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The problem of the pre-platform Web is the difficulty of discovery; your interesting content will have but a few readers. The lure of platforms, like Twitter,
by nine_k 1y ago
The problem of the pre-platform Web is the difficulty of discovery; your interesting content will have but a few readers.
The lure of platforms, like Twitter, or, well, HN, is that your content can potentially be seen by "everyone". Going viral is fun but not that important; being seen by the right people you never knew, or never had a hope to grab attention of, is much move valuable. This leads to much stronger cross-pollination.
(Spam is a problem here, but spam is also a problem in similar biological systems; blooming plants release tons of pollen, and then tons of seeds, most of them fruitless.)
- asadotzler 1y agoDiscoverability wasn't much of a problem for Google's first half decade. We had great content spread all over from millions of sources easily discovered with a simple search engine. Then Google IPO'd and Facebook showed up and everything went to shit. And that ignores other great discovery tools from directories all the way back to web rings. The web from 1995-2005 really was pretty good for content and discovery both. Today it's a few mega corporations with walled gardens who control all of the discovery and are loathe to let users engage with the web outside of their walls.