makes images huge at the top of the page (navigation icons, etc.). So, then I disable images as well. Then there are huge vector graphics of some kind; I can't tell if it's SVG not counting as an image, or just really large font sans CSS to size it. Maybe one of these days I'll write a "no bullshit" firefox extension that carefully applies these restrictions except for in a user-defined allow list. edit: oh yeah, I could call it "reader mode." Hm...
 - inetknght 5y ago
 I went a few years liking firefox's reader mode. But it's worth noting that reader mode does _not_ disable javascript.
 - rhn_mk1 5y ago
 > what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that <google.com> is disabled but not <google.com/maps>. Try out uMatrix.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
I started just leaving as well. If uBlock Origin failed for any reason I just closed the tab. Now this site is the only one I still actively browse.
don-code 5y ago
It's seemingly becoming harder to have an "experience" on the Web, and I find myself turning away from progressively more sources as a result. In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_. Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content. Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content. But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself. Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise. Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.
- 5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
  >setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page Reader mode (ctrl+alt+r) instantly gets rid of this kind of crap.
reesporte 5y ago
https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ is a cool search engine for classic internet sites you might like it's not a curated list, but there is a "surprise me" button
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
If it's straight HTML and some CSS, I just can't do anything but smile. I love the people who just keep with the old way cause it will be the easiest to support and last the longest. After all, it's just text.
HWR_14 5y ago
Also, with javascript off, it doesn't work hardly at all. Just like a real site.
manuelmoreale 5y ago
> I long for a curated list of such sites. Like you, I'm a fan of this kind of websites. I have one of my own in fact. And since you're after curated lists, let me share a few links: https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ https://terra.finzdani.net https://terra.finzdani.net https://gossipsweb.net/directory https://gossipsweb.net/directory https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ (I built this one for fun)
fsflover 5y ago
> Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Web search for such websites: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/.
Macuyiko 5y ago
Some more lightweight old-fashioned internet portals other than the ones mentioned before: 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/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/
Abishek_Muthian 5y ago
> I long for a curated list of such sites. Text only websites - https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html (Disclaimer: The author has kindly included couple of my websites in the list).
- leavenotracks 5y ago
  thank you for that - great list
niutech 5y ago
You can use the Reader View in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...) or Readability bookmarklet in all browsers (https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/ https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/) instead of leaving the page. As an alternative, there is FrogFind search engine (http://frogfind.com http://frogfind.com) for text-only websites.

spikej 5y ago

Sometimes you need the content and for that I use browser reader mode or if the content is really good, subscribe via rss. If they don't have rss, use a service to build one for the site

themodelplumber 5y ago

> I long for a curated list of such sites. I don't know if this is good news but I started doing this a while back and found so many sites that it was futile to keep them in one list. These days I tend to keep them in contextual notes or databases. Also many of them fail to pass one or two annoyance tests, but I find that they're worth it anyway. For example they are not mobile friendly in some minor way, like the touch target for their menu is annoyingly small, or they are a little bit cluttered, or use more CPU than I'd like (specific mapping sites). So it's not easy to fit a perfect list, but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is. (Also I try to make my own obscure personal sites all the time as my contribution to this mess...)

leavenotracks 5y ago
> …but it's impressive to me just how deep the less-discovered, high quality web really is. Would that there were a search engine out there that prioritised the indexing of these high quality ‘well behaved’ sites.
- simonmales 5y ago
  That would be a joy to have.
- fouc 5y ago
  Interesting it occurs to me that google search could do this, but they have a conflict of interest - adsense.
  - abhinavsharma 5y ago
    Million short sort of does this
- WA9ACE 5y ago
  You’re looking for https://millionshort.com/ https://millionshort.com/ I’ve found very many niche sites, blogs, and information dumps with this engine. It’s astounding how much is never surfaced on google or DuckDuckGo.
  - asdff 5y ago
    How do you use it like that? I typed in "falafel" as a test and the first result was JS heavy foodnetwork.com.
    - WA9ACE 5y ago
      You have to tell it how many of the top sites you want removed from the results. For instance you can remove the top 1000 sites and it will remove that foodnetwork.com result.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
My god, the web has become so garbage that we're going back to web directories...
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Maybe we should have never left. It's Google search and their advertising that destroyed the web we all used to enjoy.
  - abraxas 5y ago
    This is not the case. At least it wasn't the case in the late nineties and early naughts. The web then was full of banner and popup and pop under ads (punch the monkey, remember?). Google was a breath of fresh air then with a clean site and text only ads. No question they strayed from that early vision but they are still far from the worst offenders.
    - gunapologist99 5y ago
      Exactly. After they bought Doubleclick and promised they wouldn't merge the two third-party cookies and the associated data, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. No display advertising ever again! And the web smelled like roses ever since.
    - rapnie 5y ago
      > but they are still far from the worst offenders. Maybe in the type of ads they show. But don't forget increasingly garbage search results that are also indirectly related to the whole ad-tech business they facilitate.
      - mr_mitm 5y ago
        Which search engine do you find shows better search results? I keep coming back to Google because no one else even comes close to the quality of search results. That was true even more so when Google started out. Their competition was Yahoo and AltaVista, which were practically useless. I'd argue that Google has done a lot for the web. But I can agree with the sentiment that they took a turn for the worse at some point.
asdff 5y ago
Someone needs to just scrape the web for light weight websites then offer a search engine just for these sites. Rid the corruption from the web please.
- freediver 5y ago
  Did that here https://teclis.com https://teclis.com Very fun project and still working on expanding the index. The condition to get into the index is no/low bloat/tracking/spam.
  - eloisius 5y ago
    I was interested to check this out but it looks like it's offline
    - freediver 5y ago
      Try http://teclis.com http://teclis.com
- hardwaresofton 5y ago
  But would anyone pay for it? Basically a relatively closed and essentially almost manually curated web ring seems like it'd offer a lot of value, but who pays? Maybe it could work if you charge users a super small base fee (let's say $1/month), and charge commercial sites that want to be listed in certain verticals?
  - asdff 5y ago
    I'd be happy to pay per month but if a commercial site can just buy sponsored posts I'm out.
    - hardwaresofton 5y ago
      Well I didn't think about it too much but the idea is that the more "salesy" the site (i.e. the further they stray from the ideals of the webring/directory), the higher the price. Also, I wasn't thinking of a stream-of-posts type thing -- more like private, curated search but I guess having a stream makes sense too. Either way, the question then becomes would enough people pay whatever monthly fee would keep the site viable (pay for the curation, bandwidth, etc) to prevent the people running the service from making compromises on the vision...
fjfaase 5y ago
I have an old style HTML (and a little CSS) personal website, but making it responsive (mobile compatible) is a lot of extra work. It would take me a few months spare time to fix all my hunderds of pages.
- z3t4 5y ago
  Even if your site design consist of static table td cells - modern smartphones should be able able to read it, for example Opera mobile browser will realign the text. Old sites tend to be designed for 800x600 screens and that will also be fine on a modern smartphone. Making a site mobile friendly is tricky as you need to allow users to zoom and change the text size - no element can be static in size. Often old web sites does that by default - while many modern sites think they are printed media.
- zo1 5y ago
  As an alternative suggestion: don't. The web was fine when you had to zoom in and out. If anything, make it "responsive" with dynamic font-size scaling.

danuker 5y ago

Here's mine: https://danuker.go.ro/ https://danuker.go.ro/ Tip: add your site to your HN profile, and look at others' profile.

leavenotracks 5y ago
Thank you - great tip, and great site! I like that you also mix in articles in, what I presume, is your native Romanian.
SilasX 5y ago
It has a fixed floating header though.

tpoacher 5y ago

This is why I love the gemini space. It feels ... unadulterated somehow.

smoldesu 5y ago
Gemini is awesome, but it's lack of ambition is what really kills it for me. I appreciate their minimalist take on the web, but if their implementation is less robust than what we currently have, I have very little incentive to host a site there.
droidist2 5y ago
Are you talking about this? https://gemini.circumlunar.space https://gemini.circumlunar.space
- tpoacher 5y ago
  yes. My favourite gemini browser is Lagrange. Makes a nice experience even better.
pmlnr 5y ago
Gemini is a dead end. If it was backwards compatible with gopher, with added TLS I might even consider it a good idea, but this is just plain text with links. The true power of web used to be self expression. This is why geoticies was a big thing, why myspace worked, and why Flash defined an era. It's not a great idea to reduce options for creativity; instead, we should encourage it again.
- tpoacher 5y ago
  > but this is just plain text with links. I think this unnecessarily reductive. I disagree for two reasons. 1. Technical. The restrictions are on the protocol side. Not the browser side. It's up to the browser to convert links to "more than" links. The Lagrange gemini browser is a good example of that. E.g. if it detects a link to an image, it adds that image inline. 2. Behavioural. Protocol restrictions do not immediately equate to inability to be creative. In my short stint in geminispace I've already witnessed some wonderfully creative content, ranging from writing, poetry, ascii art, a tictactoe/chess server, and even interactive fiction games.

rchaud 5y ago

I keep a list of personal/small websites as well. Sites that don't have this endless amount of marketing and tracking cruft. Unfortunately it makes for pretty boring reading. So many sites out there have like 4 or 5 blog posts, and that's it.

bpugh 5y ago

I'm still amazed that https://gail.com/ https://gail.com/ is still just a pleasant personal website that reminds me of the early days of the web...

turadg 5y ago
The HTML is delightfully retro, Q: Interested in selling gail.com? A: Sorry, no.

arp242 5y ago

> These days, when even a few hurdles of crap present themselves, I often just leave. I don’t care what the site has to say or sell me. I find that disabling JavaScript often helps. I have it enabled by default, but disable it in uBlock on a per-site basis if some crap pops up. A lot of the times that fixes things. For example for some reason the BBC thinks it's helpful to display a big fat "Register for an account today!" every fucking time I visit their website, but with JS disabled you don't get it. I think missing out on all BBC content would be too high of a price to pay, especially since most news sites do something similar (or worse). Downside is that sometimes stuff like images no longer work. It's usually not a big deal.

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
I tried disabling Javascript by default, but there are too many important sites that require it. My browser's "disable javascript" extension can disable on a per-domain basis, but really what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that <google.com> is disabled but not <google.com/maps>. Sometimes disabling scripts is not enough, so I also disable CSS. This makes images huge at the top of the page (navigation icons, etc.). So, then I disable images as well. Then there are huge vector graphics of some kind; I can't tell if it's SVG not counting as an image, or just really large font sans CSS to size it. Maybe one of these days I'll write a "no bullshit" firefox extension that carefully applies these restrictions except for in a user-defined allow list. edit: oh yeah, I could call it "reader mode." Hm...
- inetknght 5y ago
 I went a few years liking firefox's reader mode. But it's worth noting that reader mode does _not_ disable javascript.
- rhn_mk1 5y ago
 > what I'd like is on a per-URL-pattern basis, so that <google.com> is disabled but not <google.com/maps>. Try out uMatrix.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

I started just leaving as well. If uBlock Origin failed for any reason I just closed the tab. Now this site is the only one I still actively browse.

don-code 5y ago

It's seemingly becoming harder to have an "experience" on the Web, and I find myself turning away from progressively more sources as a result. In the 2000s, running with an ad blocker was a near surefire way to speed up loading a page without any functional issues cropping up - the ad blocking tech even then was _good_. Then came paywalls - pay for this content, or you won't see it. I suppose, then, I won't see the content. Then came JavaScript frameworks in the 2010s - ads weren't assets anymore, they were actually part of the content. But for the most part, the Web still worked without JavaScript, and many sites (for what reason, I still don't totally understand) would gracefully fall back to presenting "just the content" if JavaScript was disabled. So I traded an ad blocker for NoScript, turning the lot of it off instead. Some sites need a minimal amount of JS to function, which I'll allow (first-party and CDNs like `jsdelivr`). But if you require JS from stripe.com, I suppose I also won't see then content. But eventually those JavaScript frameworks became bold - displaying partial content, or no content at all, became the fallback. I count the "Continue reading" button among these (and I get why - tracking who actually read the article must be vastly more lucrative than counting pageviews), though some pages are so bold as to display _nothing_ but the "You need to enable JavaScript" text itself. Most recently, I've noticed a new tactic: setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page. Removing the rule with dev tools shows the entire page. I can only assume this is a way to make sure the page doesn't become visible until all of the content is loaded, but again, the content includes the ads, upsells, and otherwise. Thankfully I've logged into Hacker News and posted this comment without JavaScript enabled. I wonder how long I'll be able to do that.

5e92cb50239222b 5y ago
>setting a CSS "opacity: 0;" on the page, then removing it with JS, even when JS is not required to load the page Reader mode (ctrl+alt+r) instantly gets rid of this kind of crap.

reesporte 5y ago

https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ is a cool search engine for classic internet sites you might like it's not a curated list, but there is a "surprise me" button

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

If it's straight HTML and some CSS, I just can't do anything but smile. I love the people who just keep with the old way cause it will be the easiest to support and last the longest. After all, it's just text.

HWR_14 5y ago

Also, with javascript off, it doesn't work hardly at all. Just like a real site.

manuelmoreale 5y ago

> I long for a curated list of such sites. Like you, I'm a fan of this kind of websites. I have one of my own in fact. And since you're after curated lists, let me share a few links: https://512kb.club/ https://512kb.club/ https://terra.finzdani.net https://terra.finzdani.net https://gossipsweb.net/directory https://gossipsweb.net/directory https://theforest.link/ https://theforest.link/ (I built this one for fun)

fsflover 5y ago

> Whenever I come across a site that just displays content immediately, it fills me with joy. Web search for such websites: https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/.

Macuyiko 5y ago

Some more lightweight old-fashioned internet portals other than the ones mentioned before: 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/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ https://dreamwiki.sixey.es/welcome.dream/ https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://www.cameronsworld.net/ https://www.cameronsworld.net/

Abishek_Muthian 5y ago

> I long for a curated list of such sites. Text only websites - https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html https://sjmulder.nl/en/textonly.html (Disclaimer: The author has kindly included couple of my websites in the list).

leavenotracks 5y ago
thank you for that - great list

niutech 5y ago

You can use the Reader View in Firefox (https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clutter-free-web-pages https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/firefox-reader-view-clu...) or Readability bookmarklet in all browsers (https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/ https://ejucovy.github.io/readability/) instead of leaving the page. As an alternative, there is FrogFind search engine (http://frogfind.com http://frogfind.com) for text-only websites.