4 ms·
Yeah, it's hard to come up with good examples. RSS itself isn't even a great exploration mechanism for finding stuff outside of a single site. Thinking back to
by codezero 13y ago
Yeah, it's hard to come up with good examples. RSS itself isn't even a great exploration mechanism for finding stuff outside of a single site.
Thinking back to the good old days, my main forms of discovery were IRC, Usenet (with its underlying structure it made it easy to dig into weird/different niches at will)...
A few things were consistent about these mechanisms:
Each one allowed you to start in a specific niche/community, explore outside of it and become entrenched in wider/more diverse communities/interests.
They had some basic structure (channels on IRC, top level groups on Usenet), some form of curation/moderation (channel operators, news server admins who could white/blacklist content, rules/guidelines about cross-posting, some proactive moves against spam/off topic trolling), but ultimately were "open."
Anyone could get their foot in with some basic software, anyone could add their voice, and engage either with a group of people or one-on-one.
- pit 13y agoOh, sorry -- I thought you were talking about ways to subscribe to stories/articles, rather than forms of discovery. These days, about 70% of my exploration online starts at HN. There's a bit from Kottke and Coudal, a couple of Twitter feeds, and various music labels (Stone's Throw, Mad Decent). Is Delicious the answer? It's got tags for bookmarks _and_ discovery -- there go two of the HN front page stories from this past week. Remap Ctrl-D in Chrome, and I don't think you'll find a better, more open solution for the Web out there.