Is the claim (that there are interesting small websites that are impossible to find on the major search engines) true? I mean, it feels true, but how would we measure this? How would be detect whether things had got worse, or was getting better?
As I say, I am sympathetic, but I would like to have more confidence in the claim, and better ways to test proposed solutions.
Probably too late for you to see this, marginalia_nu, but I just wanted to say I appreciate the work you've put into your search engine and I should have noted that you would have more insight into this than most.
I tend to think these articles which have become common come from a good place but say more about someone's internet habits than about the internet. I find most social media have a profile section for "personal website". I find many such personal websites by following people's github profiles from interesting repositories or PRs. Sometimes they link to other websites. I do the same in HN, snoop around to see if an interesting comment has a link to a website in the profile. Many articles are posted on HN from personal websites, which again usually link to other websites. I don't know I feel like, if I wanted I could spend all day doing this and would have no problem finding more than hours in the day. So are we complaining about the internet or that we got stuck in the walled gardens of youtube and tik tok and so on and kind of wish we would spend more time on the "old school internet" but don't because the other part is so addictive?
In my point of view what's lacking is more places where curators that have found interesting small sites can showcase them.
I used Digg a lot for that, StumbleUpon was also really nice for this type of discovery, then early Reddit had a similar effect.
Nowadays? I don't know where to go, I can do all this effort of clicking around to find them but honestly I don't have the time, I'm in my mid-30s, I won't be jumping around hyperlinks searching for breadcrumbs of potential good content... A lot of people are doing that work already, like you, we are lacking a good place where we can pool this curation work collectively so others can discover it.
Just like you said - being surrounded by interesting people on interesting platforms who are likely to create small websites, we occasionally stumble across a link in a walled garden profile.
For the average internet user, small websites don't exist. Very few Instagram and TikTok profiles feature links to handcrafted sites. Google increasingly funnels all queries to the same 500 giant SEO'd sites.
I guess the question is whether that matters. The average internet user today looks a lot different from the average internet user 20 or 30 years ago. The internet looked different but the demographics looked different as well. The average internet user primarily uses Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok because that is the internet they enjoy.
I have a tiny website. It’s a static site where I occasionally post things. I don’t have any trackers or ads.
Behemoths didn’t kill the open web. They created walled gardens which were more attractive to the 99% of people who aren’t interested in doing their own dev ops. Most people prefer to spend their time with their hobby rather than figure out how to set up a server or create ssh keys for GitHub pages.
"Small web" advocates may eschew the ethics of larger platforms, but they appear to desire the same positive feedback loops that make the larger platforms addicting.
I think that a problem for some people is that the straightforward solutions to discoverability, such as simply browsing the web in the manner you described or even what is given in the marginalia.nu article, do not solve the desire to be seen as urgently as more technologically coordinated processes.
I have more Matrix and Discord rooms/"servers" than I can read in a day. If I catch up to the chatter in my Matrix anime rooms and my Discord RPG servers I'm not going to get any work done, any work done on the RPG I'm running, or any chores done at home. This is nothing to say about the personal blogs I read, the substacks, and Reddit, HN, etc. People are starving for personal content? As you say, I think this is more a user problem.
It has a very definite bias in the topics of blogs/websites that it finds which is partly an artifact of the kind of person likely to have such a site but also where they sourced it from (I think they might have started with a HN Blog roll or something). But I agree that it's generally interesting sites, and I find myself going back to it every couple of weeks for a while. It reminds me of a more substantive version of "StumbleUpon" from back in the day.
A proposal, dear reader: Create a list of bookmarks linking to websites you find interesting, and publish it for the world to see. You decide what constitutes “interesting”.
That's exactly what I did with share-links : It's a tool that allow you to easily store and share links of things you like on the web.
Here's the repo where you can find more info (see the file DEPLOY.md if you want to launch an instance on the web): https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links
It's manually curated though so not the most scalable thing I've put together. Wish I had more time to expand on this, seems on the cusp of being pretty cool.
stumbleupon was reliant on putting websites into a frame with their menu at the top, once websites started blocking the framing of their content, for various security reasons, the idea was dead.
Not so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author’s favorite blogs.
Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger.
It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies.
But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process.
Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking.
That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.
Blogrolls could be either very freeform, or very topical, depending on the blog and the blog author, but they did the job--if you liked that blog, chances were pretty good you'd find something interesting in the blogroll.
Webrings and some called them "Affiliates" (I dont know where the name came from, it makes more sense in Spanish, not sure in English), but they had this 82x32 buttons on the sidebar (sometimes anitmated GIFs) to similar websites, usually websites handled by friends.
Links sections were awesome, and made the web feel deeper than it really was. You could go on dives just clicking through and finding so much cool stuff. Plus if it was a hobby site, there was inherently some level of curation - I don't think anybody would be linking to any of the hundreds of lookalike SEO "blogs" nowadays if it weren't for search engines allowing themselves to be gamed.
Nowadays if it's not on the first "page" of Google (well, whatever the first group of infinite scrolling results is called) it might as well not exist. Makes the web feel flatter and less like a, well, web.
I planned to do something similar to it on my blog. The idea being using that page as a public bookmark list. It would contain anything from books to blog posts to youtube videos.
I do still see "ads" on these sorts of blogs, but not at all the same type of ad as elsewhere. There are a few "ad networks" that are just free promotion for various other web revival sites, e.g. https://wsmz.gay/#misc-bannerlink
I quite love it, especially when it fits with the site's aesthetic.
Not so long ago, every blog has a "blog roll", a list of author’s favorite blogs.
I remember this but I also remember it wasn't called this. (Because in my local English that sounds like bog roll, meaning toilet paper, so I'm sure that would have stuck).
There used to be directories that indexed those, but the flow of spam became insufferable and the money dwindled. Social media with its free content and auctioned advertising took over. The problem with current algorithms is the fact that they favor currency - if you are a Youtube creator and you don’t churn content at a consistent rate, you get less exposure than the new stuff - creating a punishment for old but gold content.
> Blogs limp along through RSS and Atom, but relying on feeds shapes everything you write into a blog entry. It’s stifling, homogenizing. The blogosphere, what remains of it, is incredibly samey.
I don't see this at all: my feeds contain so-called "long form" post and sometimes single-line comments.
AFAICT Gemini is essentially "add non-HTML files to your feed experience". Umm...OK? Certainly this blog post didn't suggest more, and to me wasn't particularly convincing given that I don't even experience (IMHO) the "problem" the author decried.
Discovery is and will ever be a problem, but comments on sites like HN expose interesting things all the time.
But saving tags--what was called folksonomies at one point--never really became a mainstream way of sharing links as opposed to just bookmarking them for your own use.
At the end of the day, a lot of this is lamenting that a hand-curated Internet doesn't scale.
ChatGPT is really, really good at surfacing small blogs and websites on a huge variety of topics. Ask it for a list of personal blogs about running a hobby garden.
It's not a perfect solution – if you ask for a fairly commercialized topic it can struggle to cut through the noise and will return larger websites with SEO-fodder style blog posts, but even with that caveat, it's miles better than Google.
Eh, I still ran into SEO spam as the top results, even turning web off.
I find this one of the worst parts of ChatGPT. Recommendations are full of advertisements/astroturfing/marketing. If you know any industry with aggressive marketers(For me, its Video games and seeing Nintendo/Stardew Vally populate those lists. Or iceland as a top vacation destination. Or recommending Apple products.)
Honestly sucks really hard. Nothing you can do because the AI is dumb and can't figure out marketing makes words appear more often.
True, we need a small website search engine search engine.
In all seriousness though I have forgotten the name of this site at least 5 times, and have to look it up every time (and sometimes it is hard to find)... perhaps a rebranding is in order.
Indeed, it's hard to discover small websites. While building https://Cloudhiker.net (like Stumbleupon but modern), I collected a few hundred of those websites and people love them!
Also, clicking trough web rings (yeah they still exist), you discover a bunch of cool sites from strangers all around the world. I joined Indie Webring (https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/) and Fediring (https://fediring.net/) a while ago.
Edit: oh almost forgot. I have a few hundred links in my personal bookmark archive at https://bookmarks.kovah.de
The subscription is entirely optional and not required to use Cloudhiker. It's directed towards power users. It helps the website to stay up and running. I would say this approach is more modern than shovelling tons of ads onto users like it was done by Stumbleupon.
I'd be willing to do something like this. I'm too lazy to implement it (hence why we don't already have something like this) but I would enjoy something like the following workflow:
1. my firefox browser has an extension
2. if I think a website is interesting, I bookmark it to one of N bookmark lists (which can be arbitrarily categorized, whether topical like "tech rants" or Google+ style "IRL friends only")
3. the browser extension does some API calls to flush/fill each bookmark list to one or more of publicly accessible websites like my github bio, my HN profile, my blog listicles for one or more federated bookmarks, publishes an RSS entry, whatever
This approach does not require an account (except that I give the browser extension credentials/tokens to wherever it publishes), and it results in one-click blogroll sharing.
PS: the problem with this is the temptation for feature bloat.
Feature 2: on known websites with user profiles like HN, reddit, github, check the user profile for all users on the page and list out discovered shared blogrolls by username
Feature 3: reports such as 'most shared blogroll links' based on your own personal browsing history, calculated offline in your browser
Feature 4: ability to block blogroll links with a comment as to why you do so
Feature 5: ability to share your blocks with a given blogroll list
Feature 6: ability to follow shared blogroll link blocks from other blogroll lists, then editorialize that shared list yourself
Feature 7: ability to share your editorialized block list with others who trust you more than whoever you are editorializing
...and so on.
Though I'm pretty sure I'm reinventing lots of lost features from the web of trust and semantic web era.
A linked bookmark blog is essentially how many use Pinterest. Discoverability in part comes from shared lists because the related items on a given page are¹ based on what other things are included in lists containing the item currently being viewed.
Pinterest has a very strong visual bias, and often a selling-things bias with the stored links being to things you can buy, so there might be a niche for something like that with features geared around links more generally, or features specifically to help editorialising links to nows and other reading matter, though preferably without deliberately poisoning search results to over-favour the link storing site like Pinterest does.
----
[1] at least in part, there may be other factors like what-you-have-looked-at-before, advertising, etc.
> It’s a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this. Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them has links to other personal websites.
Bingo. This isn't just the blogosphere, I see it in research papers, on GitHub pages, on social media, and elsewhere.
I could speculate, but I don't really know what causes this...
I previously asked about about bringing back webrings to discover small sites but didn't gain much traction. there was only one comment linking about webring . I am curious too why there isn't a strong open source initiative like so many other open source projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177128
It's because Google treats all sites with a large number of outbound links as a link farm and punishes them. Because Google couldn't figure out what list of links was organic vs spam it just punished everyone.
For me personally, I have been trimming links I have in various public places because a link is a sort of endorsement, and these days there is always someone who gets mad at you for endorsing the wrong thing. Even if a personal website is mostly alright, someone is going to dig up a random quote out of context, and the rest of the internet will judge your links based on that one bit.
Linking to a specific article on a single topic seems relatively safe, but linking to toplevel websites or blogs seems more risky.
Why in the world would you care about that, when there are already millions of people who don't even know you who hate you because of things outside of your control?
It's simple. Personal websites are the equivalent of "check my Linktree" for the HTML-literate. Most personal site sites I've seen are either boring technical blogposts or an impersonal online resume. People aren't showing their real personalities on their sites anymore.
Is it because there are just fewer personal websites to link to? I run a couple of small websites - one has eight or so links to similar personal-ish websites (non-reciprocal - just links I find useful and I assume my readers will find useful) but the other has no such links, just because I haven't found anything similar worth linking to.
Yes! I've been thinking about this for months now. How would a normal person on the internet find information and enjoy the internet if most stuff they can find revolve around closed platforms, or SEO marketing sites.
The best way to use the internet is to distribute information for everyone to see. Yet, that's not the direction it seems to be heading towards.
I really believe that the fun part of the interner is in small sites, and I think we need more projects that try to find these small, but important corners of the internet.
I've posted my language practice website on HN, LinkedIn, blah blah blah several places, and I can't get people to care. I've finally got some traction on slav facebook, but only just barely. Joining a web ring maybe kind of helped?
It's free, actually really free, because it's something I love and want to share. If I post it to several places and nobody clicks on it... What am I supposed to do ?? Buy ads to hopefully get people to use my _free website_? I have tried doing stuff from SEO articles -- open graph tags, descriptions and stuff. I've posted it on social media to lukewarm reception.
Someone else mentioned something like delicious. Maybe stumbleupon. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe some federated bookmarking thing. I think there's just been a cultural shift to "if it's not on FaceBook it might as well not be on the internet", and I don't know how to get back from that. I think most people use their computers and phones as bootloaders for instagram.
Not only are you helping the community by answering questions, it also gives you some trackback links that Google used to weigh higher (not sure if it still does).
I'm sure it would. They have mod bots monitoring how many of your links are to your own stuff. I run a totally free public education nuclear site (no ads, no cookies, plain old static HTML) and used to answer nuclear questions on reddit. I'd often back up what I was saying with links to detailed writing on my site, but I got banned from a few huge subs for self-promotion. Lol. So for the most part I just stopped answering questions on reddit.
Having self promotion "rules" under the guise of "protecting communities" when it's really to force you to buy Reddit ads. As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...
I would be fine with paying Reddit for the ability to (tastefully?) promote in my comments
As a user, I've found self promotion via comments way more helpful and relevant than their terrible ads...
As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad. But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will get curious about my profile and check stuff out.
As a former Reddit mod I always found the self-promotion rules problematic. It effectively means you can promote your stuff all you want as long as you pretend you're someone else. It would be better to encourage people to stand behind their stuff. I tried not to remove self-promotion as long as it wasn't spammy (and there's a fine line there).
Nice to see this attitude from a mod. I rarely have something to contribute to forums but love to read about people's projects. I've been in the position before of actually, finally, having done something I felt was worth sharing, a super rare occurrence for me, and then posted it and just getting instabanned for "self promotion".. it just feels like such a slap in the face from a community that you were enjoying being part of. Then getting into arguments with mods about it and eventually just having to unsubscribe. It hurts.
In the early days it was a bonus if something was OC ("Original content"). Now it's frowned upon.
But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.
Pretending you're someone else won't help you if all you ever do is post links to the same site/youtube channel. In my experience the vast majority of the people who were banned for self-promotion weren't doing anything else on reddit except self-promotion. They'd create accounts then put in the absolute bare minimal amount of effort to get enough karma to create posts, or they'd buy up old accounts that already had some karma, but it was clear from their histories that their entire purpose in using reddit was exclusively promotion.
They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.
I went snooping in your HN profile to find the link, and that is a really well done site. Clean design, relevant pictures, and interesting material. It's probably going to cost me an hour or two of productivity today.
This is an amazing website. It's horrible that when asking educational questions you will absolutely never see these websites. Just the same horrible quality ones that are trying to take all your data and advertise to you.
I see lots of people with links to a home page in their user profiles (on HN, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc...) I may be in the minority here, but if I find someone particularly insightful or interesting I sometimes click through to see if they have a link.
It was said in jest but I think everyone is taking me literally. I liked sigs on older phpBB forums when they were 2-3 lines and just some userbars. Cool back in the day, but they wouldn't really translate to the more minimalist HN.
tbf it wouldn't be a bad signal for search engines that can understand forum markup.
A boon for search is knowing intent and know who wrote something certainly helps in that regard, if a strong enough signal of course. Without knowing who intends what, you basically rely on the topic and words.
From my time in the dying days of Usenet, I can remember there were compact codes so you could fit as much about yourself into your signature as possible. Something like the old dating ad codes, e.g. GSoH = Good Sense of Humour, but more geeky.
The key to creating unique content is to work backwards from the queries which don't satisfy you currently. Answer those questions and expand upon the entire category of knowledge if possible. If you start with just publishing whatever fits your fancy, you're only guaranteed to have the psychic benefit of putting your thoughts out there.
If you have to buy ads, this means that the content you are producing already has large enough pool of competitors. Nothing wrong there, as long as you have a sustainable biz model.
Understand that at the end of the day, no matter how much HN users disparage Google as a advertisement company, their core product is still search. Search is the process of bringing users to the content which satisfies their queries. We can dispute the quality of results or pine for the search landscape of yesteryear, but the core premise remains. Google still needs to produce a modicum of relevant results.
SEO games will come and go. At the end of the day Google will always have an incentive to deliver the meaningful results users crave. The metrics they use to measure satisfaction will change, but the need for satisfactory content will not. RSS feeds, sitemaps, structured data and other essentials are only tools. At the end of the day the content is what you build. Many high traffic sites have completely bungled these basics and do well.
Simple to say, harder to execute, but entirely within the realm of the possible. Think more about the value you are providing to the user.
There's no pool of competitors -- that's why I'm doing this in the first place. The resources for learning this stuff are scarce. I just don't know how to get the word out there. I'm not looking to make money, I just want to give this away for free, because I think it's worth it. I can't even give it away D:
Then you need only change your page titles and h1 headings to better match relevant queries. The other problem could be that there isn't any search volume for that niche.
Yes -- and this is a good question with a good answer -- because I want to help people who might be interested in the language and culture find it. And I _know they're out there_ by the number of people who at least _tried_ some really obscure languages on Duolingo. It's not for my own vanity, I want to help get the language and culture out there. The resources for it are scarce, and I feel like I can help supplement them. I'm doing the building, but I'm still waiting for the "they will come" bit.
Why do you assign such a high importance to 'help get the language and culture out there'?
The small number of people who have read it will further disseminate it themselves if they truly believe it to be valuable. As long as this is more then a few dozen people, then that should be sufficient.
To me, language and culture have intrinsic value. I also feel very attached to my cultural heritage because I'm descended from holocaust survivors. I don't want to simply sit back and watch as the culture and language disappear, and I want to provide an entrypoint for people like me who are interested but perhaps have a little less time on their hands, or who struggle with learning languages.
I'm planning soon to start releasing some videos where I read some of the old stories in English! There's not enough of it out there. It's important to me to preserve it, and the best way to preserve culture and language is to disseminate it.
and edit -- I'm sorry you got downvoted. I think your question was a very good one, and I don't think the answer is obvious at all.
I don't put too much stock in downvotes, there are so many new users joining over the past few years, some fraction inevitably of questionable quality, that votes as a signal have become much less meaningful compared to say 10 years ago.
In fact, it's probably more of a positive signal for the really interested folks.
I'm not quite sure how the language/culture intrinsically having value or not relates though. Surely it would be the relative strength that impacts the successful rate of sharing?
And there are many hundreds or thousands of such languages and cultures competing on the internet.
> And there are many hundreds or thousands of such languages and cultures competing on the internet.
Definitely! I think that on the culture side specifically, there's not very much "English-side" voice for it. Hence why I'm looking to read stories, share songs, etc. in English, so that people who don't speak the language can still find information about the culture.
Then the other prong, I guess, is helping to build out the language-learning side, so that people looking to enjoy the language have more resources to do so.
Which language? Because I've desperately been looking for a good resource to practice/learn Slovene that's not an expensive course from the University of Cleveland.
You're supposed to "growth hack" AKA post on popular subreddits, forums and sites pretending to be a casual user (or use bots) that links to the site while talking about how great it is.
That feels kind of dishonest... But then, is "justifying means by the ends" really harmful in this case if it's free stuff that I'm just desperate to give away ?:D No ads, no cloud, no data sales, just plz look at my site plz plz.
> Everybody with a subpar product thinks that what is lacking for them is exposure. Most of them start spending a lot on ads.
Most probably your website is not good enough to attract a public.
You didn't have to be mean, you chose to be. Whether it's true or not, this isn't constructive criticism, it's just mean spirited.
> Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.
And why would I now? Now that I already know you're expecting it to be bad, I'm guessing that whether it's nice or terrible, you're going to think it's terrible. I don't have any interest in sending my website to someone who isn't interested in giving constructive criticism or giving suggestions.
I've dealt with this extensively in business, taking to business owners who have problems getting customers and think the problem is lack of exposure, while ignoring obvious flaws in their offering.
This might not be true of your site, but the pattern is so common that I assumed so. As you haven't linked the site, it is not a criticism of it. I admit the comment is mean and maybe I shouldn't have posted it.
You're confusing two Internets. It's understandable, because they have the same name.
In one, search engines are advertising platforms, and list reams of content, which is also an advertising platform, designed to solicit revenue in one way or another.
In the other, search engines are for finding information, and they list sites that publish helpful/interesting/weird/fun/whatever information for free, in case someone other than the author might like it.
> This site is a ghost, haunting the internet. It is a read-only archive of the bookmarking website del.icio.us.... This project is a labor of love (or more accurately, a labor of like). Del.icio.us was founded by my friends in 2003, sold a whole bunch of times, and when it was about to get sold again to spammers in 2017, I took the opportunity to buy it back.
Publicly shared bookmarks was a great way to discover new sites, and I feel like delicious died because it was acquired, not because it was a bad or unpopular idea.
Looping this back to some of the linked essay, I've always wondered if there's a way to make a social bookmarking system that's more decentralized or federated, through a browser plugin or something? Maybe something that's hosted on multiple hosting websites?
Yup, and comes with an API (originally cloned from del.icio.us IIRC), so you can back up your data or use in other ways. I'm always archiving updates on mine, since he does joke from time to time about getting hit by a bus.
With shifting from Google to AI all websites will have a discoverability crisis. If I ask an AI "Where to buy XYZ" - how as a website do I get in there?
So this article highlights a critical issue that urgently needs to be addressed. The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is partly contingent on resolving this problem. With the decline in search engine usage (a trend I contribute to, as I keep ChatGPT open all day), discovering websites becomes increasingly challenging. Consequently, this may lead to a decrease in content creation since websites are receiving less traffic. Ultimately, this could hinder AI development, as it relies on training with new and relevant data. Additionally, it's worth noting that this issue may extend to books as well.
I've thought this for years that a large part of the internet is essentially ghosted by a lot of the bigger search engines. I miss the old Yahoo/AltaVista type homepage where you would get a feed. Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us were essential tools.
Geocities and MySpace had webrings, so once you landed on something you could generally find similar stuff.
I'd love to see a good "home page" with curated feeds, bookmarking and search across it (and with LLM + Graph you can have your own semantic search)
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 269 ms ] threadBut also yes, I can't believe how many great, small blogs and other useful websites I've found only from HN
As I say, I am sympathetic, but I would like to have more confidence in the claim, and better ways to test proposed solutions.
I used Digg a lot for that, StumbleUpon was also really nice for this type of discovery, then early Reddit had a similar effect.
Nowadays? I don't know where to go, I can do all this effort of clicking around to find them but honestly I don't have the time, I'm in my mid-30s, I won't be jumping around hyperlinks searching for breadcrumbs of potential good content... A lot of people are doing that work already, like you, we are lacking a good place where we can pool this curation work collectively so others can discover it.
Though I did find https://cloudhiker.net/ recently, which is aiming for the same thing, and I'm optimistic.
For the average internet user, small websites don't exist. Very few Instagram and TikTok profiles feature links to handcrafted sites. Google increasingly funnels all queries to the same 500 giant SEO'd sites.
Behemoths didn’t kill the open web. They created walled gardens which were more attractive to the 99% of people who aren’t interested in doing their own dev ops. Most people prefer to spend their time with their hobby rather than figure out how to set up a server or create ssh keys for GitHub pages.
I think that a problem for some people is that the straightforward solutions to discoverability, such as simply browsing the web in the manner you described or even what is given in the marginalia.nu article, do not solve the desire to be seen as urgently as more technologically coordinated processes.
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Here's the repo where you can find more info (see the file DEPLOY.md if you want to launch an instance on the web): https://gitlab.com/sodimel/share-links
And here's my own instance, whith over... 4000 links: https://links.l3m.in/
Want to be surprised? Open this link on a new tab: https://links.l3m.in/en/random/
It was a tool for an exciting experimental internet.
Nowadays I can only imagine it’d be flooded with odd numbered list articles.
It's manually curated though so not the most scalable thing I've put together. Wish I had more time to expand on this, seems on the cusp of being pretty cool.
https://github.com/MarginaliaSearch/PublicData/blob/master/s...
and I'll poke it into the DB.
If you don't want to dirty your hands with github, you can send me an email at kontakt@marginalia.nu :-)
Nothing was better than have your blog in the blogroll of a "famous" blogger.
It is funny how people who didn’t live through this blog era are now reinventing it spontaneously. It’s a bit like bloggers were onto something 20 years ago, before being killed by the advertisements monopolies.
But there’s a big difference between old blogosphere and current blogosphere : old blogs had ads. Most bloggers were experimenting with it, one way or another. We were lured by monetization and killed ourselves in the process.
Younger bloggers seem to have learn about it: let’s do the same old blogs but, this time, without any ads and by actively preventing tracking.
That’s how evolution works, when you think about it. It’s beautiful.
+ the webrings.
Oh, internet was so muuch better.
Nowadays if it's not on the first "page" of Google (well, whatever the first group of infinite scrolling results is called) it might as well not exist. Makes the web feel flatter and less like a, well, web.
https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/readings/
But I am not a prolific blogger and haven't updated it anyway for a long time.
I quite love it, especially when it fits with the site's aesthetic.
I remember this but I also remember it wasn't called this. (Because in my local English that sounds like bog roll, meaning toilet paper, so I'm sure that would have stuck).
I don't see this at all: my feeds contain so-called "long form" post and sometimes single-line comments.
AFAICT Gemini is essentially "add non-HTML files to your feed experience". Umm...OK? Certainly this blog post didn't suggest more, and to me wasn't particularly convincing given that I don't even experience (IMHO) the "problem" the author decried.
Discovery is and will ever be a problem, but comments on sites like HN expose interesting things all the time.
del.icio.us
Which I believe Yahoo bought off and killed.
But saving tags--what was called folksonomies at one point--never really became a mainstream way of sharing links as opposed to just bookmarking them for your own use.
At the end of the day, a lot of this is lamenting that a hand-curated Internet doesn't scale.
> on gemini-scale it works pretty well
This might be the problem in a nutshell. Maybe discoverability doesn't scale, and (overlapping) villages are the only solution.
It's not a perfect solution – if you ask for a fairly commercialized topic it can struggle to cut through the noise and will return larger websites with SEO-fodder style blog posts, but even with that caveat, it's miles better than Google.
I find this one of the worst parts of ChatGPT. Recommendations are full of advertisements/astroturfing/marketing. If you know any industry with aggressive marketers(For me, its Video games and seeing Nintendo/Stardew Vally populate those lists. Or iceland as a top vacation destination. Or recommending Apple products.)
Honestly sucks really hard. Nothing you can do because the AI is dumb and can't figure out marketing makes words appear more often.
In all seriousness though I have forgotten the name of this site at least 5 times, and have to look it up every time (and sometimes it is hard to find)... perhaps a rebranding is in order.
Also, clicking trough web rings (yeah they still exist), you discover a bunch of cool sites from strangers all around the world. I joined Indie Webring (https://xn--sr8hvo.ws/) and Fediring (https://fediring.net/) a while ago.
Edit: oh almost forgot. I have a few hundred links in my personal bookmark archive at https://bookmarks.kovah.de
What about that is more modern?
What could be more modern than that?
1. my firefox browser has an extension
2. if I think a website is interesting, I bookmark it to one of N bookmark lists (which can be arbitrarily categorized, whether topical like "tech rants" or Google+ style "IRL friends only")
3. the browser extension does some API calls to flush/fill each bookmark list to one or more of publicly accessible websites like my github bio, my HN profile, my blog listicles for one or more federated bookmarks, publishes an RSS entry, whatever
This approach does not require an account (except that I give the browser extension credentials/tokens to wherever it publishes), and it results in one-click blogroll sharing.
PS: the problem with this is the temptation for feature bloat.
Feature 2: on known websites with user profiles like HN, reddit, github, check the user profile for all users on the page and list out discovered shared blogrolls by username
Feature 3: reports such as 'most shared blogroll links' based on your own personal browsing history, calculated offline in your browser
Feature 4: ability to block blogroll links with a comment as to why you do so
Feature 5: ability to share your blocks with a given blogroll list
Feature 6: ability to follow shared blogroll link blocks from other blogroll lists, then editorialize that shared list yourself
Feature 7: ability to share your editorialized block list with others who trust you more than whoever you are editorializing
...and so on.
Though I'm pretty sure I'm reinventing lots of lost features from the web of trust and semantic web era.
Pinterest has a very strong visual bias, and often a selling-things bias with the stored links being to things you can buy, so there might be a niche for something like that with features geared around links more generally, or features specifically to help editorialising links to nows and other reading matter, though preferably without deliberately poisoning search results to over-favour the link storing site like Pinterest does.
----
[1] at least in part, there may be other factors like what-you-have-looked-at-before, advertising, etc.
Bingo. This isn't just the blogosphere, I see it in research papers, on GitHub pages, on social media, and elsewhere.
I could speculate, but I don't really know what causes this...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
Linking to a specific article on a single topic seems relatively safe, but linking to toplevel websites or blogs seems more risky.
The best way to use the internet is to distribute information for everyone to see. Yet, that's not the direction it seems to be heading towards.
I really believe that the fun part of the interner is in small sites, and I think we need more projects that try to find these small, but important corners of the internet.
I've posted my language practice website on HN, LinkedIn, blah blah blah several places, and I can't get people to care. I've finally got some traction on slav facebook, but only just barely. Joining a web ring maybe kind of helped?
It's free, actually really free, because it's something I love and want to share. If I post it to several places and nobody clicks on it... What am I supposed to do ?? Buy ads to hopefully get people to use my _free website_? I have tried doing stuff from SEO articles -- open graph tags, descriptions and stuff. I've posted it on social media to lukewarm reception.
Someone else mentioned something like delicious. Maybe stumbleupon. Maybe this, maybe that. Maybe some federated bookmarking thing. I think there's just been a cultural shift to "if it's not on FaceBook it might as well not be on the internet", and I don't know how to get back from that. I think most people use their computers and phones as bootloaders for instagram.
Though there's probably a tragedy of the commons where high rep folks start selling signature space for advertising/influencer marketing.
I would be fine with paying Reddit for the ability to (tastefully?) promote in my comments
As both a user and an advertiser I agree. The communities I visit, if not the whole site, are faithfully anti-ad. But if I answer some questions occasionally somebody will get curious about my profile and check stuff out.
But I think it's not just a cultural shift, but from being burned by everyone hustling for something. People want to drive you to their dropshipping business, their woodworking course, their OF, buy their self-help book or whatever.
They could have easily spent a few hours a week exploring and meaningfully participating in other subreddits that interested them, but they had no desire to spend that time or be a useful part of any community. They just wanted to draw viewers to whatever they were promoting.
Link for people lazier than me: https://whatisnuclear.com/
Sigs on HN soon pls?
A boon for search is knowing intent and know who wrote something certainly helps in that regard, if a strong enough signal of course. Without knowing who intends what, you basically rely on the topic and words.
If you have to buy ads, this means that the content you are producing already has large enough pool of competitors. Nothing wrong there, as long as you have a sustainable biz model.
Understand that at the end of the day, no matter how much HN users disparage Google as a advertisement company, their core product is still search. Search is the process of bringing users to the content which satisfies their queries. We can dispute the quality of results or pine for the search landscape of yesteryear, but the core premise remains. Google still needs to produce a modicum of relevant results.
SEO games will come and go. At the end of the day Google will always have an incentive to deliver the meaningful results users crave. The metrics they use to measure satisfaction will change, but the need for satisfactory content will not. RSS feeds, sitemaps, structured data and other essentials are only tools. At the end of the day the content is what you build. Many high traffic sites have completely bungled these basics and do well.
Simple to say, harder to execute, but entirely within the realm of the possible. Think more about the value you are providing to the user.
The small number of people who have read it will further disseminate it themselves if they truly believe it to be valuable. As long as this is more then a few dozen people, then that should be sufficient.
I'm planning soon to start releasing some videos where I read some of the old stories in English! There's not enough of it out there. It's important to me to preserve it, and the best way to preserve culture and language is to disseminate it.
and edit -- I'm sorry you got downvoted. I think your question was a very good one, and I don't think the answer is obvious at all.
In fact, it's probably more of a positive signal for the really interested folks.
I'm not quite sure how the language/culture intrinsically having value or not relates though. Surely it would be the relative strength that impacts the successful rate of sharing?
And there are many hundreds or thousands of such languages and cultures competing on the internet.
Definitely! I think that on the culture side specifically, there's not very much "English-side" voice for it. Hence why I'm looking to read stories, share songs, etc. in English, so that people who don't speak the language can still find information about the culture.
Then the other prong, I guess, is helping to build out the language-learning side, so that people looking to enjoy the language have more resources to do so.
You're supposed to "growth hack" AKA post on popular subreddits, forums and sites pretending to be a casual user (or use bots) that links to the site while talking about how great it is.
I dunno, what do you think?
Most probably your website is not good enough to attract a public.
Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.
You didn't have to be mean, you chose to be. Whether it's true or not, this isn't constructive criticism, it's just mean spirited.
> Edit: I know it sounds rude, but since you haven't linked to the site, there's no way to evaluate it either.
And why would I now? Now that I already know you're expecting it to be bad, I'm guessing that whether it's nice or terrible, you're going to think it's terrible. I don't have any interest in sending my website to someone who isn't interested in giving constructive criticism or giving suggestions.
This might not be true of your site, but the pattern is so common that I assumed so. As you haven't linked the site, it is not a criticism of it. I admit the comment is mean and maybe I shouldn't have posted it.
In one, search engines are advertising platforms, and list reams of content, which is also an advertising platform, designed to solicit revenue in one way or another.
In the other, search engines are for finding information, and they list sites that publish helpful/interesting/weird/fun/whatever information for free, in case someone other than the author might like it.
Confusing the two leads to disappointment.
That was a good social bookmarking site. I wonder if anything similar exists now?
> This site is a ghost, haunting the internet. It is a read-only archive of the bookmarking website del.icio.us.... This project is a labor of love (or more accurately, a labor of like). Del.icio.us was founded by my friends in 2003, sold a whole bunch of times, and when it was about to get sold again to spammers in 2017, I took the opportunity to buy it back.
For those unfamiliar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)
Publicly shared bookmarks was a great way to discover new sites, and I feel like delicious died because it was acquired, not because it was a bad or unpopular idea.
https://rubenerd.com/blogroll.opml
Wow... I never really knew when I was visiting a website transformed by XSLT
This is really cool
Geocities and MySpace had webrings, so once you landed on something you could generally find similar stuff.
I'd love to see a good "home page" with curated feeds, bookmarking and search across it (and with LLM + Graph you can have your own semantic search)