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I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art projects and detailed field speci

• joe__f 4y ago
  I liked Stumbleupon, I miss it too
• falcolas 4y ago
  > so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link is.
    • falcolas 4y ago
      I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past their lifespan on the web. I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
      • causi 4y ago
        I also wish for a modern local archiving solution. HTTRACK just doesn't cut it anymore, unless you really want a local copy of a webcomic that stopped updating in 2003.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • quest88 4y ago
        I've considered running my own IA (https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3 https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3), which only archives my chrome history, which is stored in a local sqlite db. I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how the pieces should be glued together.
    • kordlessagain 4y ago
      I use screenshots on my search engine to work around this issue. If you are interested, I have an open server deployment for it.
  • RobotToaster 4y ago
    It won't help with ones that are already gone, but there's a firefox plugin called Archiveror that automatically archives your bookmarks.
• ajvs 4y ago
  Reddit and other social media has largely replaced it I'd say (not to the same quality though).
  • marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Huh. I feel like Reddit doesn't really have links anymore. The subreddits that have external links are usually spam subreddits which humans don't visit. The human-inhabited subreddits seem to mostly be favoring selftext, images, youtube videos, maybe wikipedia, and possibly some image hosts (but they are falling out of favor since imgur turned to shit). Very rarely do they seem to link to other websites.
    • xeromal 4y ago
      I don't think they're talking about links but about content. No need for real links when the content is within reddit. For instance, I've curated my subs to all my hobbies: farming, watch collecting, coffee stations, coffee in general, musician fan pages, etc and they're mostly very small and have content very much like the old web I grew up on.
      • marginalia_nu 4y ago
        Yeah, but in that sense, it hasn't replaced StumbleUpon as a way of discovering websites, as the only website you're discovering is Reddit.
        • xeromal 4y ago
          I can get with that. I'd say it's mostly semantics because at the end of the day, we're just trying to find interesting content and both ways accomplish that but there's really no way to win that argument. Lol
• rhn_mk1 4y ago
  I doubt StumbleUpon would be able to take off in the same form today - it installed a browser toolbar, collected a profile of your interests, and collected your up/downvotes to fed them all to an opaque algorithm that took you to the next random page. Who knows where that data went. Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?
  • notriddle 4y ago
    Firefox’s Pocket recommendations took a good approach. The browser downloads a big daily file with “potential recommendations”, then filters it at the client side. The big downside was that, because it was turned on by default, a whole bunch of people who didn’t actually want it had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      I actually really like Pocket's recommendations, but yeah, the way it's all forced on you it's basically an ad. That's pretty much why I feel like I have to boycott it despite liking the product. It's such a Mozilla move to take something nice and turn it bad for no good reason.
  • slothtrop 4y ago
    At inception it was just a website that redirected you. There are variations of this created all the time but centered around essays and journalism. It would be trivial to create what is basically a glorified copy of SU, but no one cares enough to do it. Or more accurately, they already exist and we collectively don't care enough to notice.
• lotsofpulp 4y ago
  >I wonder why it wasn't viable. Because for the most part, people making content would rather earn money for their content than not earn money. The silos of TikTok and Instagram and YouTube allow for sufficiently low transaction costs such that this market of advertisers interested in buying attention and content creators interested in buying money can exist. Maybe stumbleupon was too early, but the fact that the app ecosystem makes it much more difficult to copy content makes the silos much more appealing to both content creators and advertisers.
  • kossTKR 4y ago
    An economic explanation makes sense. I wonder if a monetizable ecosystem could exists with longer form content in multiple forms, ie. multimedia, a word that has almost disappeared. There is Patreon, Substack, Youtube and others that does work, the problem lies in the curation and personalisation that seems to have gone out the window replaced by algos and simple designs with bland and uninspired designs and concepts.
    • saltsucker 4y ago
      I wish the app moguls would just give us a "Turn off Personalization" option and let me explore freely. I turn off all history tracking on YouTube, but it doesn't matter. Whether it's on or off, you can't explore a topic deeply. You have 1-2 videos on the subject, then you have completely random unrelated click-bait garbage. Even music apps are disappointing. Sometimes they do well, but most of the time it seems not. I play a radio station for Mat Corby, which is a pretty chill downtempo vibe, and the app throws in stuff from my library that has no relation--like Kanye West's Jesus Walks. Literally did that multiple times. Those vibes could not be more different. Maybe cataloging music is a difficult problem, but there was a time (maybe 2010?) when YouTube would efficiently suggest music that had a vibe to what I was listening to, and it helped me find many artists I listed to now. Edit: And a time when Apple's Genius was not a bad house party DJ
  • ghaff 4y ago
    And even if the vast majority of them don't in fact make material money, many of them have a hope of doing so and act accordingly.
• ndespres 4y ago
  A lot of it is still out there! A personal favorite of mine is https://www.fujichia.com/ https://www.fujichia.com/ which is, among other things, a blog inside a castle, with a fish pond outside and an art gallery. It reminds me of a simpler time when everyone had a handcrafted, bespoke HTML homepage with all sorts of secrets and surprises.
• hbn 4y ago
  Here's a site I like to link whenever this discussion comes up (not associated): https://wiby.me https://wiby.me I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack or something, but just a bunch of articles about every facet of these soundtracks. Just now I got linked to a page about Kodak Photo CDs http://www.tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/ http://www.tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/
  • BbzzbB 4y ago
    In a similar vein, I like Marginala's discover/site hopping mode. The little cards make it easier to get the vibe of more than one site at a time too. https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
  • ConstantVigil 4y ago
    Got this link: https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html It's a Thought Experiments Lain website P.S. There absolutely is definitely going to be sound coming through speakers. Fair heads up.
    • skyyler 4y ago
      I really enjoy that the Lain fans are not slowing down in the slightest with their love for Lain.
      • ConstantVigil 4y ago
        I'm fairly certain this is a really old site...
  • quartz 4y ago
    Wow this is fantastic! Landed on some HAM radio operator's personal text-only site and then a site about birds in some far off place in Nova Scotia: http://www.capebretonbirds.ca/ http://www.capebretonbirds.ca/.
• penneyd 4y ago
  http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/bifurcated/rivets/ http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/bifurcated/rivets/ - This is pretty great, run by my old professor (and I graduated in '95...)
• low_common 4y ago
  It's called TikTok. The internet evolved dude.
  • Chinjut 4y ago
    The post you are replying to mentioned TikTok.
  • tinsmith 4y ago
    "Evolved" is not the word I would use. As the Internet was already showing signs of being twisted by its own mythos in the 1990's, there was plenty of then-obvious opportunity that resulted in the type of profit-driven curation we see today. I remember the Internet then, but I feel a lot of people allow the lense of nostalgia to twist it into something far more wild and pure than it actually was.
  • robonerd 4y ago
    TikTok used to suggest all sorts of long-form articles. Tiktok is all short-form video; a bunch of vapid trash.
• RajT88 4y ago
  Definitely check out: https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/
• vimy 4y ago
  https://stumblingon.com/ https://stumblingon.com/ I like this clone.
• tmaly 4y ago
  I think we would need something like a modern Geocities to encourage people to start building indices again. It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.
  • kradeelav 4y ago
    Good news, it exists over on neocities which is experiencing something of a revival in younger circles now. :)
• ineedtosleep 4y ago
  IMO it's not just about being bite-sized, memeable content catering to the lowest common denominator. It's that nearly everyone making content is copying marketing strategies. Back then it was more of a show-and-tell vibe, now everything is trying to sell something.
  • vitaflo 4y ago
    Everyone has become a sellout. When I was growing up this was considered a bad thing. Today it’s a virtue.
    • a1o 4y ago
      There's not incentives currently for the no money involved approach. Before, there was still some unknown promise of the thing you are doing being discovered at some point, and also you could still sellout - lots of creators did this eventually. The noise is really high today.
      • retcon 4y ago
        I've done a penance ^h^h career in advertising ,[0] and I left because advertising sold out. Advertising and commercial art/advertising/deductible graphics used to nurture the most amazing arrays of cultural perpetual moonlighting geniuses. Now that went down the first conversion funnel long ago. We're not even a number were just amorphous $rnd now. [0]Computational advertising for print in the very early nineties...) Edit: a last gasp website I absolutely considered Sui Generis and was invaluable in the graphics world was Drawn.ca . I'd be immensely grateful to hear of any mirrors or archive.
    • munificent 4y ago
      Maybe less virtue and more necessary evil. It was a lot easier to not be a sellout in the economic boom of the 90s when you could find that paid the bills. The younger generation now is barely scraping by. They aren't into hustle culture because they love it, they do it because they're broke.
• algoeci 4y ago
  Read Something Interesting (www.readsomethinginteresting.com) is a great compilation of interesting blog posts, I've spent many an long afternoon discovering new blogs there.
  • really_relay 4y ago
    Seconding this, Read Something Interesting is amazing.
• kixiQu 4y ago
  My site [1] tends to get linked to by these kinds of things (well, more than by normal things) so I've found a few just through referrer traffic, and joining webrings has been fun too. https://gossipsweb.net https://gossipsweb.net https://fediring.net https://fediring.net https://nightfall.city https://nightfall.city https://linkbudz.m455.casa https://linkbudz.m455.casa https://indieblog.page https://indieblog.page https://indieweb.xyz https://indieweb.xyz https://stumblingon.com https://stumblingon.com https://webring.dinhe.net https://webring.dinhe.net https://hotlinewebring.club https://hotlinewebring.club https://handmade-web.net https://handmade-web.net https://biglist.terraaeon.com https://biglist.terraaeon.com https://xn--sr8hvo.ws https://xn--sr8hvo.ws https://nownownow.com https://nownownow.com https://blogsurf.io https://blogsurf.io https://theforest.link https://theforest.link There's a ton of cool stuff going on on the internet, much even public, but the ethic by which things are shared still seems to me to resemble these insights: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web Thinking of things as small social niches is helpful in figuring out where the best bits are. [1] https://maya.land https://maya.land :)
  • nathias 4y ago
    thx for the list, I already knew about your page, very cool
  • ya1sec 4y ago
    Ah I just commented about my app, Moonjump, which uses Gossip Web as one of the sites to source material from. Just found Gossip Web a couple weeks ago. Great job! Here's mine: https://moonjump.app https://moonjump.app
  • jkepler 4y ago
    Thanks for this list!
• researchers 4y ago
  A lot of that content has moved to newsletters and Twitter threads. If you know the right people to follow, there are a lot of niche, quirky, and insightful pieces that remind me of the homepages of yore. One problem is that these things get lost in the timeline. So I made a StumbleUpon for Twitter threads [0]. Check it out! [0] https://mood.surf https://mood.surf
  • NietzscheanNull 4y ago
    I really love the design/idea, but after hitting “Shuffle” a few times, it looks like it threw an unhandled exception due to an async error (now I just get a TypeError on every page load): O@https://mood.surf/build/routes/tweets/$tweetId-ID4B42CB.js:1:8106 Zi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:64683 li@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:74110 bs@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104095 Kf@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104026 st@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:103886 yi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:100770 yi@[native code] @https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50511 @https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:1:4097 _s@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50458 we@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50393 Ve@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:98358 bi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:69948 bi@[native code] onChange@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:31745 u@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:18647 @https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:26238 asyncFunctionResume@[native code] @[native code] promiseReactionJobWithoutPromise@[native code]
    • researchers 4y ago
      Thanks for reporting this. I think it has to do with certain tweets being made private/inaccessible after being added to the index. I'll look into it.
  • krapp 4y ago
    Also, video. All that "weird and fun" stuff that was in text 30 years ago is in front of a camera now.
• runevault 4y ago
  StumbleUpon was such a fun way to blow time where you needed to do something in a bit but had a few spare minutes. At one point in time I probably had a lot of random ass fun bookmarks through that.
• bombcar 4y ago
  I remember things like the DOOM FAQ https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text and there was one for Star Wars, also. I printed them out and read them; hundreds of pages.
• TheLastStumbler 4y ago
  I was at StumbleUpon at shutdown and for a few years before. I'm creating a single-purpose account to avoid doxxing myself on my main account. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that killed SU. SU relied on individual human curators to discover worthy new web pages instead of trying to crawl the web in bulk. Our most passionate users, the people who would submit great new URLs, tag URLs, rate heavily, and curate good collections, were heavy users of our XUL based Firefox extension. We were never able to build an extension as featureful post-XUL and that hurt new content acquisition and categorization. The linked content we served to users on the web had to be iframeable. That described most of the web in the early years of SU. By the time of the shutdown, most new sites and even many established sites couldn't be displayed in iframes any more. It would have been technically possible to replicate most of the iframe experience without iframes by serving up our own crawled copies of pages, but then we would have been infringing copyright. Iframes allowed SU to show a third party page without actually copying it. Over time, more sites disallowed crawling via robots.txt or by thwarting them without prior declaration by rejecting "crawler-looking" requests that didn't come from Google. Our mobile apps allowed us to serve content in a webview even if it wasn't iframeable, but mobile platforms inherently excluded a lot of the "weird and wonderful" stuff that people loved SU for. For example, our online games category contained mostly Flash games. Even most of the non-Flash games assumed either keyboard or mouse access; few of them worked well on a phone's touch screen. Similar problems applied to other interactive content (simulations, interactive visualizations). Take away the interactive content and SU started to look more like just another app for passive scrolling. Web pages became increasingly encrusted with ads, nags, and tracking scripts. I was the final developer responsible for maintenance on our Android app. 95% of the performance complaints we received about the app were, in truth, complaints about the analytics and ads an individual recommended web page was loading. This was also the source of 95% of the complaints about ads that we received. SU monetized itself with interstitial ads between recommended web pages. Every ad running on a recommended page was put there by the site owner, not us. But negative reviews and customer emails blamed us for the battery-killing, device-heating, content-obscuring ads running on-page. The ad problem was much less severe for people who used the web site instead of mobile apps, since they were largely power users who had ad blockers installed, but see previous problems about iframes and Firefox plugins. Consolidation toward siloed content platforms certainly didn't help either. But I think that SU would have been able to keep going until the present day if not for the problems mentioned above. Some of them seem like mere happenstances of history; I could imagine Flash living a lot longer if it hadn't been a notorious source of exploitable security holes. Other things, like long-form articles getting increasingly barnacled with ads, nags, analytics, and paywalls, seem like a more inevitable outcome of the collapse of old-media print revenue. One thing I've idly pondered since SU shut down is just recommending weird-old-web content that's findable in the Wayback Machine yet missing from the modern internet. The beauty would be two-fold: it's likely to be cleaner content in the first place, and you can transform it (e.g. running Reader Mode over it server-side) without worrying about the site owners coming after you for copyright infringement. Or at least not worrying as much. It seems like marginalia_nu has managed to find a goodly amount of content that still lives so maybe resorting to the Wayback Machine isn't necessary at all.
• conductr 4y ago
  I miss old internet stuff to, but in a way I think it’s just morphed. First you have to look past the influencer/marketing cruft trying to pass as authentic but I find real great content is predominantly being created on YT and other video channels. The production value I see some amateur folks take is insane and has to be a massive hobby in of itself. Also have to just realize the web is now public transport where it used to be exclusive. It’s like flying in 1962 versus 2022
  • nottorp 4y ago
    > The production value I see some amateur folks take is insane and has to be a massive hobby in of itself. Doesn't YT share some ad revenue with you if you're over a certain amount of views? :)
    • conductr 4y ago
      Is it material for most? I’d bet it hardly offsets the investment in AV equipment as well as editing software. For a lot of people, learning video editing is path for content creation just like learning to code is/was for many others. To some degree, I’d venture they are in competition with each other. And code has more business value while video has broader appeal. So more so just pointing out how the trends have played out such that developers are not necessarily the “creators” of the experienced internet any more. They mostly just do the plumbing. My YT watching tends to be around DIY stuff, how to, engineering and home/construction. These are people that in past would have made high quality blogs with tutorials but now just make videos. I’m consistently impressed by the storytelling and production value. Even if they technically receive an ad share I still think they’re amateur. There are a few that have crossed over into massive popularity and it’s probably significant but that’s not the norm. Even in the old days, people put ads on their tutorial pages and a lot of blogs so it’s no different, to me.
• tastysandwich 4y ago
  StumbleUpon was awesome! I remember when I first showed my mum how to use a computer, StumbleUpon (the FF add-on) was one of the first things I installed. She was hooked! And then she'd email me every time she saw something interesting - which was every 5 minutes... I guess now the equivalent is your mum tagging you on Facebook? (Thankfully my mum's not on social media)
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• funOtter 4y ago
  https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/