[HN Gopher] Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
___________________________________________________________________
Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)
Author : tsujp
Score : 223 points
Date : 2022-07-06 11:07 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (jarredsumner.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jarredsumner.com)
| boringuser1 wrote:
| beardedman wrote:
| It was, but then went mainstream. And much like Metallica, the
| later stuff just isn't as good.
| RajT88 wrote:
| My favorite bit of the old, weird internet was Portal Of Evil.
|
| Which took the "look at the weird stuff I found" aspect of
| stumbleupon, and used it as comedic fodder to poke fun at all the
| weird stuff.
| jdbernard wrote:
| This irks me:
|
| > We -- the programmers, designers, product people --
| collectively decided that users don't deserve the right to code
| in everyday products.
|
| Nope. People chose the simpler platforms and tools with lower
| barrier to entry (no need to code) and the strange, fun, weird
| things were choked out or relegated to the unseen corners of the
| Internet. For a brief period you had a lot of people learning to
| code at some level because it was the only way to engage with the
| Internet at all.
|
| It wasn't developers, designers, etc. that decided things should
| no longer have access to the tools, it was the consumer base at
| large who consistently chose the smoother, simpler, easier-to-
| use, less flexible, locked-down products.
|
| People still have access to the tools. The Internet has an
| extremely low barrier to entry. It is accessible in a way most
| serious technology isn't. My son has been publishing his own
| page, full of weird little games and odd styling choices, etc.
| since he was nine.
|
| Most people don't want products like MySpace. They voluntarily
| chose Facebook.
|
| I hope this company finds a successful niche. I'm glad for any
| tools that encourage people to invest in their own creativity.
| But I doubt they are going to achieve mainstream success.
| Hopefully I'm wrong.
| silent_cal wrote:
| The "old web" was quirky and cool, but it could also be extremely
| horrifying and disgusting. I miss some of it, but definitely not
| all of it.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| rotten.com, ratemypoo. Aaah, my wasted teenage years.
| simongray wrote:
| Native advertisement disguised as a blog post.
| bemmu wrote:
| VRChat may be the most fun and weird thing right now.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| As more people joined the internet, the content reverted to the
| mean of humanity. What surprised us is just how low down that
| mean is.
|
| Twitter : We hoped for listening in on The Algonquin Round Table
| we got listening to the last round at Al's bar.
|
| Facebook We hoped for pleasent updates from our friends lives, we
| got content moderators with PTSD
|
| Instagram: we hoped for pictures of our friends lives - we got
| told our friends aren't as good as other peoples friends.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| Because Google is the gatekeeper to what you see, and Google
| prioritises the boring and bland and CEO-friendly websites you
| see.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Correction: English-language Google is. -- I find that very
| often the vaunted Anglo-Saxon moralism indeed only polices
| English content.
|
| I can find the most interesting and entertaining subjects
| searching in Japanese that do not show up when the same search
| is replicated in English, where it instead gives me something
| only barely related to my search that was simply popular
| enough.
|
| It's quite simple how Twitter is actually a bastion of free
| expression, so long it not be in English.
| O__________O wrote:
| Every culture has their norms, including Japan.
|
| Japan may have some areas they are more flexible with, but
| they have just as many, if not more that they rigid about
| too.
|
| People are different, trying to make them the same would be
| just as boring.
| gonzo41 wrote:
| Well replace google with Facebook and Apple. Google just wants
| you to click adds.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| Advertisers are Google's real cu$tomer and they don't like to
| see their ads next to your experimental goatse art.
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| Google also prioritizes what is new over what is original. This
| rewards the lazy borderline plagiarism copycats, resulting in
| perpetual soulless regurgitation of content.
| lancesells wrote:
| Google isn't my gatekeeper. Stop using them and giving them
| power
| hansword wrote:
| I think this internet probably still exists, in a different form
| of course (15years later).
|
| I just think its discoverability has been swamped by the
| platforms overwhelming everything with low-effort-to-consume
| autoplay-until-I-fall-asleep content.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| https://www.cameronsworld.net
| darkmarmot wrote:
| Honestly, the internet has seemed somewhat barren to me since the
| death of Flash.
| moolcool wrote:
| Technical purists disparage flash, all with valid reasons, but
| ignore all the respects in which it was extremely good. It
| allowed developers (young amateur/learning developers
| especially) to easily make extremely high quality games and
| animations, and publish them online in a format that was easy
| to access and run on very low-spec hardware. Nothing else I
| know of today comes close.
| dschuetz wrote:
| Because of Big Tech. They buy everything up, make it go away, or
| monetize the shit out of it. Nothing weird or exciting survives.
| jtaft wrote:
| https://zombo.com
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I love that after all these years, this still exists.
| winternett wrote:
| I think it's a wide-scale effect of everyone scrambling in trying
| to make Internet money to fund themselves through our current
| tough and uncertain times but finding out that a lot of the Web
| 3.0 stuff and the Gig economy was undercover "scammy A.F.". Many
| people do not have savings now because of crypto, stock
| manipulation, and NFT schemes...
|
| There is a lot of heavy stuff going on around the world right
| now, and many of the routes to money success are heavily
| overcomplicated and undesirable in execution.
|
| I have been keeping calm on my end through working on music and
| editing (often strange and comical) TikTok videos (e.g.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9__Jq3hyHuI), commenting on HN
| and Twitter, and through doing occasional stand up comedy open
| mic nights...
| [deleted]
| vannevar wrote:
| This is yet anther transformer-driven bot, right?
| [deleted]
| adnmcq999 wrote:
| Lol
| endisneigh wrote:
| "Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?!?"
|
| _Turns post into an advertisement_
| wnkrshm wrote:
| Everything is money. But! There are subcultures that are hard
| to monetize though, e.g. furry subculture since it comes with
| so much pornography. No brand wants to be close to that. At
| this point, as a furry artist, I feel it's refreshing that this
| very weird and mostly harmless adult nature keeps the rest of
| the art also somewhat safe and in the hands of small artists.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Hello fellow furry pornmonger :)
|
| It's fucking GREAT really, furry is _poison_ to megacorps and
| there's a ton of room for individual creators to thrive
| without corporations relentlessly optimizing their cash
| extraction at huge scales.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Yeah, it is nice being in at least one fandom that is mostly
| left alone from most of the mainstream.
|
| One thing I love about the greater furry community is that a
| LOT of art gets aggregated to a certain site, which I am sure
| you are aware of, that puts high value on proper
| sourcing/tagging. (And still respects the wishes of the
| creators)
|
| Maybe unrelated: Do you think furry commissions are so
| expensive because so many furries are wealthy, or do furries
| pursue wealth to pay for commissions?
| egypturnash wrote:
| There's _tons_ of broke-ass furries who can 't afford a ton
| of commissions. There's also a lot of furries with tech
| jobs who have more money than they know what to do with,
| and are willing to pay artists fees that approach a
| significant percentage of what the techie's hourly wage
| works out to.
|
| Furry art is a significant part of my income and trust me:
| furry commissions are _crazy cheap_. Yes, even that one guy
| charging in the low four figures - he does some pretty
| complex work that I 'd charge four figures for too, if I
| was willing to work that long on a client's piece.
|
| I could be making a _lot_ more money if I 'd stayed in the
| animation industry, or if I was hunting corporate
| illustration work. But then I'd have to deal with much
| tighter deadlines, restrictive style guides, clients who
| really have no idea what they want and no idea how to
| articulate how what I just spent a while working on fails
| to capture what they want, figuring out how to make the
| lucrative but incredibly boring world of, say, standardized
| shipping pallets visually interesting, and a whole bunch of
| office politics. Drawing happy animal-headed people having
| a good time is a lot more fun. It's nice when a corporate
| gig comes my way now and then because it can pay a few
| months rent, but it definitely takes its toll in the amount
| of tedious bullshit I have to deal with.
|
| I'd also maybe have things like "health insurance" and "a
| retirement fund" but, hey. It's a tradeoff.
| Akronymus wrote:
| >Furry art is a significant part of my income
|
| looked up your art, pretty cool style youve got going.
|
| And yeah, corporate anything can be a pretty miserable
| experience.
|
| Also, maybe I shouldve added a /s to my implication that
| most if not all furries are somewhat wealthy.
| egypturnash wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| And yeah, it didn't read as sarcasm to me, oh well :)
| winternett wrote:
| These days for me, the content that is considered an Ad is
| really anything that makes a large company profit, or anything
| that is possibly a scammy or low value product. I don't
| consider an individual trying to gain attention for their
| independent work as an ad... And it can be far more easily
| ignored than a bunch of corporate employees brigading online
| about Tesla or Uber on a daily basis, and getting away with it
| in droves.
|
| That being said, I think sometimes it's better to just reply
| based on the title and theme of the HN post and not focus on
| the other promotional elements or ignore the post altogether
| provided that the poster is not really trying to spam or
| deceive us... Coming up with creative ways to work your own
| struggling ideas into conversations online is not really easy
| when you don't have a marketing staff and lots of ad money.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Odd. This is a promotional post and but because it has a fun
| headline no one seems to care.
| freilanzer wrote:
| Because it's _corporate_ and _serious business_.
| passedandfuture wrote:
| Because you're using the wrong search engine. Try Mojeek for
| fresh results, and get involved with their community.
|
| I believe Mojeek will be a gamechanger.
| blippage wrote:
| I recently found www.gopher.com, which has a different feel to
| than Google or DuckDuckGo.
| 6510 wrote:
| thanks, impressive results.
| javajosh wrote:
| God I hate articles like this. If you want to make a myspace
| clone, then make one. No-one is stopping you.
|
| The problem is that people didn't like MySpace. It looked like
| crap and giving people that level of control made them feel bad.
| Only a few fearless kids actually made the gloriously crappy
| content you admire.
|
| The other problem is that the Internet is well-settled terrain
| now, and users have many many options about where to hang their
| hat(s) and what they do there. Try convincing a Medium author
| that HTML is a good authoring tool.
|
| This article is the Internet version of "good old days"
| nostalgia, which is, ironically, retrograde and horrifying. One
| important exception: if the internet ever deprecates the tools
| needed to make another myspace (http 1.1, html, css, available ip
| addresses, ability to host a durable process) then you'd have my
| full-throated support. And of course you're allowed to like old
| things that failed because of market pressure. Just don't fool
| yourself that the world is worse because the thing you like fell
| out of fashion. As much as I hate to admit it, the world is
| better off without coin-op arcades.
| sumitviii wrote:
| I wish I could upvote it 10 times.
|
| No one is stopping these nostalgic folks. Those older techs
| aren't banned. They have just lost their war for network
| effect.
| tb0ne wrote:
| You make it seem like todays internet monopolies exist because
| of all the platform there are, they are the most well-designed
| ones, and they would simply be replaced if a better product
| came along.
|
| I disagree with that, youtube for example is not the prevalent
| video platform today because it is better than its competitors.
| Youtube today is absolutely terrible.
|
| But it does not get replaced, because it is the established
| platform, and using a competitor is suicide because your
| content will never get any traction.
|
| So we are stuck with a horribly monopolized web, where the
| established websites can become very shitty, but you have to
| stay on them because everyone else is.
| javajosh wrote:
| The phrase you're looking for is "network effect". And it is
| indeed a real thing [0]. But I find it ironic you're implying
| it's implacable on a thread about MySpace.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
| sumitviii wrote:
| >and using a competitor is suicide because your content will
| never get any traction
|
| You can post on multiple platforms, you know. Content
| creators aren't stupid. They post on whichever platform is
| buzzing. It's their day job and the most popular ones know
| what they are doing than any of us.
| Torwald wrote:
| Because "mobile first."
| greenbit wrote:
| "introducing codeblog"
|
| .. you might want to lead with that. You know, so people know
| what kind of thing they're clicking on
| aahortwwy2022 wrote:
| When I was a teenager I came up with several technical and
| nontechnical websites, zines with programming and reverse
| engineering tutorials, interviews, and just plain fucking around.
| And everyone else around me was pretty much the same. There were
| multiple "scenes", we formed deep relations on IRC, even though
| almost none knew my real name or how I looked. I still meet some
| of those people online (few even in real life) more than 20 years
| later.
|
| Nowadays, I don't put anything too valuable on the web. Because
| why should I do anything for free, right? I don't live at the
| expense of my parents anymore, and society does not provide me
| with means to survive if I spend my time doing all that and
| "share". Now, since I'm unemployed and basically unemployable (no
| linkedin/facebook/whatever, disagree with gov policies re. covid
| and the society that accepts and promotes them hence don't get
| out much, won't consider working for unethical companies that
| track people for any purpose whatsoever (there are so many of
| those), introversion, etc.), I continue to do what I always did,
| write code, come up with theories that sometimes lead to personal
| projects, etc. But I definitely won't put these up on the web.
|
| Nowadays, I don't put anything too nonconforming on the web.
| There are still people doing stuff "for free". They get money
| from something or somewhere else. But nowadays it's mostly boring
| as shit. Why? Because nowadays people learn to abide by the
| dystopia's unwritten dicta: conform, obey, self-censor, follow,
| like, share. When you can no longer post anonymously, when
| everything you say is on a permanent record, when everything
| around you is moderated to Hell. When every movement is tracked,
| your best bet is to move along in the direction of the herd. If
| you don't, you will be disappeared from the relevant environment.
| Such a society can't be fun and weird; it actively discourages
| fun and weird.
| makz wrote:
| So much this
| rchaud wrote:
| Weirdness is a choice. Taking on an affectation of weirdness in
| order to sell products or advertising is quite obvious to the
| beholder, who ignores it, and not long after that, the Internet
| becomes a wasteland of e-commerce webshops and ad-ridden 'fun
| blogs'.
|
| There's also an enormous difference between personal 'weird' and
| corporate 'weird'. 'Personal weird' came from early-gen web
| designers who had to do everything on their own, including making
| GIFs with primitive '90s image editors. We have more advanced
| tools on our phones today, yet bloggers would sooner pick
| something off the shelf from GIPHY (a Facebook company), because
| it's easier.
|
| We don't even have weird homemade clipart anymore, we have
| soulless stock graphics from Canva. And a big Discord button
| where the webrings would be.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| The availability of fun and weird has redefined both fun and
| weird.
|
| What's relatively tame and normal by today's standards would have
| been groundbreaking only a few years ago.
|
| Desensitisation is the issue, not a dearth of fun and weird.
|
| A guilty pleasure of mine are some of those klrdubs YouTube
| videos. My daughter launches a series of them at me every now and
| then, and whilst many of them are so-so, a few of them are
| absolutely spot-on genius. Fun, clever, and weird.
|
| Maybe accessibility contributes towards this desensitisation too?
| At any time that level of genius is at our fingertips. We're
| spoilt by the accessibility of the top 0.01% creative talents of
| humanity.
|
| Maybe we also actively avoid some of the fun and weird because we
| know we'll get caught in a productivity destroying rabbit hole of
| fun and weirdness?
| rambambram wrote:
| Interesting take. I think it definitely plays a role.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| The reason the web is not fun anymore is because it's now
| hypercentralized. Companies that effectively control the web
| found the formula that works for them. They want you to
| mindlessly consume streams of curated information. They want you
| to do that at maximum throughput. Most of your "interactions"
| with websites are fake and exist only to improve "engagement".
|
| If everyone starts fiddling with colors and creative designs, it
| will decrease the throughput of an average information consumer.
| Therefore, no meaningful customization is allowed. It's that
| simple.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| Don't sugar coat it. Call it what it really is: gentrification.
|
| 2000: creating content and fostering an online community in
| private was seen as super nerdy.
|
| 2022: binge watching TikTok in public and grown-ass adults
| fighting over Internet Points is "normal."
|
| And, yeah, the content is much worse. It's a lot of overly-
| socialized people taking care to say the things they should say
| so the great Algorithm gives them more Internet Points. And those
| Internet Points warp the process of creation, especially when
| they're tied to money.
|
| Like the article said, it's all taken way too seriously, and
| there's no going back.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet is
| now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty
| weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned
| out by the masses. The old school internet still exists to some
| degree but you are going to have to look harder to find where the
| weird people are at and most the people claiming they want the
| "weird" internet back would probably complain about those places
|
| same thing happens in any community/society as it ages and grows.
| People who create it are different from those who move in later
| once things are great
| [deleted]
| NoGravitas wrote:
| > most people are boring/normal by definition and the internet
| is now mainstream. The internet used to be filled with a pretty
| weird subset of the general population but now that is drowned
| out by the masses.
|
| That doesn't explain MySpace, though. Extremely
| mainstream/mass-oriented, but still fun and weird, while it
| lasted.
| projektfu wrote:
| Eventually it got to the point where comments on people's
| pages were making them unreadable or crashing the browser.
| That was too much customizability.
| joshmanders wrote:
| MySpace really wasn't that weird, they just had a bug that
| allowed people to express themselves with code and decided to
| leave it.
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| Exactly; it was _novel_ not weird. And if it had prevailed
| over FB it would have adopted a slicker, uniform ui by
| default sooner or later (maybe let old heads keep seeing
| version 1 like Reddit does).
| an9n wrote:
| I just don't want it to involve React
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just typically
| doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and is too long-
| tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like those of
| Reddit or Facebook.
|
| I've spent the last year or so building tools and algorithms
| specifically to dig up "fun and weird". It's still there:
| https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> All the fun and weird stuff is still around, it just
| typically doesn't SEO well and doesn't show up on Google, and
| is too long-tail to show up on popularity-based algorithms like
| those of Reddit or Facebook._
|
| In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is
| little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Dead in what sense?
| BrainVirus wrote:
| The web in the 90s was an evolving, alive ecosystem.
| Without the ecosystem, websites that approximate something
| old-school are standalone entities. Flowers in a vase. They
| might look the same or even temporarily feel the same, but
| they are both authored and browsed in an entirely different
| context.
|
| For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is
| likely abandoned is a very different experience from
| browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of
| something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is
| identical. The same principle applies to authoring.
|
| I have seen countless claims that all the technology that
| someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless
| of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the
| point. The _social project_ that was web 1.0 is now
| defunct.
|
| Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent
| to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I don't get what you mean. That ecosystem is still alive,
| though. It's easy to miss because lives in the shadow of
| another parallel ecosystem, but it's still there, and it
| still roughly functions the same.
|
| Web 1.0 was and still is a fringe project by and for
| oddballs. Just like most people in the '90s didn't know
| how to get on the web, most people today can't find their
| way past google and social media. In that regard, it's
| very much still the same.
| hbn wrote:
| There's still something to be said about the fact that all the
| mainstream internet platforms don't really encourage much in
| terms of "internet creativity" outside of the tight boundaries
| that are allowed (uploading a video, writing text, posting a
| picture, etc)
|
| The fact that MySpace was mainstream and allowed for HTML/CSS
| hacking did exactly what the article said -- it tricked a
| generation of teenagers into learning how to do that "weird
| internet stuff."
|
| For the most part, if you want to do anything like that now
| you're gonna be stuck figuring out domains and hosting and
| whatnot which isn't nearly as fun as typing some HTML into the
| platform you and your friends already use. So not as many
| people are going to do it.
| aprinsen wrote:
| MySpace was my first coding experience and I think ultimately
| tipped me to CS in school.
|
| I remember laying out my page like a pink and black
| newspaper. All that work for no one to read lol.
|
| But now it is essentially my career
| Agamus wrote:
| Excellent site - thank you!
|
| Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also
| changed...
|
| Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the
| internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and
| explore. My mind expected this experience.
|
| Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.
| butterNaN wrote:
| I wonder if there's a search engine that ranks results with
| worst SEOs first
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| It's not _that_ far off what my search engine does.
| tjr225 wrote:
| Precisely. It isn't fun or weird because YOU aren't fun or
| weird. If you were fun or weird you'd already know where all
| the fun and weird stuff is.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Another aspect is that your view of the internet, which on
| its own is incomprehensibly large, is largely shaped by the
| tools you use to interact with it. It's difficult to become
| aware of just how much your choice of internet gateway will
| shape your view of what exists.
|
| If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is
| going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and
| open source projects.
|
| If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going
| to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will
| appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe
| some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.
|
| If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge
| websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia,
| Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also
| going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.
|
| If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look
| like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos,
| minions memes.
|
| and so on and so forth.
| a1o wrote:
| My navigator tends to remember the websites I view more,
| which are mostly communities, and I tend to click on the
| links it has when the browser opens. So I tend to use these
| communities as the internet gateway as you say - like
| hacker news! This concept of the internet gateway and the
| perceptual islands of ideas is really interesting, I think
| you should someday write about this.
| SturgeonsLaw wrote:
| This is one of the things I liked about StumbleUpon. You never
| knew what you were going to get, but it was almost always
| something interesting.
| korse wrote:
| Thanks.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Awesome. I think there's a huge need for a search engine
| filtering out commercial content. It's basically just all spam.
|
| Recently I wanted to find information on hacking a device I had
| obtained - but of course any search query I could throw at
| search engines only yielded ways to buy it or low-effort
| reviews. I tried marginalia but it seems like the index wasn't
| quite large enough for my purpose yet.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| May well be that what you were looking for is in the index.
| My algorithms have a lot of potential for improvement. Right
| now they only really work well for broad topical searches.
| They are also entirely blind to some fairly rich websites,
| such as certain types of forums.
| petesamrogers wrote:
| I created instant.gallery (no spam, no ads, no notifications) to
| be a fun and weird website - the problem is getting quality sites
| noticed without a huge ad spend. The big funnels (twitter, google
| and fb/ig) have taken over.
| awsrocks wrote:
| dalbasal wrote:
| I think these old "remember MySpace" ideas are off the mark.
|
| What actually happened was not minor changes in UX culture.
|
| The web became powerful, instead of a subculture over to the
| side. It became democratic and populist, with everyone
| participating rather than a self selected few. It became
| monopolized, regulated by Google/etc. and regulatable because
| giant companies are easier to regulate. The coming of copyright
| is underated as a factor in changing the web.
|
| Remember the spindletop days. Why is the oils industry no fun
| anymore?
| AidenVennis wrote:
| First I thought the article (or maybe promotion) didn't gave an
| answer to the topic question, but it actually did; the need to
| sanitizing inputs destroyed what myspace enabled. The need for
| security is bigger than the need for customisation nowadays, you
| can't have a social network that has a big security flaw because
| users could edit the code on their pages. The product this
| article promotes isn't a solution, you still need developers to
| create the components users want, and users are not going to send
| requests to add something they think would be "fun" or "weird".
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| because either you get a groovy bathroom wall or you get a
| heavily moderated bathroom wall.
|
| You need populaces with higher than 86% literacy to make things
| like, "Internets" work.
| tylershuster wrote:
| https://tylershuster.github.io/an-ode-to-the-pomegranate/
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> Codeblog is powered by MDX, a new flavor of Markdown that
| supports JSX. With MDX, words look like words, and code looks
| like HTML._
|
| Or, you know, you can write HTML and avoid all that complexity.
|
| About 100 lines of PHP code to add navigation, feed and routing.
|
| About 50 lines of CSS to avoid cringe nonsense like P tags while
| retaining the power of everything else in the browser. (The main
| ingredient being white-space: pre-line.)
|
| Then you just upload your posts via SFTP and they become
| published.
|
| Instantly portable to any shared hosting provider in the world.
| The only local tool requirement is an SFTP client.
| sailfast wrote:
| This is a submarine article at its finest.
|
| "Make the internet weird again with codeblog"
| peterweyand0 wrote:
| The link to codeblog.app doesn't work. Maybe hugged to death?
| xhrpost wrote:
| > The internet added<canvas />, but the internet stopped being
| one.
|
| Wow, well stated. I particularly miss just seeing more original
| content written by people's personal experiences. Now, it seems
| like any Google search results in bloat-ware sites with a ton of
| journalistic fluff around a few data points that came out on a
| news wire.
|
| I personally have some hope in the Gemini protocol returning some
| value to this space. It doesn't quite fit the "internet as a
| canvas" model, being text based with only links to images, but I
| think there is a lot of potential to bring more interesting
| content to the forefront again.
| masswerk wrote:
| Ok, I made something weird, recently:
| https://www.masswerk.at/nowgobang/2022/philosophia-mechanica
|
| In case you asked, there's also an explanation for this. :-)
|
| (Notebook or desktop preferred, at least some mobile browsers
| seem to have issues with scaling SVG origins.)
| vannevar wrote:
| There are lots of fun and weird things on the internet, but SEO
| prevents you from seeing most of them---you end up seeing only
| the parts that someone is motivated to pay to get you to look at.
| That's essentially Google's business model.
| jsight wrote:
| I agree. Search having such a bias towards SEO as a measure of
| credibility has been incredibly damaging.
| vannevar wrote:
| Another related problem is the pathological economy of
| kickbacks that has developed on the internet. Early on,it made
| some sense to offer a small finders fee for referring traffic
| that bought something---you were connecting someone with a
| service they needed but couldn't easily find online since the
| search engines were not very good. Now it would be trivially
| easy to find almost any online service if those services
| weren't deliberately obfuscated by a jungle of middlemen trying
| to be the one that snags the referral fee.
| lancesells wrote:
| I'm always thinking of building an old-school directory of
| interesting sites on a limited number of topics. With the only
| automation being checking if the website is still up and either
| removing it or redirecting to an archive.
| kossTKR wrote:
| I remember the thousands of interesting and weird pages listed on
| StumbleUpon - directories of obscure topics, avant garde art
| projects and detailed field specific blogs - many of them both
| pretty and thoroughly made.
|
| Mind expanding stuff.
|
| I feel like today all of that has moved to silos like tiktok and
| instagram, in extreme short form formats that are easily
| disposable - so almost no one creates truly great "compilations"
| of stuff, directories, blogs, galleries or whatever - it's all
| just streams of disconnected content free floating towards
| oblivion in a few days.
|
| This has made everything bite-sized and fragmented everyones
| attention as nothing is getting polished or curated to
| perfection.
|
| I miss people polishing stuff, then just letting it sit out there
| for people to enjoy. Today everything is hidden after a few days
| - so the rare gems disappear too while the algorithms and search
| engines favour the easily devourable in the first place.
|
| We need something like Stumbleupon back, does that exist? I
| wonder why it wasn't viable.
| vimy wrote:
| https://stumblingon.com/
|
| I like this clone.
| kixiQu wrote:
| My site [1] tends to get linked to by these kinds of things
| (well, more than by normal things) so I've found a few just
| through referrer traffic, and joining webrings has been fun
| too.
|
| https://gossipsweb.net
|
| https://fediring.net
|
| https://nightfall.city
|
| https://linkbudz.m455.casa
|
| https://indieblog.page
|
| https://indieweb.xyz
|
| https://stumblingon.com
|
| https://webring.dinhe.net
|
| https://hotlinewebring.club
|
| https://handmade-web.net
|
| https://biglist.terraaeon.com
|
| https://xn--sr8hvo.ws
|
| https://nownownow.com
|
| https://blogsurf.io
|
| https://theforest.link
|
| There's a ton of cool stuff going on on the internet, much even
| public, but the ethic by which things are shared still seems to
| me to resemble these insights: https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-
| web Thinking of things as small social niches is helpful in
| figuring out where the best bits are.
|
| [1] https://maya.land :)
| ya1sec wrote:
| Ah I just commented about my app, Moonjump, which uses Gossip
| Web as one of the sites to source material from. Just found
| Gossip Web a couple weeks ago. Great job!
|
| Here's mine: https://moonjump.app
| nathias wrote:
| thx for the list, I already knew about your page, very cool
| jkepler wrote:
| Thanks for this list!
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I doubt StumbleUpon would be able to take off in the same form
| today - it installed a browser toolbar, collected a profile of
| your interests, and collected your up/downvotes to fed them all
| to an opaque algorithm that took you to the next random page.
| Who knows where that data went.
|
| Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to
| stumbleupon today?
| notriddle wrote:
| Firefox's Pocket recommendations took a good approach. The
| browser downloads a big daily file with "potential
| recommendations", then filters it at the client side.
|
| The big downside was that, because it was turned on by
| default, a whole bunch of people who didn't actually want it
| had it foisted upon them, so it got a very bad reputation
| right out the gate. Right algorithm, bad execution.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I actually really like Pocket's recommendations, but yeah,
| the way it's all forced on you it's basically an ad. That's
| pretty much why I feel like I have to boycott it _despite
| liking the product_. It 's such a Mozilla move to take
| something nice and turn it bad for no good reason.
| slothtrop wrote:
| At inception it was just a website that redirected you. There
| are variations of this created all the time but centered
| around essays and journalism. It would be trivial to create
| what is basically a glorified copy of SU, but no one cares
| enough to do it. Or more accurately, they already exist and
| we collectively don't care enough to notice.
| algoeci wrote:
| Read Something Interesting (www.readsomethinginteresting.com)
| is a great compilation of interesting blog posts, I've spent
| many an long afternoon discovering new blogs there.
| really_relay wrote:
| Seconding this, Read Something Interesting is amazing.
| falcolas wrote:
| > so almost no one creates truly great "compilations" of stuff,
| directories, blogs, galleries or whatever
|
| I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot
| is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I'd be
| pleasantly surprised.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It won't help with ones that are already gone, but there's a
| firefox plugin called Archiveror that automatically archives
| your bookmarks.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Anecdotally, my own search engine index starts to feel stale
| after about two months. I wonder what the half-life of a link
| is.
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm highly tempted to run a "caching" proxy 24x7 just to
| keep archives of some of these decaying gems around past
| their lifespan on the web.
|
| I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but
| their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes
| their archive incomplete.
| quest88 wrote:
| I've considered running my own IA
| (https://github.com/internetarchive/heritrix3), which
| only archives my chrome history, which is stored in a
| local sqlite db.
|
| I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how
| the pieces should be glued together.
| [deleted]
| causi wrote:
| I also wish for a modern local archiving solution.
| HTTRACK just doesn't cut it anymore, unless you really
| want a local copy of a webcomic that stopped updating in
| 2003.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| I use screenshots on my search engine to work around this
| issue. If you are interested, I have an open server
| deployment for it.
| runevault wrote:
| StumbleUpon was such a fun way to blow time where you needed to
| do something in a bit but had a few spare minutes. At one point
| in time I probably had a lot of random ass fun bookmarks
| through that.
| joe__f wrote:
| I liked Stumbleupon, I miss it too
| TheLastStumbler wrote:
| I was at StumbleUpon at shutdown and for a few years before.
| I'm creating a single-purpose account to avoid doxxing myself
| on my main account. Here's a non-exhaustive list of things that
| killed SU.
|
| SU relied on individual human curators to discover worthy new
| web pages instead of trying to crawl the web in bulk. Our most
| passionate users, the people who would submit great new URLs,
| tag URLs, rate heavily, and curate good collections, were heavy
| users of our XUL based Firefox extension. We were never able to
| build an extension as featureful post-XUL and that hurt new
| content acquisition and categorization.
|
| The linked content we served to users on the web had to be
| iframeable. That described most of the web in the early years
| of SU. By the time of the shutdown, most new sites and even
| many established sites couldn't be displayed in iframes any
| more. It would have been _technically_ possible to replicate
| most of the iframe experience without iframes by serving up our
| own crawled copies of pages, but then we would have been
| infringing copyright. Iframes allowed SU to show a third party
| page without actually copying it.
|
| Over time, more sites disallowed crawling via robots.txt or by
| thwarting them without prior declaration by rejecting "crawler-
| looking" requests that didn't come from Google.
|
| Our mobile apps allowed us to serve content in a webview even
| if it wasn't iframeable, but mobile platforms inherently
| excluded a lot of the "weird and wonderful" stuff that people
| loved SU for. For example, our online games category contained
| mostly Flash games. Even most of the non-Flash games assumed
| either keyboard or mouse access; few of them worked well on a
| phone's touch screen. Similar problems applied to other
| interactive content (simulations, interactive visualizations).
| Take away the interactive content and SU started to look more
| like just another app for passive scrolling.
|
| Web pages became increasingly encrusted with ads, nags, and
| tracking scripts. I was the final developer responsible for
| maintenance on our Android app. 95% of the performance
| complaints we received about the app were, in truth, complaints
| about the analytics and ads an individual recommended web page
| was loading. This was also the source of 95% of the complaints
| about ads that we received. SU monetized itself with
| interstitial ads between recommended web pages. Every ad
| running _on_ a recommended page was put there by the site
| owner, not us. But negative reviews and customer emails blamed
| us for the battery-killing, device-heating, content-obscuring
| ads running on-page. The ad problem was much less severe for
| people who used the web site instead of mobile apps, since they
| were largely power users who had ad blockers installed, but see
| previous problems about iframes and Firefox plugins.
|
| Consolidation toward siloed content platforms certainly didn't
| help either. But I think that SU would have been able to keep
| going until the present day if not for the problems mentioned
| above. Some of them seem like mere happenstances of history; I
| could imagine Flash living a lot longer if it hadn't been a
| notorious source of exploitable security holes. Other things,
| like long-form articles getting increasingly barnacled with
| ads, nags, analytics, and paywalls, seem like a more inevitable
| outcome of the collapse of old-media print revenue.
|
| One thing I've idly pondered since SU shut down is just
| recommending weird-old-web content that's findable in the
| Wayback Machine yet missing from the modern internet. The
| beauty would be two-fold: it's likely to be cleaner content in
| the first place, and you can transform it (e.g. running Reader
| Mode over it server-side) without worrying about the site
| owners coming after you for copyright infringement. Or at least
| not worrying _as much_. It seems like marginalia_nu has managed
| to find a goodly amount of content that still lives so maybe
| resorting to the Wayback Machine isn 't necessary at all.
| ndespres wrote:
| A lot of it is still out there! A personal favorite of mine is
| https://www.fujichia.com/ which is, among other things, a blog
| inside a castle, with a fish pond outside and an art gallery.
| It reminds me of a simpler time when everyone had a
| handcrafted, bespoke HTML homepage with all sorts of secrets
| and surprises.
| hbn wrote:
| Here's a site I like to link whenever this discussion comes up
| (not associated):
|
| https://wiby.me
|
| I love hopping in and hitting the "surprise me" every once in a
| while, and reading some obscure webpage written by an actual
| person with a passion for a subject. In the past I've seen a
| site dedicated to the soundtrack for a film series (I can't
| remember which), not even necessarily streaming the soundtrack
| or something, but just a bunch of articles about every facet of
| these soundtracks.
|
| Just now I got linked to a page about Kodak Photo CDs
|
| http://www.tedfelix.com/PhotoCD/
| BbzzbB wrote:
| In a similar vein, I like Marginala's discover/site hopping
| mode. The little cards make it easier to get the vibe of more
| than one site at a time too.
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random
| quartz wrote:
| Wow this is fantastic!
|
| Landed on some HAM radio operator's personal text-only site
| and then a site about birds in some far off place in Nova
| Scotia: http://www.capebretonbirds.ca/.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Oh my gosh, the "surprise me" link took me here:
|
| http://www.rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com/
|
| It's a site full of photos and descriptions of antique
| calculators!
| ConstantVigil wrote:
| Got this link:
|
| https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html
|
| It's a Thought Experiments Lain website
|
| P.S. There absolutely is definitely going to be sound coming
| through speakers. Fair heads up.
| skyyler wrote:
| I really enjoy that the Lain fans are not slowing down in
| the slightest with their love for Lain.
| penneyd wrote:
| http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/bifurcated/rivets/ - This is pretty
| great, run by my old professor (and I graduated in '95...)
| ajvs wrote:
| Reddit and other social media has largely replaced it I'd say
| (not to the same quality though).
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Huh.
|
| I feel like Reddit doesn't really have links anymore. The
| subreddits that have external links are usually spam
| subreddits which humans don't visit.
|
| The human-inhabited subreddits seem to mostly be favoring
| selftext, images, youtube videos, maybe wikipedia, and
| possibly some image hosts (but they are falling out of favor
| since imgur turned to shit). Very rarely do they seem to link
| to other websites.
| tmaly wrote:
| I think we would need something like a modern Geocities to
| encourage people to start building indices again.
|
| It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor
| like the Medium mobile app had.
| kradeelav wrote:
| Good news, it exists over on neocities which is experiencing
| something of a revival in younger circles now. :)
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >I wonder why it wasn't viable.
|
| Because for the most part, people making content would rather
| earn money for their content than not earn money. The silos of
| TikTok and Instagram and YouTube allow for sufficiently low
| transaction costs such that this market of advertisers
| interested in buying attention and content creators interested
| in buying money can exist.
|
| Maybe stumbleupon was too early, but the fact that the app
| ecosystem makes it much more difficult to copy content makes
| the silos much more appealing to both content creators and
| advertisers.
| ghaff wrote:
| And even if the vast majority of them don't in fact make
| material money, many of them have a hope of doing so and act
| accordingly.
| kossTKR wrote:
| An economic explanation makes sense. I wonder if a
| monetizable ecosystem could exists with longer form content
| in _multiple_ forms, ie. multimedia, a word that has almost
| disappeared.
|
| There is Patreon, Substack, Youtube and others that does
| work, the problem lies in the curation and personalisation
| that seems to have gone out the window replaced by algos and
| simple designs with bland and uninspired designs and
| concepts.
| saltsucker wrote:
| I wish the app moguls would just give us a "Turn off
| Personalization" option and let me explore freely. I turn
| off all history tracking on YouTube, but it doesn't matter.
| Whether it's on or off, you can't explore a topic deeply.
| You have 1-2 videos on the subject, then you have
| completely random unrelated click-bait garbage.
|
| Even music apps are disappointing. Sometimes they do well,
| but most of the time it seems not. I play a radio station
| for Mat Corby, which is a pretty chill downtempo vibe, and
| the app throws in stuff from my library that has no
| relation--like Kanye West's Jesus Walks. Literally did that
| multiple times. Those vibes could not be more different.
|
| Maybe cataloging music is a difficult problem, but there
| was a time (maybe 2010?) when YouTube would efficiently
| suggest music that had a vibe to what I was listening to,
| and it helped me find many artists I listed to now.
|
| Edit: And a time when Apple's Genius was not a bad house
| party DJ
| low_common wrote:
| It's called TikTok. The internet evolved dude.
| tinsmith wrote:
| "Evolved" is not the word I would use. As the Internet was
| already showing signs of being twisted by its own mythos in
| the 1990's, there was plenty of then-obvious opportunity that
| resulted in the type of profit-driven curation we see today.
| I remember the Internet then, but I feel a lot of people
| allow the lense of nostalgia to twist it into something far
| more wild and pure than it actually was.
| Chinjut wrote:
| The post you are replying to mentioned TikTok.
| robonerd wrote:
| TikTok used to suggest all sorts of long-form articles.
| Tiktok is all short-form video; a bunch of vapid trash.
| ineedtosleep wrote:
| IMO it's not just about being bite-sized, memeable content
| catering to the lowest common denominator. It's that nearly
| everyone making content is copying marketing strategies. Back
| then it was more of a show-and-tell vibe, now everything is
| trying to sell something.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| Yes, I think people miss the genuineness more than the fun.
| Everything happening nowadays seems to be geared towards
| selling you something. It seems to go further than the
| internet too. Reading the discussion on pubs closing on this
| site, some people seem to genuinely have internalised that
| they themselves are a product which should be optimised in
| some form of globalised meat market. Late stage capitalism is
| a bit depressing.
| vitaflo wrote:
| Everyone has become a sellout. When I was growing up this was
| considered a bad thing. Today it's a virtue.
| munificent wrote:
| Maybe less virtue and more necessary evil. It was a lot
| easier to not be a sellout in the economic boom of the 90s
| when you could find that paid the bills. The younger
| generation now is barely scraping by. They aren't into
| hustle culture because they love it, they do it because
| they're broke.
| floren wrote:
| But 99.99% of people could stream Twitch 10 hours a day,
| put out half a dozen Youtube videos a week, chase every
| TikTok trend, and never make a dime. And at the end of it
| all? They wasted so much of their time doing things to
| chase the money, instead of things they liked, and when
| Twitch decides they're not going to preserve archives
| from unpopular streams, they don't even have the artifact
| left over.
| bombcar wrote:
| Twitch/TikTok/YouTube is the "move to LA and do
| foodservice whist waiting to hit it big" of the current
| generation. You don't _actually_ make any money doing it,
| but you think someday you will.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| I don't think people are broke per say. They have been
| promoted to and have internalised the idea that if you
| are not a huge success you are a failure but in absolute
| term most people seem to be doing fine.
| schnevets wrote:
| This is especially ironic since the original article was
| using nostalgia to sell his new codeblog service...
| greggsy wrote:
| I feel like the pendulum is swinging back. Interest rates,
| rent, housing and commodity prices are up, so discretionary
| spending will almost certainly be lower.
|
| Could that reduce demand for marketing and advertising in
| general? Maybe the tighter market will drive up demand for
| more aggressive data capture? Where does all that leave
| social sites and content creators who but their empire
| selling fast fashion an overpriced gaming accessories
| during a time when access to money was easier?
| a1o wrote:
| There's not incentives currently for the no money involved
| approach. Before, there was still some unknown promise of
| the thing you are doing being discovered at some point, and
| also you could still sellout - lots of creators did this
| eventually. The noise is really high today.
| retcon wrote:
| I've done a penance ^h^h career in advertising ,[0] and I
| left because advertising sold out. Advertising and
| commercial art/advertising/deductible graphics used to
| nurture the most amazing arrays of cultural perpetual
| moonlighting geniuses. Now that went down the first
| conversion funnel long ago. We're not even a number were
| just amorphous $rnd now.
|
| [0]Computational advertising for print in the very early
| nineties...)
|
| Edit: a last gasp website I absolutely considered Sui
| Generis and was invaluable in the graphics world was
| Drawn.ca . I'd be immensely grateful to hear of any
| mirrors or archive.
| egfx wrote:
| I've built something different that I blog about with a show
| and tell. I love my product but the weird thing is dev.to the
| perfect portal to blog about such things is shadowbanned on
| HN.
| researchers wrote:
| A lot of that content has moved to newsletters and Twitter
| threads. If you know the right people to follow, there are a
| lot of niche, quirky, and insightful pieces that remind me of
| the homepages of yore.
|
| One problem is that these things get lost in the timeline. So I
| made a StumbleUpon for Twitter threads [0]. Check it out!
|
| [0] https://mood.surf
| NietzscheanNull wrote:
| I really love the design/idea, but after hitting "Shuffle" a
| few times, it looks like it threw an unhandled exception due
| to an async error (now I just get a TypeError on every page
| load):
| O@https://mood.surf/build/routes/tweets/$tweetId-
| ID4B42CB.js:1:8106
| Zi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:64683
| li@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:74110
| bs@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104095
| Kf@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104026
| st@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:103886
| yi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:100770
| yi@[native code]
| @https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50511
| @https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:1:4097
| _s@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50458
| we@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50393
| Ve@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:98358
| bi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:69948
| bi@[native code] onChange@https://mood.surf/build/_shar
| ed/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:31745
| u@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:18647
| @https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:26238
| asyncFunctionResume@[native code] @[native code]
|
| promiseReactionJobWithoutPromise@[native code]
| researchers wrote:
| Thanks for reporting this. I think it has to do with
| certain tweets being made private/inaccessible after being
| added to the index. I'll look into it.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember things like the DOOM FAQ
| https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Official_Doom_FAQ/Original_text and
| there was one for Star Wars, also. I printed them out and read
| them; hundreds of pages.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Definitely check out:
|
| https://neocities.org/
| asciiresort wrote:
| I'm surprised no one mentioned Neocities which is a spiritual
| revival of Geocities and the early 2000s web. The aesthetic is
| much more pronounced, possible too pronounced.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| It's still fun and weird, but it's in the dark corners of Twitter
| where you find these communities, Milady.
| s0teri0s wrote:
| The same reason television isn't more fun and weird.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The internet is dominated by winner-take-all markets. Niche sites
| generally don't stand a chance unless they get lucky.
| amelius wrote:
| > Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?
|
| Etiquette. For example, humor is frowned upon on some forums (HN
| included).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I've found that humor on HN is fine, it just can't be the low-
| effort trash you usually see on reddit.
|
| Reddit loves to beat the dead horse until it's not even
| recognizable as something that used to be an animal.
| kevstev wrote:
| Any forum that does not frown upon it ends up with a bunch of
| low effort rehashed posts by people who don't know enough to
| actually discuss the topic at hand. This dilutes an interesting
| conversation at best, and at worst just makes the signal/noise
| ratio so low that people with knowledge on the topic get
| drowned out for the lols and eventually stop contributing. Its
| nice that HN is an island away from that.
| jansan wrote:
| HN actually holds the current record for being the most
| humorless forum on the internet (sorry, can't seem to find link
| atm).
| elteto wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| /j
| dgb23 wrote:
| There is a specific type of gem you find on HN sometimes:
| full-blown rants. I find them very entertaining and started
| to collect them recently.
| Akronymus wrote:
| Also, occasionally there are REALLY high quality, altough
| subtle, jokes in a comment that is still a part of a
| productive discussion. Humour for humours sake is
| definitely frowned upon though.
| mellavora wrote:
| such as the above post
| Akronymus wrote:
| So subtle, it flew over my head and is still flying off
| into the sunset. I genuinly thought it was just someone
| enjoying collecting rants. (Which, some rants are quite
| enjoyable to read.)
| dgb23 wrote:
| When I realized I was making a joke it was already too
| late!
|
| In all seriousness I actually did start to collect HN
| rants I find funny a short while ago. There is something
| about elaborate rants that just gets me. Similarly I love
| elaborate, negative (social media) reviews. They are
| often way too serious and over the top.
| [deleted]
| 6510 wrote:
| We need some kind of framework for humor development.
|
| Lets start with the scripted spaghetti jokes, work towards
| functional humor then eventually do classes. OOH!
| causi wrote:
| I enjoyed the internet more when I had fifty bookmarks instead of
| five.
| mym1990 wrote:
| In a nutshell, my internet routine has become: Check email >
| check ESPN > check HN > check WSJ. Every blog site I visit
| nowadays is literally full of ads, popups, etc...the content to
| ad ratio seems to be about 50/50, which is just bleh. I 100%
| think the internet still has lots of interesting things, but I
| think so much has moved to a centralized location nowadays, its a
| bit harder to find the unique parts of the web.
| rel2thr wrote:
| get on Urbit, it's early but it feels pretty weird
|
| You have to learn a new language to do anything, people are
| publishing weird sci-fi on it , there are raves and parties , it
| is self selecting a lot of weird people
| egypturnash wrote:
| I find it somewhat ironic that despite starting as a love letter
| to the colorful, fun things people did with MySpace, this post is
| still black text on a white background like the entire rest of
| the modern web (that's not in dark mode). Pick some damn colors
| and make a statement, dude.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Just look at one of the best platforms for "fun and weird" -
| YouTube.
|
| The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted in
| the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long
| videos.
|
| Every algorithm change directly impacts what creators, create,
| because no one wants to put in a whole lot of work for something
| to never be seen.
|
| If, for example, the ideal format for a joke or video is 3
| minutes, that either gets disappeared from public view or becomes
| part of a longer video.
|
| The real answer, in my opinion, is that current recommendation
| engines prioritize profit rather than quality or innovation. Or
| perhaps their evaluation metrics are so bad that their goal is
| misunderstood. Or perhaps those who stand to profit have become
| too adept at gaming algorithms (or human psychology e.g. lewd
| thumbnails) that they degrade results.
|
| ...or perhaps we all suffer from nostalgia and forget how
| terrible the results were of yesteryear.
|
| Who knows, all I know is I feel disappointed in what the internet
| has become. Even this thread is really just an ad, hijacking our
| biases and climbing the HN ranks accordingly.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > The algorithm aggressively promotes freshness (things posted
| in the past few hours for certain queries!) and 10+ minute long
| videos.
|
| I mostly agree, but there are some counterexamples that provide
| very in depth, quality information and have gotten popular
| because of it. Off the top of my head, Ben Eater, Sebastian
| Lague, 3Blue1Brown, and Reducible.
|
| I think it's still very possible to get stuff that doesn't fit
| into the algorithm to take off if you make it interesting and
| high quality :)
| ayngg wrote:
| The internet has changed from communities of interest to
| communities of people who commoditize social interaction within
| those interests. On the surface they seem fairly close to
| actual communities but they incentivize different things which
| changes how the community operates and personally I think they
| don't provide many of the healthy benefits of communities while
| cultivating some pretty unhealthy behavior loops.
| layer8 wrote:
| This convinced me that the HN upvote button should throw
| confetti.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The answer is fear. The internet used to be full of fun, and
| whimsey, and people doing strange things, and being accepted for
| it.
|
| This applies to web sites, social media, and even discussion
| forms like HN.
|
| If you try to express humor on 90% of the internet today, you are
| attacked by anonymous mobs of people who get dopamine hits from
| being offended for other people who they have not met, and may
| not even exist.
|
| Case in point:
|
| In another thread, someone accidentally or through auto-correct
| used the word "silicone" instead of "silicon." A helpful HNer
| replied:
|
| _You mean silicon. Silicone means something else._
|
| In the early days of the internet, someone could then have
| replied "What a boob!" and a certain percentage of the viewers
| would have gotten a slight giggle from it and moved on with their
| lives. Those who didn't find it humorous would also have moved on
| with their lives.
|
| But today, the self-righteous internet mobs would attack the
| person who wrote the boob comment, so people self-censor.
|
| Almost any time someone introduces any humor into HN, for
| example, someone points to imaginary "rules" and gets upset that
| if something isn't humorous to 100% of every single person on the
| planet, it shouldn't be uttered in public. Well, guess what --
| you're never going to get 100% of the people on the planet to
| agree about anything, so get over it.
| quaffapint wrote:
| It's been listed here before, but a fun ride that my son and I
| like to take in our Internet explorations...
|
| https://wilderness.land/
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| These periodic articles hand-wringing over the loss of old
| internet quirkiness are basically just re-posing a question
| isomorphic to "Why aren't people more fun and weird?" or "Why
| isn't society/culture/reality more fun and weird?", which are not
| actually interesting questions in my opinion. I mean, I get it,
| the internet used to be a different before it was the primary
| infrastructure for most human productivity, but is it not
| basically self-evident why things get less fun and weird when the
| user base goes from futurist nerds to everyone else?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2019)
|
| Previous discussion from not really that long ago when this was
| first posted, probably alot of same sentiment as the question has
| been asked many times last few years.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19038327
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| The internet is more fun and weird than it has ever been, but
| there's astronomically more boring unfun content getting in the
| way of finding fun stuff. Kind of the same story offline.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Isn't this just art imitating life? In real life, the boring is
| every where. You have to find those niche
| stores/clubs/eateries/etc by putting forth effort vs just going
| to the same-ol-same-ol that advertises to get your attention.
| prawn wrote:
| I think this is probably correct. The fun stuff is still there,
| but the people trying to profit from their creations are more
| motivated to get it in front of you (SEO effort, etc).
| thibran wrote:
| > Why isn't the internet more fun and weird?
|
| Because everything is complicated now. To code your own website
| you have to learn hundreds of hours of web technologies. There is
| no clear way and a lot of old, now wrong, advice in old blog
| posts. This limits the creativity that can be expressed a lot and
| is probably the main reason why "everyone" is now using
| "platforms".
| kderbyma wrote:
| I disagree. its no harder to program today than it was 15 years
| ago. in fact it is easier. its less meaningful....less
| satisfying....and has been eroded by copy-cats and everyone
| spinning up a product instead of a passion project.
| verifex wrote:
| I didn't see a conversation on this in the comments, maybe I
| missed it, but I think one of the reasons why you don't see as
| much creative control over web pages is spambots. Lots of things
| that I've put up on my own personal web page that let anyone add
| things to it also allowed spambots to invade. And since most
| software to repel spambots needs to be rather advanced to work
| effectively, you see instances where the user content part just
| keeps locked up until it's closed completely.
|
| This is a problem that big companies can solve, but it's much
| trickier for one guy with a web page to solve.
| EddieDante wrote:
| This sales pitch doesn't impress me. The internet isn't fun or
| weird any longer because corporations have taken over, and most
| normies aren't going to bother to learn how to build and operate
| their own websites. Just like most normies aren't going to bother
| to become their own sysadmins so they can run GNU/Linux on their
| PCs.
|
| Most people are fine with the Web being what it is today: QVC
| with a comments section.
| corford wrote:
| >QVC with a comments section
|
| haha this is gold :)
| schroeding wrote:
| But the internet was already taken over by corporations during
| the time this article reminisces about, wasn't it?
|
| MySpace _was_ owned by a corporation, but allowed massive
| customization including custom CSS anyway. Youtube also allowed
| way more customization in the past (remember the old profile
| pages?), all those small local social networks that often
| allowed straight custom HTML died when Facebook expanded
| worldwide, they were mostly for-profit.
| rnd0 wrote:
| Not exclusively taken over, no. It was more balanced between
| the corporate and the non-commercial.
| raxxorraxor wrote:
| QVC is almost quality content compared to parts of the web.
| Corporations do like it sanitized and fun is the lowest common
| denominator of content that is still able to hold your
| attention while reaching the largest audience as possible.
|
| But there is also truth that creativity of people gets stifled
| by locked down environments. In the past myspace blogs got a
| lot of mockery but I guess most people will miss it in contrast
| social media we have today. There is good stuff too and Tiktok
| is not the end of society, but the interesting stuff that can
| hold your attention beyond 10 minutes is rare. Perhaps it was
| never different and just seems this way because there is
| unlimited content.
| Kaotique wrote:
| Fun and weird has moved into TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram with
| stickers, music, sounds and overlays. It allows millions of
| people to enjoy creating fun and weird things and not only the
| handful of people who want to mess around with html snippets.
|
| I miss it too, but we are the minority.
| tarkin2 wrote:
| I find TikTok and Instagram primarily about vanity, show-
| boating and moral crusades than creative expression. Of course,
| the internet of old had those negative elements in it, but now
| those seem to have become the bread and butter of such
| networks.
| xnx wrote:
| Dig deeper. TikTok is fantastically weird and niche. I've
| learned about so many things I'd never seen on the web or
| YouTube like small scale trains that people ride around in
| their back yard, throw gliders, and tether car racing.
| low_common wrote:
| TikTok, Youtube, and Instagram have tons of cool content. This
| isn't 2005 anymore.
| randommind wrote:
| btw it is worth mentioning for those interested that a German guy
| recently cloned the old myspace: https://spacehey.com/
| dhosek wrote:
| MySpace letting people put CSS and HTML into their pages was a
| _huge_ security nightmare. My wife, before she left the company,
| led the security team and it was a constant battle to keep JS
| injection attacks off the site. I can only imagine how much worse
| it would be in 2022 vs 2008.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| I think the Internet is fun and weird. I mean, you can find
| videos of people playing metal and reggae guitar riffs over crazy
| preachers speaking in tongues:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsTcs1nU5MU
| fleddr wrote:
| It's an awkward and elitist thing to say, but I believe it to be
| true: whatever is embraced by the masses, suffers in some ways.
|
| The expert/nerd internet was pioneering, weird, edgy,
| cooperative. The internet for the masses is...different.
|
| You'll see the same effect in movies, following "safe" formulas.
| Every movie must have a romantic side story, no matter how
| irrelevant. It must deliver to the broadest audience possible.
| And of course, nothing should be thought-provoking, keep it
| middle of the road.
|
| Check out musical charts, songs are so repetitive that they seem
| AI generated.
|
| I've found another recent example in F1 racing. It's a pretty
| technical sport that used to have a fairly limited following. Now
| the thing is exploding and there's friction between the
| "original" fans and the clueless idiots spoiling the well (not my
| words).
|
| As soon as you have the masses on board, this obviously also
| invites a heavy commercialization of any space, with goals
| entirely opposite to the original spirit of the internet.
|
| Concluding, the only way to get it back, is to be elitist. Create
| well defined spaces, heavily curated in both members and content.
| robonerd wrote:
| Maybe Gopher or one of those similar inspired projects is the
| future after all. Too weird for mass appeal.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I might phrase it, "whatever is embraced by the masses becomes
| more appealing to the masses." Broadening in appeal is not
| necessarily worse, although it's surely worse from the
| perspective of the initial specialized interest group.
|
| Yes, the Internet of yesteryear was more interesting to our
| type of people, but it had no appeal whatsoever to anyone else.
| The world is better off today with an Internet that billions
| find fun and useful, even if it's way less fun for us
| specifically.
| fleddr wrote:
| Honestly, I think we have a discovery problem.
|
| There's plenty of room for both groups. In a way the internet
| is limitless. A lot of that weirdness still exists, it's just
| incredibly hard to find.
| nick_ wrote:
| Something like a tragedy of the commons in creativity.
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| Related: this guy built bun[0] (the new javascript runtime built
| with Zig and JavascriptCore)
|
| [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993429
| asciiresort wrote:
| How is this related?
| kderbyma wrote:
| Individuals want customization, novelty and the ability to relate
| between one another and share and show off.....companies want
| ubiquity and uniformity amongst their user base......
| remram wrote:
| I don't understand. Having those 3 quirky HTML tags is fine, but
| can users add other tags? How do they go about doing that? Can
| they enter the React definition of those tags somewhere on their
| site's configuration? Or in the page? Or install them from a
| marketplace, like the Sticker Packs of some apps?
|
| Right now this reads as "content platforms today don't let you
| enter code, so publish with us we don't allow code but we have
| confetti".
| aprinsen wrote:
| I mean, if you can write arbitrary jsx and react, seems like
| you can define your own components?
| papito wrote:
| Because the barrier of entry is gone. Some level of difficulty of
| creating content weeded out the morons. It is now flooded with
| "content creators" of at best average intelligence. The early web
| was glorious. A bunch of weirdos and nerds with at least some
| technical skills created personal websites, mostly horrible-
| looking, and linked to each other. There were counters,
| guestbooks, _moderated_ discussion boards...
|
| We were children discovering a new world, all over again. It was
| full of wonder and magic.
|
| Now - any idiot can whip out their phone and write anything they
| want, in a few seconds, and create "content". And THEN we all
| have to process that shit.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| While this rationale sounds true, but it doesn't actually align
| with my observations.
|
| Most of the web's noise content isn't low-effort comments, but
| low-effort commercial websites: Sometimes "tutorials" for
| extremely easy tasks padded with a bunch of superfluous
| instructions, sometimes freebooting other content, other times
| apparently AI-generated texts that seem legitimate at first
| glance but don't really make sense.
| papito wrote:
| Yes, absolutely, but it's in the same vein. In the past, to
| create content you had to go through some things.
|
| I still remember being on the phone with Network Solutions
| for an hour to activate my first domain. They asked for my
| password... Over the phone.... Now content creation is easy
| and, yes, automated.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Scraping blogs for content to steal and training language
| models to produce legit-seeming blog posts is hardly low-
| entry stuff, surely?
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Wasn't the hugest reason that they stopped allowing people to
| write their own code in myspace and made it into something nobody
| uses anymore was because you could do code injection attacks on
| it? [1] I mean doesn't anyone else remember that kid who got
| convicted of a felony for getting everyone's myspace pages to say
| 'but most of all, samy is my hero'? [2]
|
| [1]
| https://css.csail.mit.edu/6.858/2019/readings/advisory4.5.06...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samy_(computer_worm)
| totemandtoken wrote:
| I was thinking about this earlier today. Several years ago I used
| to read Gwern's blog and I was thinking to myself how difficult
| it would be for someone to do anything remotely similar in
| today's environment. It's not just the superficial stuff the
| author of this article is mentioning - editing HTML and CSS and
| glitter. It's deeper than that. There's just not enough attention
| to go around. The economics are off and the incentives are
| misaligned.
|
| No one's going to read a hyper-neurotic blog post about a
| quantified self experiment anymore and that sort of content won't
| fare well on tik tok. And it's a shame.
| ya1sec wrote:
| I made an app called Moonjump as a tool to browse the fun/weird
| internet. It's a server that redirects you to a random page
| harvested from Are.na, Hacker News, Marginalia Search, Gossip
| Web, and other sources yet to be configured... I saw someoe
| mentioned Wiby - totally forgot to include that. Going to do it
| this weekend!
|
| My project aims spark curiosity and provide a portal to the vast
| collection of interesting material hidden by the commercial web.
| The source material is compiled with care by users of these
| aggregation platforms. Since this accumulation is performed by
| hand, pages are saved because they had an effect on the users who
| saved them. Hopefully you will find things that have an effect on
| you. Everything opens in a new tab, so you can easily close and
| jump again. I find that it's fun to map the jump function
| (https://moonjump.app/jump) to a keyboard shortcut.
|
| Try it out: https://moonjump.app
| cutler wrote:
| React.js and friends.
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