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If you think the web is boring now it's because you stopped surfing the web, not because people stopped making exciting and innovative websites. That isn't mean

If you think the web is boring now it's because you stopped surfing the web, not because people stopped making exciting and innovative websites. That isn't meant as a criticism; people's priorities change and we do different stuff. I still find the web wildly exciting after 30 years of using it because I still seek out interesting things on it... Tell me this looks like every other website: https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com/asleep-in-trees https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com/asleep-in-trees

bawolff 4y ago
Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better). But still, this misses the authors point - that mainstream websites have become homogenous. Obviously its not about literally every last website, but bemoaning what is currently trendy.
- onion2k 4y ago
  Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better). I made a few experimental VRML websites in the late 90s (on a lovely SGI Irix..) and I can see why you'd say that, but it's only superficially similar in the 3D-in-a-browser sense. VRML experiences were usually terrible and never pretty.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    It's the same idea updated with extra cycles. It is pretty, and there are some nice aesthetic touches. But the overall look is still very blocky and VRML-ish. I guess at some point we'll get photorealistic rendering - most likely in AR glasses rather than in the browser - and there will be a lot more experimentation for a while, some of it driven by AI. But even this is in a tiny niche far, far outside the web mainstream, and if it hadn't been linked here hardly anyone would find it. I remember the exact moment in the mid-90s when I realised the suits were moving in and the web was going to be transformed from a weird, colourful, mad eccentric thing into a generic mall. From a corporate POV it has far exceeded my worst nightmares. Sites like this are a very small pushback, but they're not going to make a dent in the overall crapification and hustle-driven corporatisation of our biggest and most interesting planetary cultural resource.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I did some VRML at uni. We thought it was the future :) Having said that, I think what you're saying is some very superficial pattern-matching. I found it a fantastic experience, and I'm not a particularly arty person.
bluetomcat 4y ago
It's boring because we consume content mostly through platforms that incentivise a certain mode and format of content creation. There is also the bias on recency and the fear of missing out "important" contemporary events and news. The interesting content is still there, but our perception and short attention spans mostly ignore it.
uonpopular_th 4y ago
The web is boring now because everyone interesting is banned by bland mediocrities. If you don't follow the current thing to the letter every major social media platform - bar twitter for the last two months - would remove you from circulation pretty much instantly. The only people who agree with everything that is popular right now are the ones incapable of thinking. Ergo a chat bot trained on old forum data seems more genuine than anyone left on Reddit.
- xwolfi 4y ago
  "every major social network" is a very recent sub continent on the internet and didnt replace most of it. I find reddit super exciting as well, it's THE place to talk quickly with random english speakers and I wish that existed when I was a french kids pinging randos on ICQ...
  - uonpopular_th 4y ago
    Old forums aren't much better unfortunately. Going back to the places where I hung out in the 00s the inmates are running the asylum now.
- margorczynski 4y ago
  Yeah I miss the old days where on most sites you really needed to be a hard-core troll or do/say something illegal to get banned and removed. Now on for example Reddit if you say anything that's not acceptable in the current zeitgeist it's instant (shadow)banning. It all became so corporate and milquetoast - all that matters are ads and so that they don't appear near "controversial" content to not to loose revenue.
  - uonpopular_th 4y ago
    It's much worse than that. The people doing the banning on reddit aren't doing it because they are paid or told to, they are doing it because they think stopping wrongthink is a public service and will feel right doing it every time. HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.
wslh 4y ago
The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. Even leas advanced search engines found those sites. Google beat them adding some kind of authority but at the end the authority is gamed. Well content sites giving a s*t to SEO remain under layers and layer of dust.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I think pinning all of this on Google is unfair. They're part of it, but Reddit/Twitter/Facebook is every bit as complicit. Honestly, I think most of what's changed is our collective web-usage habits. In my experience researching ways of building different and better discovery tools, the ice-berg of stuff that you'll virtually never find on Google/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter runs extremely deep, and is often much more interesting.
  - bluetomcat 4y ago
    The platform-oriented web is like a giant shopping mall with some magazines and newspapers sold in-between. News websites are mostly reviewing the "products" sold in the shops. YouTube celebrities are demonstrating their shopping abilities. Sites like Reddit/Twitter are fostering customer discussions whose aim is to determine the "best product".
  - wslh 4y ago
    Completely agree. I mentioned Google specifically because it in their official mission [1] and this is where they started. [1] https://about.google/ https://about.google/
- johnchristopher 4y ago
  > The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. But it's still enough to subscribe to some newsletters or reddit or listapart of the decade, etc. It's really not far away. Now the problem is turbulence.org. Man, that hurts.
flir 4y ago
That is lovely. I need to come back when I've got more time and better headphones. But I don't want my news headlines presented like this. I'm kinda ok with the standardization of the regularly-visited sections of the web - in fact I think it's just UX principles in action.
robertlagrant 4y ago
That website is fantastic. Cutting edge expression, difficult, well realised. I wish that were what modern art is.
pancrufty 4y ago
I mean, no, that's hardly a website. It's as much a website as example.com/demoscene.exe. Nobody ever stopped making art and video games, it's just that they don't run in the browser. If you call it a website, then Unity is a web authoring tool.
- CuriousCosmic 4y ago
  It actually is a pretty decent website. If you look at the main page [1] instead, it's a gallery to navigate to the subpages. Conceptually not too different than browsing a traditional 2d webpage. 1. https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com
- perilunar 4y ago
  As a virtual 3D space it is much more of a web "site" than a collection of "pages" is a "site".
beckingz 4y ago
What a great experience!
recuter 4y ago
Don't know about the whole fuddy duddy discussion goin on here but let me just say that website is trippy as balls. And I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you very much for posting it, seriously inspired me. The fellow who made it recommends: https://threejs-journey.com https://threejs-journey.com I know what I am doing this weekend. Cheers.

bawolff 4y ago

Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better). But still, this misses the authors point - that mainstream websites have become homogenous. Obviously its not about literally every last website, but bemoaning what is currently trendy.

onion2k 4y ago
Umm, it reminds me of all the websites when VRML was a hip fad in the 90s (but obviously higher resolution/better). I made a few experimental VRML websites in the late 90s (on a lovely SGI Irix..) and I can see why you'd say that, but it's only superficially similar in the 3D-in-a-browser sense. VRML experiences were usually terrible and never pretty.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  It's the same idea updated with extra cycles. It is pretty, and there are some nice aesthetic touches. But the overall look is still very blocky and VRML-ish. I guess at some point we'll get photorealistic rendering - most likely in AR glasses rather than in the browser - and there will be a lot more experimentation for a while, some of it driven by AI. But even this is in a tiny niche far, far outside the web mainstream, and if it hadn't been linked here hardly anyone would find it. I remember the exact moment in the mid-90s when I realised the suits were moving in and the web was going to be transformed from a weird, colourful, mad eccentric thing into a generic mall. From a corporate POV it has far exceeded my worst nightmares. Sites like this are a very small pushback, but they're not going to make a dent in the overall crapification and hustle-driven corporatisation of our biggest and most interesting planetary cultural resource.
robertlagrant 4y ago
I did some VRML at uni. We thought it was the future :) Having said that, I think what you're saying is some very superficial pattern-matching. I found it a fantastic experience, and I'm not a particularly arty person.

bluetomcat 4y ago

It's boring because we consume content mostly through platforms that incentivise a certain mode and format of content creation. There is also the bias on recency and the fear of missing out "important" contemporary events and news. The interesting content is still there, but our perception and short attention spans mostly ignore it.

uonpopular_th 4y ago

The web is boring now because everyone interesting is banned by bland mediocrities. If you don't follow the current thing to the letter every major social media platform - bar twitter for the last two months - would remove you from circulation pretty much instantly. The only people who agree with everything that is popular right now are the ones incapable of thinking. Ergo a chat bot trained on old forum data seems more genuine than anyone left on Reddit.

xwolfi 4y ago
"every major social network" is a very recent sub continent on the internet and didnt replace most of it. I find reddit super exciting as well, it's THE place to talk quickly with random english speakers and I wish that existed when I was a french kids pinging randos on ICQ...
- uonpopular_th 4y ago
  Old forums aren't much better unfortunately. Going back to the places where I hung out in the 00s the inmates are running the asylum now.
margorczynski 4y ago
Yeah I miss the old days where on most sites you really needed to be a hard-core troll or do/say something illegal to get banned and removed. Now on for example Reddit if you say anything that's not acceptable in the current zeitgeist it's instant (shadow)banning. It all became so corporate and milquetoast - all that matters are ads and so that they don't appear near "controversial" content to not to loose revenue.
- uonpopular_th 4y ago
  It's much worse than that. The people doing the banning on reddit aren't doing it because they are paid or told to, they are doing it because they think stopping wrongthink is a public service and will feel right doing it every time. HN isn't much better with flagging of posts. The highwater mark of this was PG's heresy post being kept off the front page for 6 hours before dang made the post unflaggable. I would have loved to see the Monday meeting where he had to explain why that was needed.

wslh 4y ago

The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. Even leas advanced search engines found those sites. Google beat them adding some kind of authority but at the end the authority is gamed. Well content sites giving a s*t to SEO remain under layers and layer of dust.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I think pinning all of this on Google is unfair. They're part of it, but Reddit/Twitter/Facebook is every bit as complicit. Honestly, I think most of what's changed is our collective web-usage habits. In my experience researching ways of building different and better discovery tools, the ice-berg of stuff that you'll virtually never find on Google/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter runs extremely deep, and is often much more interesting.
- bluetomcat 4y ago
  The platform-oriented web is like a giant shopping mall with some magazines and newspapers sold in-between. News websites are mostly reviewing the "products" sold in the shops. YouTube celebrities are demonstrating their shopping abilities. Sites like Reddit/Twitter are fostering customer discussions whose aim is to determine the "best product".
- wslh 4y ago
  Completely agree. I mentioned Google specifically because it in their official mission [1] and this is where they started. [1] https://about.google/ https://about.google/
johnchristopher 4y ago
> The problem now is finding interesting content, in the recent past it was enough to fire some few keywords on a search engine. But it's still enough to subscribe to some newsletters or reddit or listapart of the decade, etc. It's really not far away. Now the problem is turbulence.org. Man, that hurts.

flir 4y ago

That is lovely. I need to come back when I've got more time and better headphones. But I don't want my news headlines presented like this. I'm kinda ok with the standardization of the regularly-visited sections of the web - in fact I think it's just UX principles in action.

robertlagrant 4y ago

That website is fantastic. Cutting edge expression, difficult, well realised. I wish that were what modern art is.

pancrufty 4y ago

I mean, no, that's hardly a website. It's as much a website as example.com/demoscene.exe. Nobody ever stopped making art and video games, it's just that they don't run in the browser. If you call it a website, then Unity is a web authoring tool.

CuriousCosmic 4y ago
It actually is a pretty decent website. If you look at the main page [1] instead, it's a gallery to navigate to the subpages. Conceptually not too different than browsing a traditional 2d webpage. 1. https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com https://www.anumberfromtheghost.com
perilunar 4y ago
As a virtual 3D space it is much more of a web "site" than a collection of "pages" is a "site".

beckingz 4y ago

What a great experience!

recuter 4y ago

Don't know about the whole fuddy duddy discussion goin on here but let me just say that website is trippy as balls. And I enjoyed it immensely. Thank you very much for posting it, seriously inspired me. The fellow who made it recommends: https://threejs-journey.com https://threejs-journey.com I know what I am doing this weekend. Cheers.