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Where Have All the Websites Gone?

• FerretFred 3y ago
  Interesting .. I run a self-hosted web site mainly for my own amusement and education, and my blog mainly focuses on tech that I'm okaying with. I largely ignore my access logs but the other day I had a look and found that 80% of my traffic comes from RSS feed aggregators, and subsequent blog post accesses are almost exclusively tech-related. I'm hoping for more real human visitors in 2024 :)
• deadbabe 3y ago
  For discoverability, linktree type portals in your bio is a great way to send people to your personal blog that they probably wouldn’t have found by any another means.
• fooker 3y ago
  There is a popular conspiracy theory called the 'dead internet' theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory While it was conceived a while ago, the internet does seem to be going that way. I recently visited a popular C programming forum I used to frequent a decade ago, and was surprised to see a huge increase in bots, and almost no organic discussions or content.
• CynicusRex 3y ago
  My shout-out page: https://www.cynicusrex.com/shoutout.html https://www.cynicusrex.com/shoutout.html
• kderbyma 3y ago
  search engine's stopped focusing on search and behind the scenes became select engines and they would do the searching in advance. this was probably sometime around 2012 when the first big hacking scandals on the web that were causing mainstream media to focus on them and those places were routinely pointing out using basic search modifiers in Google to find. Google pulled all the useful operations and neutered their search functionality. Then they worked with a variety of different interest groups to steer the discussions and search results online for optics and political reasons and actively started to monitor and change search queries and inject not just ads but additional content based on various factors.
• teofimo98 3y ago
  [dead]
• japanman185 3y ago
  [dead]
• nickweb 3y ago
  I think that as the author notes, we have gone. And I think it’s because we grew up. We don’t have the spare time like we used to, which, inevitably means we don’t access same sites, depriving them of visitors and relevant revenue. We’ve gone.
  • dt3ft 3y ago
    We’ve gone, but replacement never came. They got stuck on twitter, discord, tiktok, twitch, snapchat. Websites are difficult to build for the average Joe. Having a personal website doesn’t seem to be cool anymore. The number of followers on platform xyz seems to be the thing today. Lets hope the trend dies out and personal websites become cool again.
    • Baldbvrhunter 3y ago
      it is the centralisation of visitor count widgets, guestbooks and web-rings on geocities
    • lurker616 3y ago
      It's like saying, I hope the new pop music trends that all the kids are listening to dies out, and 80s rock becomes cool again. It just isn't gonna happen.
      • dt3ft 3y ago
        I think you’re right. It is likely never going to happen.
        • krapp 3y ago
          Except 80s rock is cool again. A lot of people here are still thinking with a pre-internet mindset, where because pop culture was mediated by the distribution of physical media or broadcasts at specific times, awareness of certain genres of music and pop-cultural touchstones was strictly gatekept by time, and trends were distinctly linear and generational. But now all of that is discoverable at the same time. "the kids these days" aren't limited to what's trendy now, and it isn't more difficult to find 80's music than it is the latest tik-tok. And faux-nostalgia (neostalgia?) seems to be a constant pop human culture (indeed, much of it is manufactured by the corporations that control pop culture.) There are whole genres of new music like vaporwave and aesthetic movements that incorporate (at least a vague idea of) the 80s. People watch old shows from the 80s and 90s on Youtube. They look back on a time they never participated in as if it were a golden age of low-tech simplicity. Of course, the general rule is things become cool again after 20 years to now I guess that would be... the millennium? As far as personal websites go, the biggest reason the aren't likely to make a comeback is simply that hand-coding HTML and running a webserver has no utility for most people. Even considering all of the negatives of social media and centralization (which, let's be honest, is the fault of many of the people now complaining that the web is no longer cool) the model of software as a service allows people to publish to the web far more easily. And who knows? "the kids these days" are as aware of the dangers of social media as anyone, that's why they won't be caught dead on Facebook or Twitter, they're all on Discord now or wherever. Maybe personal websites will catch on too just because of retro nostalgia as well.
• plastic3169 3y ago
  Website is great if you want to publish a document. Collect information in one place. Most of the daily stuff is just human communication better served by forums, tweets, images, news, e-mails, chats, tik toks etc. These natively work better in apps or app like sites where the information comes and goes gets lost or never even gets discovered. If we worry about the information siloing up we should build communication web thats not owned by big corps. It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve.
  • meinheld111 3y ago
    > It’s like the open source side stopped building the protocol after web 1.0 was finished and left all the emergent use cases for start ups to solve. Interesting take
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      I'm not sure it's true exactly - OSS had email as one type of messaging, and IRC as another. The problem is that email lacks instant-ness (and for a long time you couldn't send larger files as attachments), and IRC lacks, or lacked, rich functionality. Messaging seems to just require more hardware, so the significance of whether the software is OSS or not is reduced.
      • didntcheck 3y ago
        I'd say IRC is a good example of one of the flaws of FOSS culture - the tendency to get cemented on the first working minimum viable solution, but then become too ossified to ever improve on it. IRC was great for its time, but it doesn't have remotely the minimum set of features the average person expected of a messenger solution 10 years ago. After the initial success of FOSS in chat protocols, almost all of the improvements came from commercial software, and it was too difficult to coordinate introduction of new features across all the implementations And a lot of this is not even technical, but the cultural issue of scorning anyone asking for those features and claiming those use cases are just for teenagers. Real men just use plain ASCII and no multimedia apparently. Only after its lunch was soundly eaten did we finally get IRCv3, way too late, and still with little support. The reason a lot of younger developers are using Slack and Discord isn't because they're stupid kids, but because their requirements aren't met otherwise, and they're not going to constrain themselves to 90s tech out of stubbornness (to be clear I'm not accusing you of that attitude! I'm commenting on others I've seen many times over the years)
• mym1990 3y ago
  Not only has the content become fairly centralized, many of the sites that you might go to find things like...recipes, or guides, or direction on something...are absolutely littered with ads. It is no trivial task to scroll through these metaphorical garbage cans looking for that one tidbit of information that will help you, mobile especially. And to some degree, I get it. The incentives that got is to today are all pointed towards an ad based world, so part of me just laments the feeling of seeing more of these kinds of blogs. /rant
  • yard2010 3y ago
    Tip: ublock origin on PC, vivaldi browser on android. No more ads
    • Moru 3y ago
      And the few pages that stop working probably weren't good for your time management anyway.
    • mym1990 3y ago
      You're missing the forest for the trees. I don't want to download a bunch of crap so that I can avoid seeing other crap. Eventually the providers will find a way around the crap I installed with more crap, you get the idea. It is the world we live in, dominated by advertising at every nook and cranny that is disturbing.
      • cybrox 3y ago
        In general, yes. But I've been using uBlock origin on my PC for years now and recently started using it on Firefox for Android as well (they support addons now) and I don't really recall any time where ads slipped through. Of course excessive advertising and counter measures are always a cat and mouse game but this is once instance where I can blissfully ignore it as a user very easily.
      • Minor49er 3y ago
        So you don't like seeing ads, but don't want to use freely-available tools that will remove them from websites? Digital ads are the easiest ads to remove from one's life
• cgearhart 3y ago
  I have been feeling this quite acutely for several years now, but it does seem like it’s been accelerating. In my head I’ve been blaming LLMs—appification was already driving content into silos, but the locks came out quickly this past year as the silos realized they were giving away very valuable data for free. I guess the sad part for me is that the internet mostly feels like a waste of time at this point—everything is designed and optimized to maximize “engagement” (ie monopolizing your attention) and that’s not well-aligned with being _useful_. Cookie banners, paywalls, spam—everywhere. Mobile sites are practically unusable—half page banner ad at the top, video ad auto playing underneath it, ad network drawer sliding up from the bottom, interstitial ads in the content itself, a popup over the page asking you to sign up for an account, a chat bot in the corner, and a “continue reading” fold mid page. It’s just…not fun anymore.
  • zilti 3y ago
    I wonder what it will be like in a few years. How much worse can it get? Will the web be a desolate wasteland with a few social media pages people "flee" to, while the more tech savvy will start using alternative platforms again, like Gemini, IRC, etc.?
    • cgearhart 3y ago
      In the worst case I could see content platforms start competing on those terms and a resulting winner-take-all consolidation to the point that “the internet” becomes synonymous with WinnerPlatform. (This has already happened to some degree with things like government offices making official announcements exclusively on closed platforms like X or Facebook.) There will always be nerds and hackers who have small personal sites, but the internet would be falling short of its potential if, for example, you needed a Facebook account to participate in government.
      • zilti 3y ago
        A bit ironic that the very thing the web freed itself from already once (walled gardens from the likes of AOL) now comes back again much stronger.
• cousin_it 3y ago
  Yeah, I also like the idea of linkposts. I read some bloggers who make regular linkposts with a bit of personal flavor, and it's one of the nicest things about the web today. Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. But now it seems everyone's trying to craft their online presence to maximize attention. For example Instagram is no longer a social network, it's a self-promotion network. Getting likes is not socializing.
  • shiroiuma 3y ago
    >Another maybe related question is, where have all the social networks gone? It used to be that people wrote about their life on the internet and other people read it. That fell out of favor when too many people's lives or relationships or employment were ruined by this. People are more savvy now and know the risks of posting their personal info on the internet for the world to see.
  • JKCalhoun 3y ago
    Evil Mad Scientist have a monthly (well, maybe not every month) link post. https://www.evilmadscientist.com https://www.evilmadscientist.com
    • pomian 3y ago
      Hey! What a cool collection of links. It's a perfect HN rabbit hole!
• miramba 3y ago
  I believe that there are still a lot of interesting, non-commercial websites out there. I just can‘t find them anymore. SEO dominates literally every search I try. I also tried Bing, DuckDuckGo, you.com and many more - same result. I think a search engine that excludes every website with google analytics, ad networks and amazon affiliate links would be great. Anyone know of such a thing?
  • wt__ 3y ago
    Have you tried Kagi? It's subscription and doesn't really do what you suggest, but it's results are good, you can prioritise and block specific sites and they have a project called Kagi Small Web: https://blog.kagi.com/small-web https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
    • gmiller123456 3y ago
      Been trying Kagi for a few months now. Sadly, I don't notice much difference from Google. For example, this past weekend I tried to work on learning some WebGPU stuff. The search results were filled with WebGL, WGPU, Three.js, Babylon, etc. stuff. The page might have contained "WebGPU" in a sidebar or something similar, but weren't about WebGPU at all.
  • azornathogron 3y ago
    You may want https://search.marginalia.nu/ https://search.marginalia.nu/ It gets mentioned here on HN quite a lot.
    • prox 3y ago
      What a magnificent search engine, love it. It brings back those wandering days of link clicking reading about people and their passions. No stupid “and here’s where you sign up” and annoying things like that.
    • ghosty141 3y ago
      Really missing a way to sort by recency, that would make it far more useful for me.
• dikei 3y ago
  Isn't this how we classify web "generation"? * Web 1.0: independent websites, self-maintained, hard * Web 2.0: hosted platforms like blogs and social networks, easy, but rely on providers * Web 3.0: promise to free users from the platform providers but are mostly crypto scam currently.
  • cpburns2009 3y ago
    No one seems to remember the original web 3.0 was the semantic web from almost 20 years ago. It in part enabled the news feed aggregation of modern social media.
  • bdcravens 3y ago
    Web 3 as you described it never existed. I think Web 3 is more the TikTok and other mass content tools. Still dependent on their parties, but it's shifted to more access to rich content and more access, rather than the curated pinhole view of "posts", especially when it comes to live feeds.
    • nottorp 3y ago
      > Web 3 as you described it never existed. But it's been talked about this way a lot. Think of the ... in Rust posts but replace it with ... on the blockchain. Btw where are the ... in Rust posts? They've been replaced by ... with AI?
    • mcv 3y ago
      I would really like web3 to go back to distributed networks. Fediverse and all that. I guess cryptocurrencies fit in there too; I guess web3 would have its light and dark side. But decentralisation would be a nice theme. TikTok isn't really fundamentally different from the stuff we consider web2, is it? (I actually think imposing these artificial "generations" on web evolution is silly, but if we're going to do it, I'd prefer to use it to steer it towards something positive.)
      • ok_dad 3y ago
        I think Web N isn't about the actual tech being used, it's about the way the tech is being used and how it interacts with the real world and our society. Web 1 was HTML informational web sites, maybe some chat rooms and games here and there but not much affect on the real world. Web 2 was/is the "web app" where you can transact various business online, and group into communities and stuff and which is well integrated into our lives. Web 3, I think, is currently being formed and I have no idea what it is, but whomever can figure that out will be the first nrillionaire or whatever. The tech itself is just all the same if/else statements in a different order.
• asicsp 3y ago
  See also: "Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36575081 (1014 points | 6 months ago | 1960 comments)
  • splitbrain 3y ago
    Also https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/ to randomly jump to a post from any of the mentioned personal blogs from that post plus many many more. (close to 3500 personal blogs)
  • carrozo 3y ago
    This could be a nice monthly HN post like the who’s hiring / who wants to be hired ones. “What blogs did you post to in the last month?”
  • pelagicAustral 3y ago
    From the thread: https://dm.hn https://dm.hn still going
• bdcravens 3y ago
  I don't see the TikTokization of the world as necessarily bad - it creates a world of fast publishing with first-class tools, no nerd gatekeeping required.
  • Stranger43 3y ago
    Exept of cause that it creates a bunch of giant for profit gatekeepers manipulating the content stream for maximum profit(for the gatekeeper).
  • mym1990 3y ago
    It also creates a world of nearly unlimited consumption, and the majority of the userbase is on the consumption side, not the publishing side.
  • marginalia_nu 3y ago
    The problem with having a platform like that is the obvious incentive for rent-seeking. In the short term user interests align with platform interests because this creates a rapidly growing user base, but in the long term it's contrary to the platform's best interest to act in the users' best interest, as a large number of users alone does not translate to profit, so what happens is what's happened to Facebook, Reddit, Twitter; basically any mature social media platform still around. They turn themselves to poison.
• keiferski 3y ago
  I share the author's feelings on the old web, but I think this misses a fundamental point about younger people: they don't really read as the default anymore, in the sense of reading longform blog posts/articles/newspapers. You could blame this on the impatience of youth, but I think it's actually more of a fundamental shift of media formats. Websites-as-default have gone away because browsing the web (i.e. reading stuff on websites) has largely gone away for most people. It's easy to forget that reading text is in no way "natural" to the human experience, it's just an old, reliable technology. Video, which functions as a proxy to in-person presence and speech, is dramatically more appealing to the average person than the abstract symbol system that is writing and reading. It would not surprise me at all if a century from now, video is the default format, with text-first things like transcripts redesigned to minimize the downsides of video and replicate the benefits of text.
  • pjc50 3y ago
    I'm slightly alarmed by this, not just because of the decline of literacy and the slower speed of transmission, but the stronger charisma effects through voice seem to me to be a driver of problems. That seems to be why there are so many terrible influencer cult leaders.
    • keiferski 3y ago
      Part of me has the same concerns, as I love books and think reading is critical. However, I also realize that reading and books are a technology that has developed through history, like anything else, and that a yet-unseen format of the future (that incorporates video, text, audio, etc.) may be more effective than reading. I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech.
      • mym1990 3y ago
        " I don't actually think reading is a great way of communication, it's more just evolutionarily fit compared to speech." This is a very baffling thing to say. Its like saying "I don't think fish gills are an effective form of breathing for fish, but it just happened to evolve like that." Reading and writing is an amazing way to communicate things that need to span time. Street signs, postcards, books, literally everything around you that is man made likely has some form of writing on it. Reading/writing obviously has limitations...like it is difficult to interpret tone in many of these HN comments...but that is hardly a nail in the coffin of the form of communication.
• bell-cot 3y ago
  Obviously an imperfect analogy - but the article reminded me of an older acquaintance, describing how the world he lived in became so shriveled and monotonous, as he descended into alcoholism.
  • danielovichdk 3y ago
    I think you touch on something correct. It's not that the websites are gone. It's because the used to be readers has been caught in echo chambers and new trends and can't seem to understand that they are the ones who changed.
  • jjgreen 3y ago
    Beer is one way out ...
• isodev 3y ago
  Apps themselves have undergone a similar transformation. It's OK to have an app for everything but instead today we sort of have a more common format: "login and we let you download the For You page in what looks like an app". For some reason, websites are also trying to be apps, instead of being websites and it feels like both are a side effect of of what the OP describes as the need for the few to maximise revenue on their content.
• aredox 3y ago
  See the same sentiment from Marginalia : https://www.marginalia.nu/log/79-ikea-offramp/ https://www.marginalia.nu/log/79-ikea-offramp/
  • cpeterso 3y ago
    Great analogy from the post: > There is an episode of Star Trek where a character is for plot reasons trapped in a shrinking parallel universe. As time passes, people she knows one by one just vanish and she is the only one who seems to notice. Eventually it gets to an absurd point. She asks if it really makes sense if a ship made for a thousand people would have a crew of a few people, and everyone just sort of like shrugs and looks at her like she’s crazy. That’s basically what the last decade of the Internet. It feels like it’s shrinking. Like parts of it are vanishing.
• Stranger43 3y ago
  It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously. What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform. That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things. Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.
  • notatoad 3y ago
    the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat) without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
  • yreg 3y ago
    > What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
    • Vicinity9635 3y ago
      [dead]
    • robertlagrant 3y ago
      Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  Social-media ate the traffic. A 10 minute video of someone typing on you-tube will capture more views than a well formatted website. Thus, people just started gleaning other peoples static content into low-effort media. These days there are bots that automate this process to make garbage content. Perhaps you meant to ask "why has the signal-to-noise ratio dropped on the modern web?"...
• wt__ 3y ago
  Related reading: Picked up a copy of a book called "We Got Blog: How weblogs are changing our culture" in the university library a few days ago, published in 2002. An nostalgic and interesting, albeit rather random, semi-curated collection of blog posts from prominent, mainly US, bloggers. Tells the story of Blogger too. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/928428.We_ve_Got_Blog https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/928428.We_ve_Got_Blog
• mpliax 3y ago
  Archived version if anyone needs it: https://archive.is/5sxo8 https://archive.is/5sxo8
• Almondsetat 3y ago
  The "old web" is one of the cases in which people forget about absolute numbers and focus too much on relative proportions. There are more independent websites than you could ever visit in a lifetime. Who cares if they "lost" to the social networks relatively speaking.
• lmm 3y ago
  Meh. Something like textsfromlastnight has probably been replaced by a subreddit, and I like it better that way - no custom CSS to get in the way of me reading it (the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way). Yes, these things used to be their own websites and now they're largely not. But usually you wanted the content, not the website, and that's easier than ever to get at.
  • robertlagrant 3y ago
    > the same reason that Facebook won out over MySpace, IMO - you don't actually want all of your friends' pages to look different, you want the design to be something bland that gets out of the way 100%. I had the exact same impression at the time.
  • thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
    meh++
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  I'm going to start writing more, again. I'm definitely stealing this one, “2086© (so I don't forget to change the year) From Jason.”
• INTPenis 3y ago
  I think it's just numbers. Us internet users used to be a minority, and in a very short time a huge influx of new users came online through apps. So relatively if you look at the numbers no one is using websites anymore, but I'd be willing to bet that some of us old internet users still use the internet much as we used to. The websites I still visit are mostly old message boards. And of course I visit a lot of blogs but they're always linked from a message board. I don't subscribe to any blogs but that's just personal preference, I never did before either.
  • cybrox 3y ago
    You're still part of a minority now. Namely the few people that remember what the internet used to be like and still browse it like they used to. For a large part of users, the internet is not websites, message boards or blogs. It's the four or five content aggregation pages that they got started on, because those invest huge sums of money into keeping people on their platforms. (And into SEO to lead them back to their platforms, should they dare to venture out). I think the author is very well aware that message boards and blogs still exist. They just don't have a prominent spot in today's internet world anymore. And you bet if any of them dares to produce quality content, it will be ripped and regurgitated ad nauseam on content aggregators like TikTok and Reddit.
• detay 3y ago
  social media ate it
• detay 3y ago
  social media ate them
• seydor 3y ago
  i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. You just gave away your audience to facebook and tiktok. people are selfish, they like to give feedback and rant about anything. BigTech definitely nudged them away from that and into their garden. Yeah, spam does not scale, but you 'd have to deal with that, things that scale get eaten. The OP's blog would get a lot more engagement if it had a comment form underneat
  • pixl97 3y ago
    >i think it was a mistake for most sites to disable comments. It was not a mistake at all, and you stated exactly why. Spam. Not just spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. Spam. A never ending torrent of shit. An ocean of it. And that's before the mean spirited comments, trolls, outright illegal posts and more. Oh, and if you post anything really controversial, might as well get behind cloudflare now before you get blasted off the internet.
• mazzystar 3y ago
  I share the same sentiment, which is why I created this website: https://www.sublink.app https://www.sublink.app It's not about promoting anything, but rather, I genuinely wish for a platform where everyone can curate their favorite websites and articles, you can read my article here: https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/12/07/sublink/ https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/12/07/sublink/
  • robaxisal 3y ago
    is it selfhostable? or can it only be used on your instance?
• PsyNyde 3y ago
  unrelated to the post but this website is dope <3
• nicgrev103 3y ago
  I used to love a site called 'Stumble Upon' that would take you to random interesting websites. Those were the days.
  • splitbrain 3y ago
    Not exactly the same, but the spirit is similar: https://indieblog.page/ https://indieblog.page/
• benguild 3y ago
  I feel like Wikipedia is one thing that helped take down a lot of topic-specific indie sites or home/about pages. Before, you could make a site about anything and find it via a search engine. That was part of the exciting surprise factor of the old web. Now, Wikipedia coverage is kind of like an expected existence for a lot of things. When Google started to rank Wikipedia very highly for search terms, that was the beginning of this shift
  • ricardo81 3y ago
    Great point imo, not an easy point to make given how altruistic wiki is generally seen. Another angle is Google's algo making people too scared to link out to other sites which was happening around the early 00's.
  • Whoppertime 3y ago
    And this is where we get hybrids. Topic specific wikis. If I want to know about quests in a Fallout game I check one wiki if I want to know about alternate universe Lex Luthors I check another wiki.
    • didntcheck 3y ago
      And of course they themselves have experienced the same phenomenon, with 90% of fandom wikis being absorbed into the blob that is "Fandom (tm)". It's turned fan wikis from what felt like niche non-commercial projects into yet another corporate entity trying to sell me more Marvel movies
      • piperswe 3y ago
        There's been a growing pushback against Fandom (tm), with contributors to quite a few Fandom(tm) wikis moving back to a self-hosted MediaWiki instance. The Minecraft Wiki (https://minecraft.wiki https://minecraft.wiki) is a major example.
    • chasd00 3y ago
      my kids pour over the SCP foundation wiki. All fan made up content, very detailed and a lot of it. It's pretty amazing really what a community has put together and maintained without a profit motive behind it. on an aside, i think a lot of regular websites are considered failures because the definition of success has radically changed. Unless you achieve complete internet domination in your domain then your site is failure.
• mnky9800n 3y ago
  I feel like hacker news is the curated content that the author wants, at least for technology.
• phendrenad2 3y ago
  I think what changed was education. Digging through the internet archive, as I do about 16 hours a day (as an out-of-work RoR dev with a nostalgia problem), I see many sites that look like they were started by highschoolers. And that reminded me that once upon a time, computer literacy in school meant "have the kids put some HTML and PHP on the school webserver". These days, they're probably learning how to crack leetcode or something that won't result in fun websites.
• mrkramer 3y ago
  Commercial web was something wildly new and wildly interesting for all the people that used it because such a thing never existed before but web consolidated over the years and now people find it boring and not that useful. We should support and fight more for the "Open Web" nature of the web and slow down with walled gardens. Speaking of "Where Have All the Websites Gone?", they are most likely dead. There are millions of dead websites that no longer exist on the WWW. I didn't do any formal research or data mining project but my assumption is that there are more dead websites than there are alive websites or in another words websites that exist today on the web. Since history is a passion of my, I think I and others should do more to explore and perhaps revive those websites for the sake of information and knowledge preservation and retrieval.
• blackhaj7 3y ago
  Really enjoyed the post, the recommended sites and the authors general website
• aethertron 3y ago
  A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy. Another reason blogs have languished: discussions come to an end, a point of exhaustion. When everything that's there to be said, has been. Retreading old ground is not the same as posting original thoughts. Different qualities of people do these things.
  • mrkramer 3y ago
    >A personal site is a lonely place. That's why blogs, after an initial burst of creative energy, languish. People nowadays seeking online to fulfil their social inclinations go elsewhere, to the platforms better optimised to harness that social energy. A personal site or blog might be a lonely place in the early days but then came comments section and people started discussing your articles but then came the question of persistence of your profile and I think Disqus is a pretty good web commenting solution to that regard. The biggest problem of big social platforms is content discovery; there is so much content out there that you can not find the content that suits you the best. That's why you see "Discover" feature in every app because they became aware of that problem. That's also why TikTok took off so wildly because they glued together short attention content (short videos) with powerful recommendation system. Like somebody already said, web and social platforms push only new content to you, they are sort of like TVs but there is vast amount of content and websites that are never discovered and visited because the right incentives aren't there to show you old content and old websites.
    • aethertron 3y ago
      The advent of commenting did mitigate the lonesomeness of independent blogging. Then social media sapped away much of that social energy, returning blogging to its natural state of solitude. Bloggers can try to nurture community, but it's a hard task. Maybe the advent of reader-funded blogging will re-energise the practice. I hope it will. Disqus seems good on paper. Seems something like Disqus is in a position to facilitate content discovery: it has ads so it could also add related or recommended links to other stuff in the ecosystem.
• taopai 3y ago
  Good old forums. I am lucky I found one in my own language recently. We are a small community, like 250 active users. Most of it is joking, having a blast, and insulting. It's very funny. For me forums are the best of internet. I don't consider reddit a forum because it has an opaque algorithm. Hackernews is great, but it's threads are very short lived, and it's to big to be a functional traditional forum.
  • HeckFeck 3y ago
    This is what I associate with my best days online. Good old threaded message boards with persistent conversations. They're not completely dead but there are fewer than there were. And newer forum software like Discourse that tries to mimic Reddit or StackOverflow is not the same.
  • smallnix 3y ago
    I always disliked forums. With the groups very tight nit, elitist, and only referring to some garbage search function.
• aaron695 3y ago
  TikTok accounts cover many of those websites, TikTok hashtags cover many of the others. I'd just say most people here are near death and can't learn the new way. The same as some felt lost when the magazines disappeared to websites. The old modeling (miniature) magazines and computer mags were awesome, but we moved on. Some great things were lost, more was gained. Anthony Bourdain website now is Martin Shkreli's TikTok (which is really interesting) Adapt or die.
• amadeuspagel 3y ago
  textsfromlastnight.com still exists[1], but it's not even linked in the article. The websites are not gone, you just have to find and link them. [1]: https://textsfromlastnight.com/ https://textsfromlastnight.com/
• xtiansimon 3y ago
  They still show up at Kottke (curated) and Metafilter (community) from time to time.
  • xtiansimon 3y ago
    LOL. And on HN once in a blue moon, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38945125 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38945125
• bovermyer 3y ago
  My entry into this idea is a web directory for TTRPG generators. https://rpggen.dev https://rpggen.dev I curate this site manually. Source is on Github, in case people want to contribute.
• renegat0x0 3y ago
  Internet is corporate now. Therefore it leads to corporations. Corporations lead to other corporations. Big platforms lead to big platforms. Internet is ad bisness right now. Anything that is not monetized, falls into obscurity. You will not have the scale, budget, readers, followers without big money. It is not a hostile "elite takeover", but it is organic result of big corporations entering the game. You cannot moderate Internet for disinformation. Big brother cannot easily ban "words" "extremism" on the Internet, and cannot control speech. Social media platforms can moderate their contents, can ban people, and control what is being said, what is true, and what is not true. This produce a nice coherent version of world seen by big corporations, but is not entirely true. I think it is beneficial for corporations, elite, big brother to channel all communication through social platforms. Internet cannot be personal and private any more. No corporation will have any incentive for that. It is impossible at personal level to have search engine. It requires corporation, or organization. There are millions, and millions of the lost Internet. Google does not rank it, as it has difficulty to say what is important anymore. Most of the traffic is beyond scope of Google. Does Google knows what exactly goes through TikTok, discord? Probably it has some idea. People themselves have changed. Most of the traffic goes to celebrity photos at Instagram, memes, logan paul videos. Nobody is interested in any form of writing/reading. Most of the Internet users are too dumb to comprehend anything what would interest 'us'. Google creates a Internet bubble for everyone. It is really difficult to find anything interesting. It often leads to mainstream links. Maybe because it is more reliable, less chance of disinformation. Not sure. Internet is a shopping mall right now, more than a place to find Interesting places. Corporations built roads toward their own shops. This starved creative people out of their small nests. Google rolls out EEAT for SEO. What could any blog do to be relevant in EEAT? I think it can do nothing. Internet is dead. Google is potemkin village.
• dividefuel 3y ago
  The causes seem two-fold. One is that most people consume content in apps, so most creators create contents for that audience. TikTok, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, etc are where users are, so it's where creators put their content for visibility. Related to this is, I feel, the switch to mobile, where the more limited UX of the device makes it a LOT easier to just stay in the same app rather than type URLs or manage a ton of bookmarks. For many people who weren't computer literate in the 2000s, they find apps on their phone MUCH easier to use than a browser with mouse/keyboard. The other is the huge rise of SEO spam sites. They dilute search results and waste time. Combined with the first point, there's now far less signal and far more noise than ever, so often looking for websites isn't fruitful. This creates the feedback loop: users aren't looking for websites, so why create content on websites? EDIT: I'll add that I often think of StumbleUpon, which my friends and I really enjoyed using around 2010. It was enjoyable clicking a button and being taken to a random page on the Internet: a funny video, a deep dive on WW2, a quirky page devoted to someone's pet tarantula. The variety of topics and experiences you would encounter were much broader than what you'd see today, where most content follows the same patterns to achieve success for its respective platform. StumbleUpon could not be successful today.
  • chankstein38 3y ago
    I miss StumbleUpon on a regular basis! I feel like now adays it'd just be flooded with spammy garbage sites unfortunately.
  • pksebben 3y ago
    Stumbleupon! What a gleaming ray of sunshine in the vast landscape of the web! I agree with you that it couldn't survive today, but I often wonder why. If I had access to stumbleupon as it was, I would absolutely be using it - but when I try to think about how to reimplement it there are a couple sticking points that I don't have any solutions to: - Engagement: SU lived and died on it's users, a paragon of the crowdsourced model. For it to work you'd have to have it pull enough interesting people from the mire to function - Gaming the system: One of the things that made SU great was that there wasn't so much goddamn SEO out there. If you 'stumbled' on a thing, it was because it was interesting, engaging, funny, or otherwise *actually valuable*. These days, I can't imagine a successful platform *not* getting beleaguered by the SEO vultures.
• karaterobot 3y ago
  I struggle to keep up with all the blogs and niche communities I watch. I spend too much time on websites (like HN). I rarely cannot find a good website about some subject—yes, there is lots of spam. I'm not on any social networks, or TikTok, or anything like that, so maybe I just never lost the connection this author can't seem to find. I don't agree with the premise of the article because it doesn't match my experience, though it's just my experience.
• zubairq 3y ago
  Yeah it does feel like all the websites have gone, it only the static ones
  • JKCalhoun 3y ago
    I found a web page on my drive that I had created, I don't know, maybe two decades ago. For kicks I opened it in a browser (cringe) and for laughs clicked on the links. To no one's surprise they were essentially all dead. Curiously the only one that worked was to a Pixies (the band) site.
• eshack94 3y ago
  > It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends. I digress, but I think the first day of the year in 2009 was Thursday, January 1st, 2009. Well-written post. I share the sentiment and I find myself longing for new ways to find creative/interesting content on the web. Seems like there are too many gatekeepers of content these days and it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least.
  • troupo 3y ago
    After long and boozy night? It might as well be Tuesday :)
    • kridsdale1 3y ago
      For you, that was the worst hangover of your life. For me, it was Tuesday.
  • Swizec 3y ago
    > it's hard to keep up with blogs and niche interests. More difficult than it used to be, at least It is hard to keep up with niche interests! I blame it on being 36 with real responsibilities instead of 22 and in college. I suspect that has a much bigger impact than the state of the web/internet today. My younger more energetic coworkers tell me about all sorts of fun and wonderful things they discover and deep-dive on TikTok. Just as I used to on blogs. The format is different but the variety and serendipity remains. If anything, "kids these days" have way more content and creators than we did.
    • zelphirkalt 3y ago
      Way more content, maybe, but on platforms that are not made for long term retention and curation, but for attention span of a fruit fly and optimized for engagement. The content might get the quick giggle or wow, but then it has passed. TikTok and similar are not the kind of platform that I would search answers to questions on or that I would use to follow a hobby in depth. Perhaps my hobbies don't lend themselves to being represented by TikTok shorts or whatever they call them there.
• rpastuszak 3y ago
  Here's the list of indie web resources to I follow: https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content
• Ellipsis753 3y ago
  My cousin runs a very small home-made html blog. I really like it and it gives me that early 2000s nostalgia. I'm sure he'd be psyched if some people here were to read it. https://deadvey.com https://deadvey.com https://deadvey.com/blog/index.html https://deadvey.com/blog/index.html https://deadvey.com/blog/feed.xml https://deadvey.com/blog/feed.xml
  • LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
    Sorry. No. Tell him something about ergonomics and bad contrast. That color-scheme is a NO-GO.
    • piperswe 3y ago
      I somehow suspect that the poor contrast and readability are part of the aesthetic he's going for.
      • LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
        That's all well and good for him, but not for me. First impression of that site: WTF?! Trying to scroll, have a bright red scroll-bar. WADDYA DOIN' WIFF MY BROWSA, DUDE?! Trying to make sense of the text, having to squint. Switching off uBlock (benefit of doubt, etc.), to see if it messes with some JS/CSS. No joy. Don't care. Tab closed. Done.
  • precompute 3y ago
    Love it, colorscheme and all. It's very legible for me.
• sdsd 3y ago
  i recently created a website: 13channel.crabdance.com we only have a handful of users, feel free to join us. I think it's hard for people to stick around since there are no alerts, subscriptions, notifications, etc. You have to come back to the website and check.
  • zelphirkalt 3y ago
    But what is its mission?
    • sdsd 3y ago
      just for fun - something to do with my digital ocean droplet. it's actually down now since i deleted the droplet and am planning on buying a VPS. probably won't run an imageboard tho.
  • fullstick 3y ago
    It's also hard to stick around when the website doesn't implement HTTPS and is insecure.
    • sdsd 3y ago
      lol. i guess someone on your local wifi might intercept your posting password and delete your post to 13channel! it's an anonymous imageboard with fairly uncontroversial topics. what's your threat model such that https would make you feel safer on 13channel? fwiw i agree, we're gonna implement it soon just as a matter of principle, but it does seem a bit silly - what are you worried about happening? what is there to "secure"?
      • pomian 3y ago
        This thinking, or questioning, is needed everywhere. There is so much security paranoia, that it affects any one, just trying to do something. From setting up a wifi router, to seeing up an email account. Passwords must be used. Walt for 2FA before proceeding. Change your password to include upper lower Roman numerals and at least 5 different fonts... Why? Instead of saying up a website in 15 minutes, there is an hour of preparing to set up a webpage. If I live in the country side, have no neighbors for 50 miles, I must secure my router going to my starlink. Why? Added complexity and regulations, seem to grow around us just as the beurocracies; schools, governments, companies - maybe our lives are just all dependent on the 3rd law of thermodynamics. Higher disorder? I recommend this amazing presentation, questioning the basics, and attitude in teamwork, of the Artemis project: https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=dHI-_EbDzcqJc-vF&v=OoJsPvmFixU&feature=youtu.be https://m.youtube.com/watch?si=dHI-_EbDzcqJc-vF&v=OoJsPvmFix...
• herodoturtle 3y ago
  > 2086© (so I don't forget to change the year) I love this guy.
• simonw 3y ago
  I want more people to have link blogs. I have one in the sidebar of https://simonwillison.net/ https://simonwillison.net/ which I've been running since November 2003. You can search through all 6,836 links here: https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark https://simonwillison.net/search/?type=blogmark I can post things to it with a bookmarklet. It has an Atom feed. It's such a low-friction way of publishing. A lot of https://daringfireball.net https://daringfireball.net works like this too. I also like https://waxy.org/ https://waxy.org/ and https://kottke.org/ https://kottke.org/ for this. I'd love to see more of these.
  • epiccoleman 3y ago
    I love this idea, I've got a ton of links that I was going to add to a post at some point. I like the idea of having a whole separate section on the blog for that, with a feed. Very cool, I'll have to find some time to add something like this to my site.
  • mtillman 3y ago
    have you seen https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory ?
    • LargoLasskhyfv 3y ago
      have you seen https://curlie.org https://curlie.org ?
    • simonw 3y ago
      Hadn't looked since it launched, wow it's looking very healthy! Here's my listing there https://ooh.directory/blog/96nwv6/ https://ooh.directory/blog/96nwv6/
  • sanroot99 3y ago
    I have mine! https://sancoderr.netlify.app/links/ https://sancoderr.netlify.app/links/
  • jassyr 3y ago
    I enjoyed the blog. Where do you find the time to post though, once you're done with work or do you schedule specific time to post?
• sadpolishdev 3y ago
  Internet centralized itself around few corporations, people don't want to selfhost/self publish websites, I have own devlog on github pages, and when I try to convince friends who do interesting things to start writing about them, its always "I'll just post on twitter" or "i'llshow some screens on discord" etc. Internet shrank in recent years greatly, with more and more dead places that are not updated being closed down due to hosting issues or simply lack of interest from original authors. It gets sadder when one of corporation suddenly decides that whole genre of things is not welcomed and/or just simply pull the plug on certain functionality/content. Same goes with old phpbb forums - everyone sits on various discords, and places-pockets of knowledge dies one by one, recently lot of 3d-design related people mourned closure of cgsociety forum.
• tonymet 3y ago
  Thanks to exponential growth there are still more websites than ever. The issue is indexing and how people consume content. For a proof of concept try https://wiby.me/ https://wiby.me/ -- which seems to be curated more like Yahoo's catalog of yore. You can find traditional web content we just need more applications that index it properly. The Google index is dominated by SEO-optimized [sic] clickbait and social media content is well understood to be low bar.
• tonis2 3y ago
  I have been thinking exact same things sometimes, I want to view some random websites, but I don't know many anymore, only some tools, which is great, but not exiting. I think it's cause there's no good Content Management system, there's wordpress, it's still very popular, but kind of bloated and hard so manage. I haven't found any Headless CMS, that I could just self host and attach the data to my website :/
  • garspin 3y ago
    I've switched to self hosted wiki.js for my blog & personal notes. And pocketbase as a headless CMS. I self host it - however free hosting is at pockethost.io
• gmiller123456 3y ago
  I've made the decision to give up app development and go back to plain old webapps. Google's requirement to update the "targetsdk" for every app appears to be a "war on free", as only people making money off their apps are willing to jump through such hoops. I expect the noose to tighten even more as more app developers comply. So rather than fight it, I decided to throw in the towel early. I expect Google will try to walk a fine line of getting the right number of developers to jump ship, but I'd expect to see a lot more hobbiests switching back to web development in the coming years.
  • webworker 3y ago
    This is where I'm at, too. The overhead of getting a mobile app up and distributed is extremely heavy and distracting. I have taken a look at hyperview and tried it out. That's probably the only way I'll ever do another mobile app.
• iamthirsty 3y ago
  Tried to load, got: > Secure Connection Failed > An error occurred during a connection to www.fromjason.xyz. PR_END_OF_FILE_ERROR In Firefox on Windows. Oh, the irony.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• Giorgi 3y ago
  Social networks absorbed most of them, forums went into groups, small corporate websites went into pages and so on.
• aodonnell2536 3y ago
  I agree with many of the sentiments in this article and for the past year or so have had curation in the back of my mind when I use the Internet. Yes, the users are on the big tech apps, but the great majority of these users aren’t interested in niche websites. Many of them began using the Internet for leisure/socializing when they created their first social media app sometime in the mid 2010s. The lack of potential interested users in this space could even be a good thing early on. For those who want to become a link curator, it would be more in the spirit of the cause to not use a something like Linktree, but rather to self host a minimal site with good discoverability. This barrier of entry, though small, may be too much for most people however
• nforgerit 3y ago
  Not sure what web 3.0 will be fought with but web 4.0 will definitely be sticks and stones
• mtillman 3y ago
  There are a lot of fun websites. Start here https://ooh.directory https://ooh.directory instead of your App Store.
• emsign 3y ago
  What's the point of maintaining a website when the big search engines (Google) hides them under tons of SEO crap? You find information on social media now. And that's worse than how you used to find information in search. I've given up hope for the web.
  • runamuck 3y ago
    An anecdote. I craft a hand written, deliberate technical blog and publish monthly. Google tanked my impressions from 3k/ month to 300 last year. I still churn it out though, I just know people won't find me through search any more.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    well if genAI begins to replace search and includes citations like the hypetrain promises then the SEO/AI-EO race starts all over again... so there's that.
• brianzelip 3y ago
  What a pleasure reading the article and following the little trails! Highly recommended!
• revskill 3y ago
  Messing Ads with Search result is just ridiculous of the stupidity of human i've seen. In a decade, i never see any actual useful Ads results to worth it. If you want to show ads, make a dedicated Ads page, and i'll go there to browse your Ads, right ? I go to your search page to search, to save my time, not to waste my time to ignore those useless Ads.
• miuramxciii 3y ago
  https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/about https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/about He is still among us through his words... such a wonderful soul. https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/ https://anthonybourdain.tumblr.com/ "Yesterday I got a call from the outside world but I said no in thunder. I was a dog on a short chain and now there’s no chain." RIP, AB.
• kgdiem 3y ago
  I dread the idea of social commerce and the like eclipsing individual apps because the support experience from these companies is already so poor. I can't even imagine what fresh hell could eclipse the walled garden (social media) inside of the walled garden (app stores). I tried to sign up for Facebook to make a business page and was instantly banned for no reason. My appeal was denied after uploading a picture of myself. It just doesn't make sense from a consumer or SMB perspective to continue to promote this path but most can't afford not to participate. Funnily enough though, on New Years Eve 2023 I was talking to a few people about a website that I'd made. The only criticism that I received was that there was no app... it is a one-time-use experience that takes less than 5 minutes, then you never have to use it again except to check order status. But -- going back to "most can't afford not to participate" -- as I write this I figure that I might as well relent, make the app and start checking into the possibilities with social commerce as to not be left behind screaming about an open internet.
• shuntress 3y ago
  It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge. Most people who want to create and share things (which is almost everyone) need someone else to handle the website for them. Most companies that will handle a website for you do it under condition of implicit exclusivity. Facebook, TikTok, Youtube, etc want their moats to be as large as possible and the content they publish to be as inaccessible (from outside their silo) as possible. [0]https://xkcd.com/2501/ https://xkcd.com/2501/
  • jpc0 3y ago
    > It is too difficult and dangerous to run a website without extremely deep[0] technical knowledge Counter point possibly. Squarespace and its lookalikes... Old school "php webhosters" generally now have "site builders" that are reasonably decent, hell I can buy a wordpress site pre setup with a theme that is automatically kept up to date for next to nothing, around what I would pay for a filter coffe every month. For a blog do you really need more? Being a knowledgeable developer I can spin up 10 such sites using nginx + some html and CSS and spend about 10 minutes every now and then running updates and rebooting for about the same price but for the average user generating your own content has literally become "click these 5 buttons and begin writing"
    • shuntress 3y ago
      Squarespace specifically is positioned much more as a "website for your business" than for your personal space online but they do seem accessible enough. I think you are still overestimating the average user. Is the guy running a pizza shop with pictures of the menu on Facebook going to sit through learning about domain name registration?
      • jpc0 3y ago
        He clearly learnt how to use Facebook, no small feat there... Honestly though someone asked me about developing a website, I pointed them at a local provider and they had a custom domain + email + a template driven website up in literally 5 minutes... They needed to know how to use a credit card and a web browser. Pretty sure there are similar experiences all over, I can't really speak for other countries to be fair and I am not those places target market. I pay for a VPS and deploy whatever I want on it vs the guy that asked me for a website who doesn't even know what a domain name is. There are products for both of us.
• rchaud 3y ago
  We all miss the opinionated blog era of the 2000s, but even if the Buzzfeed-like aggegator sites that replaced them in the 2010s hadn't existed, the blogs were going to die out eventually. Great blogs were always seasonal, in that the best content posted on it was written when the writer was in a particular phase of their life. Once that phase passes, the writing dries up. Great websites therefore have a start and an end. We should be archiving these websites, not telling people to "just post anyway" so that the site doesn't disappear from Google Search. For a Gen Z parallel to this, look to any Reddit thread about how some Youtuber they worshipped a decade ago has either disappeared or is making low-quality content to pump affilliate links. We wouldn't want that happening to our favorite writers of yesteryear. There's no shame in calling time on something. 20 years ago, maddox.xmission.com was my go-to place for rants and laughs. The site is still around, but I've changed, so my interests are elsewhere. Similarly, I can't expect the site's author to still be playing the same character that made me bookmark the site all those years ago.
  • kridsdale1 3y ago
    Maddox is on threads and appears to be the same person. I on the other hand am now a nearly 40yo man with a family and house and career, and not the lol-southpark 12 year old I was when he started.
• LaurenSerino 3y ago
  "Creating content" meant for a platform tends to reduce quality to the lowest common denominator of what will work for that platform. When the algorithm reigns supreme, there's less incentive to try something new. The internet has lost its sense of fun creative trial and error.
• blueridge 3y ago
  I don't know, I've given up on following people across the web. They’ve all got a sickness that compels them to incessantly fidget with their sites: fonts, colors, designs, and About pages change almost weekly. And then they babble on about why they made those decisions. It’s a garden, a stream, a worry board, a playground. It runs on WordPress, now Jekyll, now Hugo, now Ghost. No no, now it’s “handcrafted” HTML and CSS like the old days. It's the same psychosis that prevents people from shutting up about their note taking system, their ideal journal setup, whether they should use a Moleskine or Leuchtturm, yellow or white paper, ruled or blank. I don’t see a “cozy” or “small” web of independent minds on the Internet. I see a group of anxious and nervous and restless people trying in vain to assemble a Self and grasping for meaning where there is none. If you’ve got a personal website, just leave it the fuck alone.
  • rvrs 3y ago
    This comment is so mean-spirited... reading it made me sad. I'm allowed to own so little in this world, so how I present myself online is particularly dear to me. If you don't like my website, you can go find others. What does it matter to you?
    • blueridge 3y ago
      I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just sharing an honest opinion and criticizing a widespread behavior that I've noticed. I've stopped following people because the "housekeeping" posts just kept coming. There's so much focus on digital structures, on the means by which they express themselves or engage their audience, on the colophon, that they forget to make a point or write about anything else. I'm worn down by this kind of chatter, by the hyper-focus on the platforms and the tools instead of the message. It's the same thing with designer portfolio pages. They can't get off the treadmill and they're constantly tweaking their portfolio instead of settling on a good layout and letting their work speak for itself. There's this endless frenetic energy that pushes people to search for phrases, labels, names, categories, definitions that allow them to rationalize their behavior and justify how they're spending time online. Listen, I'm the OCD type and I'm guilty of this sort of thing, too. And every now and then I find myself obsessing over tools in a way that's unproductive and I have to stop and pull myself out of that headspace. There's an instant feedback loop to editing themes, messing with fonts, publishing a blog post (that no one will read) and so it's easy to keep going. And it's easy to waste a fuck load of time doing this sort non-work. Anyway, I feel like I'm watching the progression of a most chronic illness that keeps people tinkering in an anxious state of mind, and that makes me sad. It seems unhealthy to me, but you can do whatever you want!
• at_a_remove 3y ago
  I cannot speculate as to the magnitude, but I suspect that having your blog copied by some spam-type and then them hitting you for a copyright violation might be a chilling factor.
• davidmurdoch 3y ago
  Heroku took them away, or in the least took mine away, when they shut down their free tier.
• tech_ken 3y ago
  One dynamic that I think contributes to the disappearance of websites, but which has maybe a more positive shine than some other explanations, is the increasing usage of internet technologies to support small social group interaction. Consider the hypothetical Jan 1 scenario described by the author: the 2024 equivalent is seeing a screenshot of a Tweet that reminds you of a friend, and then posting it in your groupchat. This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server. I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline. The internet is now less like cave-diving or archaeology, and more like a house party. The space is familiar and comfortable, in part because of the "For You" feed, but also because the point is to share the space with people you're close to. Certainly Instagram profiles have replaced personal blogs, which isn't great, but also Instagram messaging has (partly) replaced comment sections which TBH is probably better for many people's experiences. Anonymous forums can, for all their fun and novelty, be hostile and sad places when you get down to it.
  • tivert 3y ago
    > This type of close/closed-circle communication didn't really exist back in the 2000-2012 era. Sure chat rooms existed and were popular, but they had a very different flavor from the current social forms of a group chat or a discord server. Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? I missed that boat, but that was my impression. > I think this turn towards the "cozy-net" in the last 5-8 years (a term I'm fuzzily borrowing from Venkatesh Rao) means that people are less interested in finding weird niche blogs or internet 'locations', hence their decline. Does that timeline for that theory make sense? My sense is that "websites" started declining as social media platforms took off. If I understand the concept correctly the "cozynet" is a reaction to and rejection of those platforms.
    • tech_ken 3y ago
      > Wasn't ICQ/AIM/etc. like that during that time period? Yes and no. In some ways they were definitely a clear precursor, but I think the major difference is mobile. Back in the day people would login to AIM after school or something, and you'd hang out remotely for some period of time, but then one or more of you would actually log-off and go about your day in meatspace and the chat would be like done for the day. Groupchats and Discord servers are literally nonstop, and this is because nobody ever has to get up from the computer. I think that this really gives them a different character than the old-school chatrooms. AIM was like inviting one or two friends over to hang out in your room and shoot the shit for a few hours, my Signal groupchat is closer to sharing my house with close friends: constant chatter, meme-sharing, planning, etc. AIM chat was one activity that your friend group would do among other things (like going to the bar together), whereas groupchats in some ways can really define the friend group itself. This isn't universal, people were definitely using AIM to define the limits of their friend group or were always online, but I think the experience was far less common than it is today. For most people (that I knew) AIM was closer to a party phone line, rather than the central forum for all communication and interaction. > Does that timeline for that theory make sense? That's a good point, and yeah I definitely think you're correct that coziness is a reaction to/recreation of the "old web". However I do think that coziness was present in early social media platforms in a way that like Rao doesn't really acknowledge. My romance with my now spouse kicked off in a large part through FB interaction, and there were plenty of ways that we could create privacy/coziness even on a large platform that didn't explicitly support that. But yeah, maybe it would be more accurate to say that "socialness" killed websites, and that coziness is the currently dominant form of socialness? edit: on that second point I would also say that "coziness" is maybe a reason that the reaction to big platforms didn't cut back towards websites, and instead has focused on the chatroom/messaging paradigm.
• gexla 3y ago
  People just don't think of the world in terms of finding their people. Work? Find people doing cool things. Internet? Find people writing about or doing cool things. Friends? Find cool people to hang out with. Dating? Find cool people to... (none of my business.) Instead, it's all about job applications, swiping right, scrolling the algos, etc. Nobody thinks in terms of people. My list isn't even websites. It's people, and whatever ways I can follow or contact them.
• bloppe 3y ago
  Once upon a time, people installed applications. You installed skype. You installed AIM. You installed iTunes. You installed Microsoft Office. Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com. You don't have to install and constantly update desktop apps because you can load an always-up-to-date webpage in 500 milliseconds. PWAs have access to desktop notifications, serial ports, your local filesystem, etc. They can do everything desktop apps can. With WASM, they can even handle high-performance workloads. The web is just a better way to distribute software. IMO, operating systems should go all-in on web apps. ChromeOS basically does that. The capyloon project [1] aims to do that for mobile devices. There should be no downloadable apps. "App stores" should just be CDNs. Browser caching can enable offline use. There's no technical reason why the web can't be just as user-friendly as downloadable apps. It's just culture. And, hopefully making the web more usable would also soften the power of the platform silos. [1]: https://capyloon.org/ https://capyloon.org/
  • skydhash 3y ago
    > Now, you go to zoom.com, or messenger.com, or open.spotify.com, or docs.google.com. The web was designed for documents and form. Everything else feels like rudimentary solutions which barely get to what native desktop UI is capable of. And the latter is better designed. Web apps are ok if you want a good enough solution (good for business, I guess) but worse for customers. Most people use only a handful of tools, and only on few devices. Trying to build something to work for everyone result in something that is worse than a solution crafted for that particular platform.
  • rimliu 3y ago
    There is no technical reason we can't eat soup with a fork. It's just culture.
• jmclnx 3y ago
  There is Gemini and it seems to be filling in that niche. Plenty of sites there you can explore. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) Just go to these places and from there you can find many more sites from people who are on sdf. gemini://gem.sdf.org/ gemini://sdf.org/
• tasty_freeze 3y ago
  The world keeps turning and it can be shocking when what was once a comfortable way of doing things, so comfortable you just take it for granted, suddenly becomes passe. A couple others things come to mind, not just personal websites. I used to like giving CDs to friends and family at Christmas: here is some music that you might like that you probably don't know about. I'm sure it was a frog in a boiling pot phenomenon, but it seemed to happen all at once: the recipients all said, "Thanks, but I don't have a CD player." The same thing with app development -- people want to click a link and immediately start interacting and not need to install anything. I've written a few emulators for old computers that weren't popular to begin with, which already limits the audience to a handful of people who care at all. Even among that narrow selection of people who visit my sites, probably 95% of them can't be bothered to download and install an emulator, and I get it. It would be a fun exercise rewriting them to be web apps, but the inability to seamlessly save/restore disk images to the user's space really harms the experience. Anyway, I have to attend to my guestbooks and curate a webring.
• deleted 3y ago
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• thelandofrandom 3y ago
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• yyyfb 3y ago
  > here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished, and I suspect what we really miss are the joys of discovery Yes, we vanished, because algorithmic curation is overall a lot more effective. We may be nostalgic of the craftsmanship that came with old school curation, but it's not coming back any more than we moving out of cities to return to a agrarian life. EXCEPT MAYBE that algorithmic curation is expensive, and advertising revenue can only cover a certain amount before turning people off. High interest rates as well as growth slowdown will cause a reckoning, in the next few years, of these costs - and I expect that in some areas we will see a return to traditional curation.
• dyeje 3y ago
  I couldn’t help but read the title to the tune of Where Have All the Cowboys Gone by Paula Cole.
• ulwtekwcuhwj 3y ago
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• 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y ago
  "Because it's still out there, we just have to find it." With search engines operated by advertising companies, or companies that profit from advertising. there is an incentive to actively prevent discovery and hide what is not profitable. Search "too fast" on Google and draw a ban. Even when this is public information being searched; it does not belong to Google. Facilitating discovery by web users is against Big Tech interests. Big Tech will do the "discovery"; relax and consume what is presented. Want to go deep into results. Not so fast. According to Big Tech, what's actually online is not your business. Only what Big Tech wants to show you matters. What's actually online beyond this might be mostly garbage,^1 but the public is actively prevented from discovering that fact. At least, they won't discover it via Big Tech intermediation. Maybe it's not all garbage. But how would anyone know. The advertising company sits in the middle, controlling what can and cannot be discovered. 1. Not advertising garbage but another kind that has no utility for advertising. Don't believe me. Read some zone files, starting with the com.zone. There are milllions of websites that have become all but impossible to discover via Big Tech intermediation of the web.