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The Small Website Discoverability Crisis (2021)
- throwaway092323 3y agoI would love a search engine that only catalogs pages without ads.
- frankfrank13 3y agoSomething something dead internet theory. But also yes, I can't believe how many great, small blogs and other useful websites I've found only from HN
- dannyobrien 3y agoIs the claim (that there are interesting small websites that are impossible to find on the major search engines) true? I mean, it feels true, but how would we measure this? How would be detect whether things had got worse, or was getting better? As I say, I am sympathetic, but I would like to have more confidence in the claim, and better ways to test proposed solutions.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoSomeone ought to build a search engine to try to demonstrate this fact.
- sowbug 3y agoDuplicate Google, but put a minus sign in front of the ranking formula.
- dannyobrien 3y agoProbably too late for you to see this, marginalia_nu, but I just wanted to say I appreciate the work you've put into your search engine and I should have noted that you would have more insight into this than most.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoHaha, no worry.
- vasco 3y agoI tend to think these articles which have become common come from a good place but say more about someone's internet habits than about the internet. I find most social media have a profile section for "personal website". I find many such personal websites by following people's github profiles from interesting repositories or PRs. Sometimes they link to other websites. I do the same in HN, snoop around to see if an interesting comment has a link to a website in the profile. Many articles are posted on HN from personal websites, which again usually link to other websites. I don't know I feel like, if I wanted I could spend all day doing this and would have no problem finding more than hours in the day. So are we complaining about the internet or that we got stuck in the walled gardens of youtube and tik tok and so on and kind of wish we would spend more time on the "old school internet" but don't because the other part is so addictive?
- piva00 3y agoIn my point of view what's lacking is more places where curators that have found interesting small sites can showcase them. I used Digg a lot for that, StumbleUpon was also really nice for this type of discovery, then early Reddit had a similar effect. Nowadays? I don't know where to go, I can do all this effort of clicking around to find them but honestly I don't have the time, I'm in my mid-30s, I won't be jumping around hyperlinks searching for breadcrumbs of potential good content... A lot of people are doing that work already, like you, we are lacking a good place where we can pool this curation work collectively so others can discover it.
- marban 3y agoFor general news: https://upstract.com https://upstract.com or https://biztoc.com https://biztoc.com
- TehShrike 3y agoStumbleUpon was the best, I haven't had a better experience with finding interesting, relevant things on the internet. Though I did find https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/ recently, which is aiming for the same thing, and I'm optimistic.
- 3y ago
- andyjohnson0 3y agoKagi has an option to search what they term "the small web" [1]. I haven't used it a lot - but the times I did, it seemed to give me good results. [1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
- MostlyStable 3y agoIt has a very definite bias in the topics of blogs/websites that it finds which is partly an artifact of the kind of person likely to have such a site but also where they sourced it from (I think they might have started with a HN Blog roll or something). But I agree that it's generally interesting sites, and I find myself going back to it every couple of weeks for a while. It reminds me of a more substantive version of "StumbleUpon" from back in the day.
- scary-size 3y agoThanks for reminding me about this! I just discovered three interesting blogs within a few minutes.
- 400thecat 3y agobut Kagi uses third party indexes anyway (ie, google). So, if google does not index small websites, how can Kagi show them?
- jryb 3y agoThey augment those with their own index (named teclis).
- sodimel 3y agoA proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”. That's exactly what I did with share-links : It's a tool that allow you to easily store and share links of things you like on the web. Here's the repo where you can find more info (see the file DEPLOY.md if you want to launch an instance on the web): https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links And here's my own instance, whith over... 4000 links: https://links.l3m.in/ https://links.l3m.in/ Want to be surprised? Open this link on a new tab: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/ https://links.l3m.in/en/random/
- rambambram 3y agoNice, I subscribed to your feed for new links and tags.
- sodimel 3y agoThanks! It means a lot to know that some people care about my projects or the curated links I choose to save and share :)
- xaellison 3y agoWhatever happened to stumbleupon? I feel like that was a popular website that served this purpose.
- ss64 3y agostumbleupon was reliant on putting websites into a frame with their menu at the top, once websites started blocking the framing of their content, for various security reasons, the idea was dead.
- xaellison 3y agonice thanks for the history!
- dartos 3y agoI miss stumbleupon. It was a tool for an exciting experimental internet. Nowadays I can only imagine it’d be flooded with odd numbered list articles.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI built https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random and https://explore.marginalia.nu https://explore.marginalia.nu to try to capture the old stumbleupon vibe. It's manually curated though so not the most scalable thing I've put together. Wish I had more time to expand on this, seems on the cusp of being pretty cool.
- mario_kart_snes 3y agoHow do I submit a link for this?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI haven't built a clean workflow for that yet, but in the interim, make a pull request here: https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/PublicData/blob/master/sets/random-domains.txt https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/PublicData/blob/master/s... and I'll poke it into the DB. If you don't want to dirty your hands with github, you can send me an email at kontakt@marginalia.nu :-)
- ploum 3y agoNot so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author’s favorite blogs. Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger. It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies. But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process. Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking. That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.
- Finnucane 3y agoBlogrolls could be either very freeform, or very topical, depending on the blog and the blog author, but they did the job--if you liked that blog, chances were pretty good you'd find something interesting in the blogroll.
- prmoustache 3y agoBefore the blogs, many websites had a links section as well. + the webrings.
- 101008 3y agoWebrings and some called them "Affiliates" (I dont know where the name came from, it makes more sense in Spanish, not sure in English), but they had this 82x32 buttons on the sidebar (sometimes anitmated GIFs) to similar websites, usually websites handled by friends. Oh, internet was so muuch better.
- StableAlkyne 3y agoLinks sections were awesome, and made the web feel deeper than it really was. You could go on dives just clicking through and finding so much cool stuff. Plus if it was a hobby site, there was inherently some level of curation - I don't think anybody would be linking to any of the hundreds of lookalike SEO "blogs" nowadays if it weren't for search engines allowing themselves to be gamed. Nowadays if it's not on the first "page" of Google (well, whatever the first group of infinite scrolling results is called) it might as well not exist. Makes the web feel flatter and less like a, well, web.
- dzink 3y agoThere used to be directories that indexed those, but the flow of spam became insufferable and the money dwindled. Social media with its free content and auctioned advertising took over. The problem with current algorithms is the fact that they favor currency - if you are a Youtube creator and you don’t churn content at a consistent rate, you get less exposure than the new stuff - creating a punishment for old but gold content.
- gumby 3y ago> Blogs limp along through RSS and Atom, but relying on feeds shapes everything you write into a blog entry. It’s stifling, homogenizing. The blogosphere, what remains of it, is incredibly samey. I don't see this at all: my feeds contain so-called "long form" post and sometimes single-line comments. AFAICT Gemini is essentially "add non-HTML files to your feed experience". Umm...OK? Certainly this blog post didn't suggest more, and to me wasn't particularly convincing given that I don't even experience (IMHO) the "problem" the author decried. Discovery is and will ever be a problem, but comments on sites like HN expose interesting things all the time.
- 303uru 3y agoI agree, why does it matter if my feed is interspersed with everything from long form to a simple short form link post?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWhat I mean is your website turns into a list. Posts have a definite date, a title, a body, semantics such as a previous and next; before and after.
- hattmall 3y agoSounds a lot like what used to be one of my favorite site del.icio.us Which I believe Yahoo bought off and killed.
- ghaff 3y agoI use pinboard.in. Works fine for me. But saving tags--what was called folksonomies at one point--never really became a mainstream way of sharing links as opposed to just bookmarking them for your own use. At the end of the day, a lot of this is lamenting that a hand-curated Internet doesn't scale.
- Lutzb 3y agoI miss delicious. The amount of discoverable content that was staggering. Collaborative bookmarking needs to make a comeback.
- filato 3y agopinboard.in is quite Ok, if you don't mind paying yearly for it
- flir 3y agoIs this reinventing Google's original "links are votes of confidence" observation? Nothing wrong with that of course. > on gemini-scale it works pretty well This might be the problem in a nutshell. Maybe discoverability doesn't scale, and (overlapping) villages are the only solution.
- elliotbnvl 3y agoChatGPT is really, really good at surfacing small blogs and websites on a huge variety of topics. Ask it for a list of personal blogs about running a hobby garden. It's not a perfect solution – if you ask for a fairly commercialized topic it can struggle to cut through the noise and will return larger websites with SEO-fodder style blog posts, but even with that caveat, it's miles better than Google.
- hospitalJail 3y agoEh, I still ran into SEO spam as the top results, even turning web off. I find this one of the worst parts of ChatGPT. Recommendations are full of advertisements/astroturfing/marketing. If you know any industry with aggressive marketers(For me, its Video games and seeing Nintendo/Stardew Vally populate those lists. Or iceland as a top vacation destination. Or recommending Apple products.) Honestly sucks really hard. Nothing you can do because the AI is dumb and can't figure out marketing makes words appear more often.
- gyinshen 3y agoChatGPT also hallucinates a lot. Many links generated by it don’t work
- fsflover 3y agoHere is how you find such websites: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
- RunSet 3y agoBut how are people expected to find that website?
- mcpar-land 3y agoA comment on Hacker News, of course
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andai 3y agoTrue, we need a small website search engine search engine. In all seriousness though I have forgotten the name of this site at least 5 times, and have to look it up every time (and sometimes it is hard to find)... perhaps a rebranding is in order.
- Kovah 3y agoIndeed, it's hard to discover small websites. While building https://Cloudhiker.net https://Cloudhiker.net (like Stumbleupon but modern), I collected a few hundred of those websites and people love them! Also, clicking trough web rings (yeah they still exist), you discover a bunch of cool sites from strangers all around the world. I joined Indie Webring (https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/ https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/) and Fediring (https://fediring.net/ https://fediring.net/) a while ago. Edit: oh almost forgot. I have a few hundred links in my personal bookmark archive at https://bookmarks.kovah.de https://bookmarks.kovah.de
- joenot443 3y agoStumbleUpon was free, your product is $2.99/mo. What about that is more modern?
- spzb 3y ago> StumbleUpon was free, your product is $2.99/mo. What could be more modern than that?
- marginalia_nu 3y agoTo be fair StumbleUpon seemingly also bled money until it shut down. Unclear if a subscription fee is the answer, but it's at least an answer.
- Kovah 3y agoThe subscription is entirely optional and not required to use Cloudhiker. It's directed towards power users. It helps the website to stay up and running. I would say this approach is more modern than shovelling tons of ads onto users like it was done by Stumbleupon.
- waveBidder 3y agonot powered by venture capital that plans to enshittify sounds like a good sign for longevity.
- Multicomp 3y agoI'd be willing to do something like this. I'm too lazy to implement it (hence why we don't already have something like this) but I would enjoy something like the following workflow: 1. my firefox browser has an extension 2. if I think a website is interesting, I bookmark it to one of N bookmark lists (which can be arbitrarily categorized, whether topical like "tech rants" or Google+ style "IRL friends only") 3. the browser extension does some API calls to flush/fill each bookmark list to one or more of publicly accessible websites like my github bio, my HN profile, my blog listicles for one or more federated bookmarks, publishes an RSS entry, whatever This approach does not require an account (except that I give the browser extension credentials/tokens to wherever it publishes), and it results in one-click blogroll sharing. PS: the problem with this is the temptation for feature bloat. Feature 2: on known websites with user profiles like HN, reddit, github, check the user profile for all users on the page and list out discovered shared blogrolls by username Feature 3: reports such as 'most shared blogroll links' based on your own personal browsing history, calculated offline in your browser Feature 4: ability to block blogroll links with a comment as to why you do so Feature 5: ability to share your blocks with a given blogroll list Feature 6: ability to follow shared blogroll link blocks from other blogroll lists, then editorialize that shared list yourself Feature 7: ability to share your editorialized block list with others who trust you more than whoever you are editorializing ...and so on. Though I'm pretty sure I'm reinventing lots of lost features from the web of trust and semantic web era.
- dspillett 3y agoA linked bookmark blog is essentially how many use Pinterest. Discoverability in part comes from shared lists because the related items on a given page are¹ based on what other things are included in lists containing the item currently being viewed. Pinterest has a very strong visual bias, and often a selling-things bias with the stored links being to things you can buy, so there might be a niche for something like that with features geared around links more generally, or features specifically to help editorialising links to nows and other reading matter, though preferably without deliberately poisoning search results to over-favour the link storing site like Pinterest does. ---- [1] at least in part, there may be other factors like what-you-have-looked-at-before, advertising, etc.
- brucethemoose2 3y ago> It’s a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this. Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them has links to other personal websites. Bingo. This isn't just the blogosphere, I see it in research papers, on GitHub pages, on social media, and elsewhere. I could speculate, but I don't really know what causes this...
- arromatic 3y agoI previously asked about about bringing back webrings to discover small sites but didn't gain much traction. there was only one comment linking about webring . I am curious too why there isn't a strong open source initiative like so many other open source projects. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128
- booleandilemma 3y agoI'm sure it has something to do with crab mentality. Why promote others? The only people I see doing so are the already super successful. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
- giantrobot 3y agoIt's because Google treats all sites with a large number of outbound links as a link farm and punishes them. Because Google couldn't figure out what list of links was organic vs spam it just punished everyone.
- omoikane 3y agoFor me personally, I have been trimming links I have in various public places because a link is a sort of endorsement, and these days there is always someone who gets mad at you for endorsing the wrong thing. Even if a personal website is mostly alright, someone is going to dig up a random quote out of context, and the rest of the internet will judge your links based on that one bit. Linking to a specific article on a single topic seems relatively safe, but linking to toplevel websites or blogs seems more risky.
- 3y ago
- nobodyandproud 3y agoYellowpages v2? What’s old is new again.
- elpachongco 3y agoYes! I've been thinking about this for months now. How would a normal person on the internet find information and enjoy the internet if most stuff they can find revolve around closed platforms, or SEO marketing sites. The best way to use the internet is to distribute information for everyone to see. Yet, that's not the direction it seems to be heading towards. I really believe that the fun part of the interner is in small sites, and I think we need more projects that try to find these small, but important corners of the internet.
- mydriasis 3y agoThis resonates with me. I've posted my language practice website on HN, LinkedIn, blah blah blah several places, and I can't get people to care. I've finally got some traction on slav facebook, but only just barely. Joining a web ring maybe kind of helped? It's free, actually really free, because it's something I love and want to share. If I post it to several places and nobody clicks on it... What am I supposed to do ?? Buy ads to hopefully get people to use my _free website_? I have tried doing stuff from SEO articles -- open graph tags, descriptions and stuff. I've posted it on social media to lukewarm reception. Someone else mentioned something like delicious. Maybe stumbleupon. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe some federated bookmarking thing. I think there's just been a cultural shift to "if it's not on FaceBook it might as well not be on the internet", and I don't know how to get back from that. I think most people use their computers and phones as bootloaders for instagram.
- Clubber 3y agoSomething I used to do way back in the day was answer related questions on forums and have my website in my signature. It worked pretty well.
- mydriasis 3y agoHmm, that does sound like a good idea!
- Clubber 3y agoNot only are you helping the community by answering questions, it also gives you some trackback links that Google used to weigh higher (not sure if it still does).
- candiddevmike 3y agoWonder if having a "signature" on reddit (or even HN!) like this would get you banned... Though there's probably a tragedy of the commons where high rep folks start selling signature space for advertising/influencer marketing.
- dalore 3y agoWho remembers delicious? That was a good social bookmarking site. I wonder if anything similar exists now?
- HeckFeck 3y agoThere is still something of it remaining: https://del.icio.us/help https://del.icio.us/help > This site is a ghost, haunting the internet. It is a read-only archive of the bookmarking website del.icio.us.... This project is a labor of love (or more accurately, a labor of like). Del.icio.us was founded by my friends in 2003, sold a whole bunch of times, and when it was about to get sold again to spammers in 2017, I took the opportunity to buy it back.
- mario_kart_snes 3y agoSelf-hosted version: https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/ https://github.com/Kovah/LinkAce/
- gorjusborg 3y agoThat was what came to mind for me when I read the linked article. For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) Publicly shared bookmarks was a great way to discover new sites, and I feel like delicious died because it was acquired, not because it was a bad or unpopular idea.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoWith shifting from Google to AI all websites will have a discoverability crisis. If I ask an AI "Where to buy XYZ" - how as a website do I get in there?
- kazakx 3y agoSo this article highlights a critical issue that urgently needs to be addressed. The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is partly contingent on resolving this problem. With the decline in search engine usage (a trend I contribute to, as I keep ChatGPT open all day), discovering websites becomes increasingly challenging. Consequently, this may lead to a decrease in content creation since websites are receiving less traffic. Ultimately, this could hinder AI development, as it relies on training with new and relevant data. Additionally, it's worth noting that this issue may extend to books as well.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- janvdberg 3y agoI want to point out Ruben Schade bookmarks page. It's quite wonderful. An OPML file that is also a webpage. https://rubenerd.com/blogroll.opml https://rubenerd.com/blogroll.opml
- orange-mentor 3y agoView source on this one! Wow... I never really knew when I was visiting a website transformed by XSLT This is really cool
- tanepiper 3y agoI've thought this for years that a large part of the internet is essentially ghosted by a lot of the bigger search engines. I miss the old Yahoo/AltaVista type homepage where you would get a feed. Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us were essential tools. Geocities and MySpace had webrings, so once you landed on something you could generally find similar stuff. I'd love to see a good "home page" with curated feeds, bookmarking and search across it (and with LLM + Graph you can have your own semantic search)
- brisray 3y agoThe trouble with the bookmarking idea is link rot. It takes some effort to keep the lists up-to-date. The new webrings are not doing too well because of this either. I know of around 190 of the "new" webrings and can only get around 20% without encountering a 404 message. The "small web" search engines might well be the way to go. Apart from Kagi, some I know of are: https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ https://searchmysite.net/ https://searchmysite.net/
- komali2 3y agoI have like a billion bookmarks and sometimes I tag them well, but sometimes I don't, and once every few months I'll go through the list at random and tag away. But like, what's the point of all those bookmarks? Outside of implementation details that are captured on stack overflow in convenient question - answer format, I feel like everything that exists on the internet already exists better in books. Even my own blog is basically just me stumbling though photography and philosophy and travel destinations, writing out information that's much more easily understood from published materials. Well, I suppose one thing small sites are good at is condensing information that should be condensed elsewhere but isn't. My most popular article (gets tons of organic traffic from Google) is titled "How to Rent a Motorcycle in Taiwan." If you searched that on Google I think the top few links should end in .gov.tw but none of them do.
- itslennysfault 3y agoThis reminds me of the early internet. Every little site had a "links" page or "friends" or "sister sites" or "blog roll" There were also "web rings" which was a club you could join. You put a widget on your site that would randomly link to other pages that were part of the same web ring (and you'd get back links from other sites). I haven't really seen any of those things in probably 10 or 15 years though.
- keepamovin 3y agoCreate a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see...The model is as recursive as it is simple. There is nothing preventing a list of bookmarks from linking to another list of bookmarks...The creation of a bookmark list is a surprisingly fun project. I agree. I've often thought of people publishing a list of bookmarks in a way that everyone can see. I even created DownloadNet originally based on this idea. I wanted a way to publish one of my bookmark folders as a server for people. But then, as so often happens, the simple idea evolved, and I got carried away by who knows what (technical challenges? I don't know) and ended up creating a personal archive and search engine with only a scant integration with bookmarks. This article is a good reminder of what originally seemed to me a good idea. Perhaps I should add it there. Also, perhaps p2p could be an easy way to federate these things? Not everyone can just create their own server, nor do they want to host it on big providers always. I've been tossing around the idea of p2p as a way to "solve" this, but it's still rather formless: new and vague. Over the last 3 days I created a p2p blog (and again, got carried away -- perhaps with technical challenges -- and added p2p chat). But I think there's something there. Perhaps I should listen to that idea that keeps recurring for me. To that first version of it anyway. Something simple, that unifies, publishing a bookmark folder (I have some chrome bookmark reading code^0), over p2p (I have janus^1), and possibly uses either the popularity of DownloadNet, or even some of the search/archiving stuff -- without getting carried away -- to assist in delivery or marketing. I don't know. A clear synthesis right now escapes me, but that's OK. I think there's something there: bookmarks (maybe a special bookmark folder, something referential, like "/var/www/html"), into which bookmarks go and then become public; a lightweight p2p server (that perhaps in some limit future could be federates effortlessly for p2p discovery, but who knows how?). Ugh...still too complex perhaps. Bookmark folder + p2p + transitive (my bookmark folder includes a link to another person's bookmark folder ~~ somehow). So it's like that article recently on the homepage "We need webrings" or sth. I didn't think that was particularly a good idea, but now I see at least a partial appeal. The "link" to another person's p2p bookmark "folder" will instead be a normal www hyperlink that links to the "signalling access point" where you can do the ritual to make the connection. People may think the weirdness, unavailability (you have to be running the little service in your terminal or as a daemon), and difficulty makes it a non-starter. But I think these "backward" elements, could be a paradoxical strength. I don't know. I think there's something there. I definitely want to keep pushing in this direction, anyhow. 0: https://github.com/00000o1/Bookmate https://github.com/00000o1/Bookmate 1: https://github.com/00000o1/janus https://github.com/00000o1/janus
- kyledrake 3y agoNeocities (disclosure: I work on it) has taken steps to try to improve small personal web site discoverability, which ends up being like a platform for people making web sites with a hybrid social component https://neocities.org https://neocities.org I like the idea of calling this the small web, I usually go with something like "personal web site" or "home pages" but it's never quite stuck for me. I hope they've added Neocities to the Kagi small web search because there's some pretty incredible sites available for that and our compiled sitemap will make importing easy: https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse The framing for this stuff is usually something like "wow remember the crazy 90s web" nostalgia pieces or "this is an active resistance against Facebook come join us in the lonely space nobody goes to." But really there's some incredible, magical content that requires the canvas the web provides, that isn't on the social media super-platforms and people very much still use the web to access them. Neocities alone serves hundreds of millions of views per month across all the sites, there's still a lot of web surfing going on. I would actually argue that having a web site gives you more exposure for your content than an average social media account, because sans a few lucky accounts, most are being throttled and limited by weird algorithms to prevent people from seeing your content organically. Your google search ranking might not be great, but people share links all over the place, including in private channels (think Slack/Discord/IRC/IMs) and you can still get meaningful distribution of your content this way. To paraphrase @izs "if you build it, they will come", is a misquote from a Kevin Costner movie about baseball ghosts, but if you build a good site with good content, people do just magically show up through mechanisms I don't myself quite understand yet. It's pretty cool to see new sites on Neocities that are unusually interesting and know they'll organically get view counts into the millions before it happens.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoI really like the stuff happening over at neocities :-) Out of curiosity, do you make any metadata available? Would be a very interesting resource to have, working on making the rest of the web discoverable as well ...
- StableAlkyne 3y agoI just love how Neocities has webrings. They were such a great way to find content related to the site you're currently viewing
- mario_kart_snes 3y agoIsn't this the idea of web rings from the 90s?
- gavinhoward 3y agoOh boy, I'm the owner of a few small websites that have been blessed to be discovered. I should do this to pay back the favor. I already have a list of bookmarks! Problem: it has 7328 bookmarks because I save everything good I come across, not just small websites. Give me a few hours. :)
- nonrandomstring 3y agoYou raise a good point that large collections have enough value to motivate people. The idea of trading "discoverables" is solid. Like in the zine or warez culture it's great to trade a big cache with others. There is a trust issue, that some will poison the well with their malware or spam, but many new solutions do seem to take-off out of mutually motivated sharing. Perhaps something as simple as a library/standard for "exchanging trusted link collections" - and there almost as in-built webserver function would be a game changer. Like if https://links.example.com/json https://links.example.com/json always returned a most recently verified bundle.
- karmakaze 3y ago> Simple federated bookmarking > A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”. For federated content, we could use ActivityPub if the site content units are posts. At some point, there should be a searchable taxonomy of the federated groupings and sources.
- jlturner 3y agoMaybe a big Google query prefix to hide all major sites?
- VikingCoder 3y agoI've have this weird idea in my head: There's a book I love, Daemon. I love it so much that I'm willing to bet you money that you'll love it. How about I buy you a copy of the book, and if you love it, you have to buy a copy for two other people? Or... how about, I bet you $1 that you'll enjoy this website. If I'm wrong, you keep the money - or maybe it goes to a charity of your choice? If I'm right, I get my money back... and maybe you have to give me $1...? and you have to pick two other people to gamble? I dunno - the thought has been tickling my brain for a while...
- runamuck 3y agoI love this post. Share more "crazy" ideas!
- Minor49er 3y agoSomeone would just create a bunch of fake accounts to exploit the userbase and redeem all of the free stuff
- VikingCoder 3y agoMy idea is that this is just between you and people you actually know. First-hand.
- Minor49er 3y agoIn that case, why not just buy your friends or colleagues copies of the book as a gift?
- VikingCoder 3y agoBecause I want it to go viral? Especially when it's a new author, and I really want to support them. It's not just about finding good books for my friends, it's about finding customers for authors / creators I really enjoy.
- gessha 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- agentultra 3y agoRemember when content creators of yore were teaching the web newbies how to generate traffic to their sites and get noticed on search engine rankings? We still have that now. Only it's how to get the YouTube algorithm to share your content or how to optimally use Steam's tools to promote your game. It's all within the walled gardens. Even Google, a search engine of yore, is a walled garden now much more like a social network than it's prior iterations when it was an indispensable tool for finding new content on the web.
- mo_42 3y agoEvery thought we express, happens in the context of something we've read or discussed etc. before. For example, this comment is based on the original text linked, the comments here on HN, and my own thoughts. I think a writer should include all the references that lead to their thoughts expressed in the texts. This way the reader could follow these links to explore more adjacent topics. To me, it seems like the ecosystem of small website could improve on that. I'd rather explore other writers based on some topic than on a blogroll. In scientific writing this has a long tradition called related work. In some fields it degraded a bit into a section that merely lists all the works that should be named rather than a deep discussion of their contents. Obviously, this is also the original idea of Berners-Lee for the web. A good example that comes to my mind is this: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-ai-scaling https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus-on-a...
- rakoo 3y agoI'm not a fan of a bland list of websites, because it feeds into my FOMO and either I find the courage to click on all the links to add them to the pile of I-will-read-this, or more likely I realize I will never have the time to do it and just close the website. A better model is to have a list of bookmarks, to specific pages if needed, with a small description of why it's worth looking at it. That's the model of shared bookmarking behind shaarli (and others before it), and it's much more amenable to serendipity: I can subscribe to your rss feed, you probably don't add an entry every single day so I will have time to look at it, and I'll get to discover other websites.
- brianpan 3y agoThat's exactly how I used to do it- categorized links with descriptions. Once that takes off, we can scrape bookmarks list and descriptions. We assign webpages with lots of incoming links as more interesting (bonus if it's updated often). A "page ranking" so to speak. Then everyone can discover pages based on simple searches. Has anyone else thought of this?
- rakoo 3y agoYour sarcastic description of the web shows exactly why TFA exists: by using such tasteless metrics everything can be easily gamed to always the same site, always the same format. And I don't know what I want to discover, so I can't search for it. You're actually making the point against your own view.
- brianpan 3y agoI'm just pointing out we had all this before in the 90's, we loved it, and it didn't work. What's different this time? We REALLY want it this time? The article doesn't point out anything that hasn't been tried. You're telling me that bookmark links is going to solve it?! Maybe we can pay money for discovery instead of paying with our eyeballs, but do people even want the small web enough for it to work? I do, but I highly doubt enough other people do. And even if a high enough threshhold of people want it to work, what's going to stop the SEO/gaming arms race that happened before? To me, it looks like the same problems of social media and eventual enshittification. I think despite the best intentions we had, this is the reality of the web (or maybe the reality of humans, or maybe the reality of capitalism).
- nonethewiser 3y ago> Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. I do like this idea. But it begs a few questions: - Where? - And then what? The problem statement is that its hard to discover small websites. If I publish my bookmarks on my small website then the problem has not been solved. It seems like there needs to be some aggregator which of course ventures directly into the problem of centralized distribution and algorithms making the little guy undiscoverable. Whats the solution? A site with “friends” whose lists you can see with no overall aggregation? Personally, I actually think it would be interesting to aggregate these lists. In particular I think it would be interesting to find the most common domains below a certain threshold of popularity. Pretty sure you can do this on google already, although youd have to save the string and copy paste it in all the time.
- QwertyPi 3y agoWe've needed a search engine that excludes the work of corporate giants that dominate our modern internet for a while. It's just never been so clear and dire as today. Interestingly google used to have a per-user, user-controlled domain blacklist that go excised around ~2008 or so—presumably because this would have enabled automated blocking of high-value clients.
- mbforbes 3y agoI like this author's idea of curating bookmark lists, but I think they are most effective when two criteria are followed: (1) keep the list small, (2) write small notes about each entry. For example, the bookmarks list the author links to (https://www.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks/ https://www.marginalia.nu/links/bookmarks/) has 48 URLs annotated only by category. That's too many for my tiny brain to handle and I move on. A webring like Hundred Rabbits' (https://webring.xxiivv.com/ https://webring.xxiivv.com/) has 203 entries. For me, this is in the same category as 48. (It also reminds me of those "Awesome X" lists on GitHub that end up flooded with hundreds of links.) To attempt an example of what I mean, here's the bookmark list I publish on my website: - Bret Victor (http://worrydream.com/ http://worrydream.com/) • interaction and abstraction - Craig Mod (https://craigmod.com/ https://craigmod.com/) • long walks, atmospheric photos - Hundred Rabbits (https://100r.co/site/home.html https://100r.co/site/home.html) • physical and digital minimalism from first principles, extensively documented - Mu-An Chiou (http://muan.co/ http://muan.co/) • rhythm, space, movement, color - Steven Wittens (http://acko.net/ http://acko.net/) • 3D sorcery (edit: formatting)
- brynet 3y agoOn my personal website [0] I've kept a small list of "mildly interesting sites" which just gets duplicated onto each page (all static HTML), but it feels like I've only ever removed dead links from it and rarely added anything. [0] https://brynet.ca/ https://brynet.ca/
- jrmg 3y agoI think that part of this is that small web sites simply are not being indexed by Google at all any more. My ~15 year old blog has, according to Google Search Console, 15 indexed pages, and 174 ‘Discovered - currently not indexed’ pages. The number of indexed pages is going _down_ over time, despite occasional new posts. The Search Console page says “Examine the issues […] to decide whether you need to fix these URLs.” But about the only suggestion I can find is just to wait for them to be indexed - which doesn’t seem to ever happen. I wouldn’t argue my blog is the best or most exciting content in the world or anything, but I can’t believe anyone would say it’s worse than the often-incorrect SEO-informed duplicative nonsense that fills the first few pages of Google search results for anything technical nowadays.
- h1fra 3y agoIt's even worse on brand new website, google will index your homepage and ignore everything else unless it has some external links. Even with a good sitemap and good usability score.
- michaelbuckbee 3y agoThis is a well known phenomenon of "Google Jail" where to combat spammers just setting up hordes of new sites, getting dinged and then migrating to a new domain, Google penalizes new sites until they've been "aged" for some number of months.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoDunno if it's about age so much as it is context. Like my search engine does something similar. The actual text on the pages are only a fraction of the signals used by search engines to put a website to put the putative search result into context. It's really hard to rank a website if there are no links or traffic to it.
- ushercakes 3y agoIt's not just you - this is widespread. I run a SaaS to help site owners get their content indexed. We're seeing an influx of users, I think a lot of the issue is simply because of AI. New web page additions were pretty linear over time, and then AI copywriting tools came out. Suddenly page additions basically went "hockey stick"/vertical. Now, you can publish thousands of pages in a few minutes, and it's created a huge backlog in Googles crawl queue, thus increasing overall time to get indexation, disproportionally affecting smaller sites.
- Aerbil313 3y agoThere is a big software discoverability crisis, not just websites. The same software gets reinvented a thousand times a day by the industry because that battle-tested FOSS software is lost in the depths of the internet. Idk what will solve it. My bet is on a specialized web-scraped database specialized for OS software with an LLM frontend.
- s17n 3y agoIs it true that "traffic is evaporating" for smaller sites? I'd love to see some numbers. Keep in mind that overall traffic on the internet was orders of magnitude lower back in the heyday of quirky personal sites.
- jamesfinlayson 3y agoMaybe - I run a few small sites, but the two main ones have seen increased traffic over time (I make some effort to be discoverable and add new content). I think that Google's recent index pruning could be a factor though - a small percentage of pages on one of my sites have become unindexed for no obvious reason - I assume others are seeing something similar, and it's possibly accelerated if content isn't being updated regularly.
- rambambram 3y agoI added a bookmark list (or call it a webring or a blogroll) to my website software Hey Homepage (link in bio) and I call it 'shared links'. Indeed, nothing more than a list of interesting links. I also present this list as an OPML file and I dubbed this whole concept 'Other People's Meaningful Links' (not my own abbr). This kind of thing is so crucial for discoverability, I want to do more with it and I hope this topic gets discussed more on HN.
- starkparker 3y ago> A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”. > The model is as recursive as it is simple. There is nothing preventing a list of bookmarks from linking to another list of bookmarks. This + friend-of-friend commenting on shared bookmarks = Google Reader's "Note in Reader" bookmarklet + friends shared items[1] feature. For the people who used shared items, the RSS feed reader part of Reader was just another way to generate shared items. The shared items list could be public and positive engagement was broadly open, but commenting on shared items was limited to designated friends and their friends. This made the sharing aspect sticky. Sharing and commenting on items helped you expand your friends list, which exposed you to more shared items, for which you could be the aggregating conduit that shared unique items (including bookmarklet-captured items with no corresponding feed) for people on the other side of the friendship wall. Those groups grew organically and were socially insulated from abuse. By definition everyone involved knew or had to vouch for each other, even without real names. And aside from blocking individual users, severing a mutual friend connection effectively cut them off from visibility to others. It was fantastic.[2] 1: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-readers-gets-more-social-with-social-sharing-features-and-we-love-it/6846/ https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-readers-gets-more... 2: https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network https://www.buzzfeed.com/robf4/googles-lost-social-network
- higgins 3y agoI've noticed this too. My art/advertising project (https://24HourHomepage.com https://24HourHomepage.com) let's people advertise themselves for free. Lots of people promote their IG/Twitter/Tiktok etc. I'm not surprised given how much "influencer economy" marketing there is (also, I advertise the site on Tiktok/IG/YT) but I'm over-joyed when I see good ol' fashioned websites. Even then, they seem to be older sites :/ Other good sources for small website discovery: - https://cloudhiker.net/ https://cloudhiker.net/ - https://theuselessweb.com/ https://theuselessweb.com/ - https://www.boredbutton.com/ https://www.boredbutton.com/
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- renegat0x0 3y agoMy own repositories: - bookmarked entries https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database - mostly domains https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database - all 'news' from 2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 https://github.com/rumca-js/RSS-Link-Database-2023 I am using my own Django program to capture and manage links https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive https://github.com/rumca-js/Django-link-archive.
- permanentacc 3y agoInstead of putting links to interesting websites on a bookmarks page you could link to related content within the main body of the article itself. You or I don’t know if I’d want to read more about a website about ‘humanities’ or ‘misc’, but since I’m reading through this article you know I’m willing to read about small websites. So, if you have read anything relevant about small website discovery, Gemini, or web rings, you could link to it from where you mention it in the article.
- PumpkinSpice 3y agoThis is actually a very lucid way to frame this. People love to complain that "Google is useless now," but it's pretty clearly not the case if you look at how most people use search. What they usually mean is "nobody can find my interesting hobby projects and I can't find theirs." And that definitely tracks. As a person who poured a lot of energy into completely free, non-commercial educational content, it grinds my gears that there are 2-3 pages of derivative blogspam peppered with affiliate links - and increasingly, LLM-generated drivel - ahead of me. What I think we get wrong is demanding that others fix it for us, though. Yeah, it's the cool part of the internet, but it's a commercially insignificant one. What the article is trying to do - pick a specific practical solution and lead by example - is probably better. Even if it's a rehash of what we tried in the pre-Google days.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- shoknawe 3y agoThis is a great post. I have about 10000 links saved in Pinboard over the past 10 years and to figure out how I could share.
- rambambram 3y agoRight now, I use Hey Homepage myself to follow around 850 other websites and their updates. I follow some computer and car news. I follow some 'dev blogs' with weekly or monthly updates. I follow some timelines from people that post shorter but more frequent posts (like Twitter). I even follow some Youtube channels without being exposed to their algorithm. What I'm missing and would like to see more of, are feeds about hobbies/activities other than computer-related stuff. I might be in a bubble or I'm dealing with early adopters, but the only quality feeds I encounter are from programmers who write about... programming. I put my money where my mouth is and added a microblog/timeline to my website about building a bicycle caravan (see theredpanther.org). What I also miss are more 'photo feeds'. Every update in a feed can have a picture included, why not make more use of that!? It sparks some live into the dull text-only format. Adding a photo now and then also makes the webview of the a timeline more interesting. Just as Twitter-posts can have a picture attached. I make extensive use of photos on a niche site of mine about beautiful cars. Go check Artomotive (https://www.heyhomepage.com/site/artomotive https://www.heyhomepage.com/site/artomotive). The technical side of these things isn't new or innovative. And that's the beauty, it's proven technology. No hype, just natural growth. The technology behind 'feeds' (it's called RSS, I call it 'Really Social Sites') is twenty years old now. It's not tainted by surveillance capitalism, commercialism, algorithms, platforms or AI. But to get the most out of it, you have to do some things. Like collecting interesting feeds/websites to follow, clicking to read the whole article, playing the algorithm yourself by curating the stream of content, etc. But if you want to stay sane on a changing internet, it seems the only way.
- activescott 3y agoGoogle buying up Feedburner only to shut it down didn't help the small websites federated via RSS/Atom either. Seems like it was replaced with centralized medium now. BTW Is there a good feedburner alternative out there?
- asimpletune 3y agoIt's hard for small, beautiful websites to get traction. One big issue is engaging with a small audience, like having a commenting system, without imposing an account signup on your readers or having them login with Facebook. What do other HN'ers think about the UX of using email for accepting comments? Sort of like a form submission. Details linking the comment and the parent post could be stored in mailto links. I posted an Ask HN before seeing this post that has more details https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38278697
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWhy do you need comment fields? I always figure, if someone wants to talk to me, they can send me an email, and popular blog posts, like the one we're discussing now, generally end up having comment fields on sites such as Hacker News.
- asimpletune 3y agoWell that's exactly what I mean. Comments fields aren't a requirement, but I disagree that HN and other sites are an acceptable replacement. A much more suitable replacement is like you said, sending an email.
- pkdpic 3y agoWell I'm sold, Im re-adding my links section to my personal site. But this time more links less curating.
- arromatic 3y agoDoes any one know if it is possible to teach a llm to differentiate between a small web website and a commercial one ?
- zackmorris 3y agoNetizens should own the means of consumption. To show how old I feel, my friends and I had a vision for where the web was going in the 90s. We wanted a shareware future where anyone and their grandma could save their MS Word file to a shared drive on their computer and point a domain name at it for a few dollars per year. Then use a real version of PayPal with no transaction fees to accept micropayments. To maybe write casual games priced at $10 and sell a few hundred copies per month to enter pretirement. Or make pottery and sell it themselves rather than on Etsy, and actually get found and paid. Of course that future never materialized, or more accurately was quickly overshadowed by the attention economy which makes nothing and sells nothing. Through that lens, it's easy to see where search engines went wrong. There should have been a public domain database of the web and its metadata like archive.org, but fully indexed and queryable through SQL. Search engines could be built above that with clever queries, but the database would always be available to all of us. Then we could have search that does the opposite of what corporations do, and actually make long tail results the most prominent. Instead we got the ensh*ttification of the very best stuff like Google, bringing the worst aspects of capitalism to what should have been a free human economy of ideas on its way to delivering a moneyless society. I would very much like to work on all of this and help bring us back to the bright future of 1999. I'd also like to write declarative stateless programming languages and AI that actually does people's work for them to get them paid instead of robbing them of their creative opportunities. Basically put real effort and resources into undoing whatever all this is and get back to the real work of solving the prerequisites needed to roll out UBI. Instead like most of you, I'll likely spend the rest of my life throwing all of my energy at the hardest problems with the smallest rewards to make rent. A tragedy of the commons on such a vast scale that we can't even see it. I still have faith that AI will deliver the semantic web and maybe this could all materialize, since human-curated metadata was always a pipe dream. But I worry that the trillion dollar tech status quo will stop this. Mainly because revisionist history has turned what were once deep insights and winning strategies into easily discreditable flights of fancy and idealism. That's why search engines were corrupted in the first place.
- alexashka 3y agoWebsites are last century tech - everything else is a natural by-product of that. If small websites were a good idea, myspace would have won - it was the ultimate 'create your own little website' 'thing'. The real crisis is app discoverability. Unless you're put on the front page by Google or Apple - good luck getting your app to gain traction without giving half your company away to get venture funding to afford to spam people's lives with advertising. That's the real crisis - we don't have discoverability services and rely on spam because the companies that control the internet profit from selling ability to spam people. Websites - I don't even know the last time I visited a new website multiple times (aka none of them have provided any lasting value) - it must've been years ago and I'm on the internet all the time.
- hettygreen 3y agoHow do people find links on the darkweb?
- shams93 3y agoGoogle is also a part of the problem here because everything is automated if Google wanted to help nurture the creative web they could at least feature new sites on web.dev.
- Moggie100 3y agoSomewhat obvious disclaimer that this is my own stab at this a little while back: https://johnvidler.co.uk/blog/federated-web-rings-and-link-sharing/ https://johnvidler.co.uk/blog/federated-web-rings-and-link-s... with its associated search tool: https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph/ https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph/ I tried to come up with a spec for listing bookmarks in an easily handled format for both humans and machines, and just ended up with using .json files; here's mine for example: https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph.json https://johnvidler.co.uk/webgraph.json which all follow a very loose specification. Because it just requires a single file to connect to others using the same system its really easy to implement. I've been slowly pushing for folks I know to add to the sources that the search engine can idly spider, slowly building up a large searchable list of user-selected links.
- helpfulmountain 3y agoThis is kind of blowing my mind, but I'm looking for people discussing the proposal here and can't quite find the valence that seems most potentially viral or self-perpetuating: There seems to be a really exciting incentive to share lots of links, to regularly hit a hotkey to add the current page to a link list, because there is a kind of graph traversal thing that can emerge, akin to recommendation engines spotify or youtube use, whereby your (anonymized) "like history" -- might be interesting to include some metadata, including when it was liked, how you arrived there, whatever -- will connect you with other people who have intersecting likes, and then blow open entire other leaves of search trees you didn't know you wanted. I have this feeling on the net recently where I feel like starved, it just feels so stale and bland, hard to find actually good content, going back to HN or Twitter or Reddit or whatever, these little linear "feeds" with discussions etc. I want a feeling of opening-up, branching, discovery, excitement. I feel like if a bunch of people shared their like histories in a pseudonymous fashion, you could see these fascinating interest clusters emerging and if there was a compelling UI for navigating them, it could really be self-perpetuating and awesome. Sort of like visualizations of LLM embeddings, showing regional clusters of information domains, but with a navigable, social aspect, and where because it's pseudo-anonymous you don't mind running AI recommendation engines on it for you and others. Does this exist? Should it? I would love something like this!
- mattlondon 3y agoWhat is to stop a list of bookmarks not also just being a load of links to spam and astroturfing? You could argue "ah well you have to just use the ones from websites you trust!" But that is basically PageRank when you think about it. So we're back to the same problems. I guess we can't have nice things.
- 101008 3y agoThis might not be the appropriate thread to ask this, but I feel that if I create an Ask HN with just this, nobody will see it and I won't get any responses. I've been running a website for over 15 years, something popular, on a specific topic. It has no ads; I only have Patrons who give me between 100 and 200 dollars per month. I don't get many visits (between 800 and 1200 per day, except on special days with some news where I can get many more). I grew up in the era of web rings and old websites, and aside from being very nostalgic, I would love to go back to that. And I know that if I don't start, others won't either. But I have this constant debate about whether I should do it and follow my desires or what the audience wants. I feel that if I do that, people will stop taking the website seriously. Unfortunately, visitors come to my website, and if they don't see something modern and well-done, they won't take it seriously. So I'm between a rock and a hard place: do I follow my desires and do what I like, knowing that it may cost me an audience? Or do I adapt to trends to try to get more visits and new readers? I don't know if anyone has the answer, but I would like to hear your opinions (any type of opinion is welcome).
- sideshowb 3y agoWhat do you want from your website: side hustle or hobby? You're allowed to enjoy stuff without making money...
- 101008 3y agoSorry - I gave the example of the Patrons to give an idea of how much people consume me. I don't do it for the money - I invest a lot of money in fact, paying contributors, etc. I just want to be an important voice in this topic and have some kind of influence.
- sideshowb 3y agoYou could have it both ways with a prominent "retro mode" button to let users switch css?
- chiefalchemist 3y agoCan't you do both? Stick with an aesthetic your visitors expect, but also add web rings and other feature that are throwback-y but styled to look new? It's hard to say without being able to understand your visitors, their expectations, and how much wiggle room that leaves you to be you.
- kazinator 3y agoA billion small websites cannot be discoverable all at once. The search engine is an extension of the pop culture treadmill. It determines what is popular. Some sites inherently deserve to be popular, like "horses' mouths" primary sources of important information. For others, it's just a popularity crapshoot. It's the same like in music or anything else. A million equally talented singers cannot all simultaneously get to be popular idols; you cannot introduce that many people to a nation. At some point it's a lottery. That doesn't amount to a "crisis".
- marginalia_nu 3y agoThere are definitely more web surfers than there are web sites, so reasonably speaking, most of them, at least the ones built by human beings, should be able to get at least a modicum of traffic. The reason we have such concentration of popularity today is that we use popularity to direct traffic. That starts feeding into itself fairly rapidly, and the result is inevitably that the same few websites eat virtually all of the traffic.
- defanor 3y agoI like this approach, more than webrings: it forms a graph, rather than a linked list, which is more reliable, and basically what the "web" metaphor is about. So I both have a "links" page on my homepage, and trying to link relevant resources from public notes. Embedding RDFa metadata seems potentially useful for forming a graph and helping with exploration as well, but it does not seem to be used much.
- ss64 3y agoThe difficulty with this is linkrot. It is not just that links break, but they change into content farms or domain squatters and unless you are constantly checking them, your neat collection of links quickly becomes useless.
- tmnvix 3y agoI've recently thought that a return to site directories might be overdue. Possibly something based on the dewey system. If I'm interested in making shoes, I want to see a list of relevant sites (or videos, etc) that have been vouched for (possibly with comments) by actual humans. Obviously rating/review abuse is a hard problem, but imagine if most subreddits had a list of quality sites as determined by users of the subreddit. Then imagine it without the reddit bit.
- jeffreyw128 3y agoCheck out http://metaphor.systems/ http://metaphor.systems/ - neural embeddings based search that is really good at finding the longtail of high quality content. Really good for finding personal pages, niche blog posts, etc.. Algorithm doesn't at all weigh website popularity explicitly. (Disclaimer: I'm one of the cofounders)
- krembo 3y agoAll Facebook and Twitter profiles are the personal websites and blogs of this era. The benefit of having a dedicated "website" is between none to negative.
- rchaud 3y ago> But I’m just going to state that automatic link feeds do not seem to work on HTTP any more. You end up with a flood of astroturfing, vapid click-bait and blogspam (i.e. reddit). This would be true for anything that has a critical mass of users which would make it a target for astroturfers and spammers. The likely reason Gemini has managed to escape that is because it's a text-only alternative protocol that only a very few people would be interested in joining.
- creer 3y ago"Web sites"? Isn't a large part of the useful small web about single projects or pages? And then discoverability is what HN does - although scalability is not there. That is, it's not all that important that someone has a personal site with travel photos. If in there they have 3 awesome reviews and summaries of economics books then I'd like to find THOSE. There is no or there should be no obligation of consistency, body of work, or overall project in discovering worthy single essays. Something like "long form cooperative bookmarking"?
- p4bl0 3y agoI feel like less and less small personal website owners maintain a list of links to other personal websites they like. That's too bad because I think this is a fantastic way to discover those parts of the web :). Here is my link list: https://pablo.rauzy.name/links.html https://pablo.rauzy.name/links.html
- lencastre 3y agodelicio.us or whatever how many periods were
- pilgrim0 3y ago“curated link directories were a thing back when the Internet was in its infancy, but the task of maintaining such a directory is a full time job” Here’s the economically viable answer. It could be a job in the same sense as a YouTuber. I imagine lists being distributed through releases, not an infinite, always-on feed. Releases would not consist of links only, but actual context. A well known curator could use his reach to leverage smaller projects, the political factor of course would be present. It’s not so different than what people already do on social networks, and that’s a good sign. The main difference would be that the linked content would be sourced from around the web, not only from within a particular network. Ad business could also flourish in this context. Ads can be really useful. For people with interest in a given topic, it is valuable to get access to offers regarding the activity. You could have people literally making a living just by thoughtfully wandering on the web and collecting media with a niche public in mind. The mere act of selection from the curator would be an expression of individuality, even more so if they enrich the published volume with their view. It would reach a point where you would simply submit your content to the curator network, bypassing search engines entirely. I would also add that a fully curated internet would feel extremely safe, since you’d always know what to expect from the sources you subscribe to, and also considering media would flow downstream in a parallel fashion, so no intersection of undesirable content. It would be beautiful if it all happened through a torrent or torrent-like protocol.
- realaether 3y agoThis reminds me of Dense Discovery (https://www.densediscovery.com/ https://www.densediscovery.com/) and Tom Scott's newsletter (https://pad26.aweb.page/subscribe https://pad26.aweb.page/subscribe).
- MentallyRetired 3y agoReal question: Could machine learning be used to identify these sites to a high degree of accuracy, with crowd sourced human moderation denying the false positives to help further train it? Disclaimer: I know very little about machine learning.
- iteratethis 3y agoThe small website problem is not too different from the small social media account problem. Most people on social media get zero traction. Barely any views, likes, engagement. Almost all traffic goes to a very small group, and not just that, the big account has a snowball effect. They are ranked higher, thus seen more, thus followed more, and so on. The algorithm is basically incorrect in that it keeps rewarding something that was already rewarded. You can't say that this channel deserved it most for the simple reason that the rest wasn't even seen at all. In fact, even if you'd list 3 accounts below each other that we hypothetically consider to be of identical value, the one on the top will get 80% of the followers/engagement. And that's why blogrolls and link directories also do not help.
- LAC-Tech 3y agoI was actually thinking about this the other day - the approach is much simpler and more scalable than web rings. and I can remember it being everywhere in the 2000s. Found a lot of webcomics that way. They weren't called "bookmarks" though. Wracking my brain to think what it was usually called.
- LeonB 3y ago“Blogroll” was the name for your list of other blogs you like, and was put into an OPML file.
- ajxs 3y agoI'm a big advocate of The Small Web[0], and care deeply about the internet being a creative space. Something to keep in mind is that the way people use the internet has changed completely since the days that small, independent websites were the norm. When I first started using the internet in the late-90s, if you wanted to find information you would probably end up reading a page curated by a single person, devoted to a single topic. I remember having favourite sites devoted to bands I loved. Now, the main resources for information are collaborative platforms like Wikipedia. These days, if I want to find lyrics to a song I'll probably find them on genius.com, rather than someone's lovingly crafted fanpage. These days I can just right-click 'Search for <term>', and I'll have an answer within seconds. Even though this has taken a way a lot of the creative, human aspects of the internet, I think that the ease at which people can retrieve information on-the-fly from known sources has made the internet a much more powerful tool. I think what's missing is our desire to actually look for, and find creative spaces. Having said this, I'm not giving up on the small-web. I run https://webri.ng/ https://webri.ng/ which is a platform people can use for hosting webrings. 0: A term that I borrowed from Parimal Satyal: https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/ https://neustadt.fr/essays/the-small-web/
- krapp 3y agoI don't know. I feel like creative output on the web is orders of magnitude greater now than it ever was on the 90's web. Unless you limit "creativity" to the design of custom HTML and CSS. Yes, that output exists primarily on services and yes that presents issues with control over data, data mining, AI training, etc. But the premise that the internet is no longer a creative space simply because people use it as a tool to publish to, rather than an expression of programming and design in and of itself, to me seems to miss the forest for the trees.
- ajxs 3y agoYou make a great point. You're totally right that the total amount of creative content on the internet is much, much bigger now. That is something worth appreciating. I've found some really amazing artists on social media platforms, and even been able to reach out and collaborate with them. So it's not all bad, of course. What I'm mostly concerned about though is the website as a personal, creative, individual space. This doesn't really need to be a user writing their own visually creative HTML/CSS. I just feel something of creative value is lost if the entire human aspect of the internet is viewed through the window of social media.
- nialv7 3y agoIn this article: people rediscovering the concept of a blogroll.
- _anti_meh 3y ago[dead]
- yuz 3y agoThink of small websites like those cool, hidden gardens you sometimes find in a neighborhood. They're not famous, but when you find one, it's special. They're made with care, not for fame. It's like that with our little websites. We build them for fun, for ourselves, and for the few who might wander in and smile at what they see. That's what makes them awesome, not how many people visit
- _anti_meh 3y ago[dead]
- aoi_sora 3y ago[dead]
- filato 3y agoI'm using a similar service - https://pinboard.in https://pinboard.in to both managing my own bookmarks and to browse other users' public bookmarks of interest by tag or using built-in search functionality. Quite useful imo. I do remember so-called "Web Rings" and still think they were a nice idea (among others, passed away), and it seems to me, del.icio.us and then pinboard.in are one of a few options we still have to make smaller sites remain "visible"
- thiodrio 3y agoAll links should be tagged. Tags may help to create multidimensional category structure
- giantrobot 3y agoI think there's one major root cause of this: Google. Search has two problems, relevancy to a query but then the sorting of results returned. In Google's early days they emphasized sorting by relevancy/authority related to a query. If you had the foremost site about stunt kites on the web searches for stunt kites would find your site. But then Google started weighing results for recency. If you wrote a textbook worth of prose about stunt kites and published it all in 2000, there was little need to update the content unless amazing new stunt kite technology was introduced. But when Google started weighting for recency, the definitive stunt kite site dominating results in 2000 started dropping down the ranks for no other reason than its pages didn't have recent dates on them. This has led to a bunch of problems. For one it punishes anyone that dared to make a website and then not constantly update it. There's no new seasons of Space Above and Beyond so there's no reason to constantly update a fan site about the show. Second it punishes sites for maintaining a history of content. It's super difficult in Google to search for a topic more than a few years old unless it's got a Wikipedia page. Third it helps bullshit SEO where some old blog post just gets a new timestamp and maybe a few words changed and Google thinks "oh boy brand new content!" This powers combine to form a shit Voltron with an inability to find anything that doesn't abuse the shit out of Google. There used to be some good ways to aid in discoverability before everyone decided XML was icky. If small web search engines actively support such things they could greatly help discoverability. The Friend of a Friend[0] (FOAF) project is a decent solution to this problem. Not only could you define data about yourself but links to other people. It was useful in that it made distinct the difference to a person's homepage and blog which might not be the same. The Sitemap XML spec[1] is useful for providing a map on your own site to the benefit of crawlers. [0] http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/ [1] https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html https://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
- michael_forrest 3y agoIt’s a fine proposition but in practice, with a list of bare urls, the author asking me to click on random links with no context[1], and I have to override my instincts, shaped by decades of internet use, to be very wary of doing so. I don’t think this works without a summary provided with each link. Or even just fetching the open graph tags or something. [1] it’s not a 100% fair test because I don’t have a relationship with the author, so there is no trust to leverage. But I don’t even like clicking on bare links in WhatsApp messages from close friends without a word or two on why I should do so! There’s always a possibility someone’s account is compromised, and without being able to evaluate that the link is accompanied by their “voice”, I err on the side of caution and usually ignore…