7 ms·

This is what I never got about the whole "social media ruined the web" - thing. The web, the REAL web, that weird and almost alive thing where people share and

This is what I never got about the whole "social media ruined the web" - thing. The web, the REAL web, that weird and almost alive thing where people share and create and tell their stories ... never went away. And it likely never will. Sure, it's not the web that the masses choose to use. That's fine. It doesn't need to be. Same as everyone is free to decide whether they want to munch fast food, or eat a fine dinner, everyone can choose the web they deserve. Relevance/Quality/Importance and Clicks may be conflated in the ad-businesses that call themselves social media, but it doesn't matter to me if my blog is seen by 10 people or 10E6.

grumbel 3y ago
> never went away. It might still be hiding out there, but when search engines never point you to it, social sites don't allow links to it and even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.), how are you ever going to find it? The amount of normal open web sites I tend to interact with is approaching zero. Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad. All links turn into 404 within a couple of months, so that little bit of interaction I still have with the open web happens mostly through archive.org. It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either.
- stavros 3y ago
  This is a huge problem. Search engines never find indie stuff that answers my question any more. Instead, they find huge websites that are only tangentially relevant to my query. I used to often have people tell me "I was looking for a solution to a problem with Django and found your blog, thanks!". Now they find an unanswered question on SO instead.
  - klabb3 3y ago
    Maybe your site is just unappealing and has bad UX? Have you tried adding adsense, tracking scripts, cookie consent banners, auto playing videos, scrolljacking, newsletter popovers and put the content after a long GPT generated background story at the bottom of the site to make it more appealing to PageRa.. I mean users?
    - stavros 3y ago
      Don't forget the obligatory "we care about your privacy" popup with the options "accept all" and "manually click three thousand checkboxes".
- marginalia_nu 3y ago
  You're using the wrong search engines ;-) Here's a rabbit hole for you: https://search.marginalia.nu/site/jvns.ca https://search.marginalia.nu/site/jvns.ca (disclosure: I built this)
  - em-bee 3y ago
    how do i add this as a default search engine in my browser?
    - marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Dunno depends on your browser. In firefox you should be able to add it by just right clicking the URL bar while at the marginalia search website. Chrome is constantly finding ways of making it harder to add new search engines to the browser, but what you do is this: * Go to settings * Add a 'site search' engine called Marginalia Search, with the pattern 'https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%s https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%s' If you want to go all in on MS (don't think it's ready for that), you can click the 3 dots on the right and make it a default search engine there. I have no Apple hardware so I have no idea about Safari.
- usrbinbash 3y ago
  > but when search engines never point you to it So? This internet existed LONG before modern search engines. We found each other, and still do. How? Links, that's how. One breadcrumb leading to the next. Plus, it's not as if search engines are the great windows to the interwebs they once were, and that situation isn't improving: https://www.fastcompany.com/90673924/its-not-just-you-google-search-really-is-getting-worse https://www.fastcompany.com/90673924/its-not-just-you-google... https://marketvantage.com/blog/google-search-is-getting-worse/ https://marketvantage.com/blog/google-search-is-getting-wors... https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sucks-search-engine-chatgpt-will-revolutionize-search-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sucks-search-engine-c... > social sites don't allow links to it Same question as with the point about search engines, only with an even bigger "So?". So called "social" sites are not good entrypoints into the web as it is, and have every incentive not to be. They are ad-businesses, and their revenue depends on keeping users in their ecosystem, not guiding them somewhere else. > even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.), Excuse me? Almost every major browsers allows using RSS feeds. They all have bookmarking functionality, usually tag- and searchable. And I am pretty sure, they all know what an `<a>`nchor is ;-) As for uploading and editing: We have been doing this via webmasks for well over a decade, this is a solved problem. And it's not like I need the editing mask my self hosted blog-software offers to edit a page that is essentially a markdown document. > Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad. Compared to what, the retention in the "closed" web? Where everything gets flushed out of the recommendation feed as soon as it isn't making the ad-companies enough money any more? Oh, sure, the content may still be there somewhere, but who knows, since the searchability of the whole thing sucks. In contrast, some resources of the "open" web I have in my bookmarks, rival the age of some of the "closed" web companies, and are still up and running. That's because it doesn't really take much to run a small website based on simple and relieable technology. And even if they do go belly-up at some point, there is a good chance that their simple and relieable structure has been picked up and archived with all relevant information by any of the crawl-and-archive projects around. In contrast, please show me how I can reliably cite information from some random social media feed several years later. > It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either. On the contrary. In recent years, with the ever declining quality of search results, the ever increasing amount of low-quality machine-generated bloat on the web, and the toxicity and tribalism on "social" media, there has been a veritable resurgence of the simple, open, organic web. I see alot of people making new small community sites and interesting projects. And the glue holding all of these together making it discoverable, aka. blogs is in better shape than ever. As I said before, the amount of clicks doesn't indicate health, and the attention of the masses don't really matter to resources that don't have to justify their existence by generating as much ad-revenue as possible.
dfxm12 3y ago
Ruined is a strong term. The signal to noise was greatly reduced though, among other things. Even in the context of social media sites, My Space allowed for a lot more "weirdness" than what you can do with today's popular social networks. Facebook had features that made it feel more "alive" when it first launched compared to today as well.

grumbel 3y ago

> never went away. It might still be hiding out there, but when search engines never point you to it, social sites don't allow links to it and even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.), how are you ever going to find it? The amount of normal open web sites I tend to interact with is approaching zero. Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad. All links turn into 404 within a couple of months, so that little bit of interaction I still have with the open web happens mostly through archive.org. It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either.

stavros 3y ago
This is a huge problem. Search engines never find indie stuff that answers my question any more. Instead, they find huge websites that are only tangentially relevant to my query. I used to often have people tell me "I was looking for a solution to a problem with Django and found your blog, thanks!". Now they find an unanswered question on SO instead.
- klabb3 3y ago
  Maybe your site is just unappealing and has bad UX? Have you tried adding adsense, tracking scripts, cookie consent banners, auto playing videos, scrolljacking, newsletter popovers and put the content after a long GPT generated background story at the bottom of the site to make it more appealing to PageRa.. I mean users?
  - stavros 3y ago
    Don't forget the obligatory "we care about your privacy" popup with the options "accept all" and "manually click three thousand checkboxes".
marginalia_nu 3y ago
You're using the wrong search engines ;-) Here's a rabbit hole for you: https://search.marginalia.nu/site/jvns.ca https://search.marginalia.nu/site/jvns.ca (disclosure: I built this)
- em-bee 3y ago
  how do i add this as a default search engine in my browser?
  - marginalia_nu 3y ago
    Dunno depends on your browser. In firefox you should be able to add it by just right clicking the URL bar while at the marginalia search website. Chrome is constantly finding ways of making it harder to add new search engines to the browser, but what you do is this: * Go to settings * Add a 'site search' engine called Marginalia Search, with the pattern 'https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%s https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%s' If you want to go all in on MS (don't think it's ready for that), you can click the 3 dots on the right and make it a default search engine there. I have no Apple hardware so I have no idea about Safari.
usrbinbash 3y ago
> but when search engines never point you to it So? This internet existed LONG before modern search engines. We found each other, and still do. How? Links, that's how. One breadcrumb leading to the next. Plus, it's not as if search engines are the great windows to the interwebs they once were, and that situation isn't improving: https://www.fastcompany.com/90673924/its-not-just-you-google-search-really-is-getting-worse https://www.fastcompany.com/90673924/its-not-just-you-google... https://marketvantage.com/blog/google-search-is-getting-worse/ https://marketvantage.com/blog/google-search-is-getting-wors... https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sucks-search-engine-chatgpt-will-revolutionize-search-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sucks-search-engine-c... > social sites don't allow links to it Same question as with the point about search engines, only with an even bigger "So?". So called "social" sites are not good entrypoints into the web as it is, and have every incentive not to be. They are ad-businesses, and their revenue depends on keeping users in their ecosystem, not guiding them somewhere else. > even your browser lacks any advanced way to deal with it (recommendations, notifications, editing, uploading, etc.), Excuse me? Almost every major browsers allows using RSS feeds. They all have bookmarking functionality, usually tag- and searchable. And I am pretty sure, they all know what an `<a>`nchor is ;-) As for uploading and editing: We have been doing this via webmasks for well over a decade, this is a solved problem. And it's not like I need the editing mask my self hosted blog-software offers to edit a page that is essentially a markdown document. > Doesn't help that the retention on the open web is pretty bad. Compared to what, the retention in the "closed" web? Where everything gets flushed out of the recommendation feed as soon as it isn't making the ad-companies enough money any more? Oh, sure, the content may still be there somewhere, but who knows, since the searchability of the whole thing sucks. In contrast, some resources of the "open" web I have in my bookmarks, rival the age of some of the "closed" web companies, and are still up and running. That's because it doesn't really take much to run a small website based on simple and relieable technology. And even if they do go belly-up at some point, there is a good chance that their simple and relieable structure has been picked up and archived with all relevant information by any of the crawl-and-archive projects around. In contrast, please show me how I can reliably cite information from some random social media feed several years later. > It might not be dead yet, but it's certainly not in a very healthy state either. On the contrary. In recent years, with the ever declining quality of search results, the ever increasing amount of low-quality machine-generated bloat on the web, and the toxicity and tribalism on "social" media, there has been a veritable resurgence of the simple, open, organic web. I see alot of people making new small community sites and interesting projects. And the glue holding all of these together making it discoverable, aka. blogs is in better shape than ever. As I said before, the amount of clicks doesn't indicate health, and the attention of the masses don't really matter to resources that don't have to justify their existence by generating as much ad-revenue as possible.

dfxm12 3y ago

Ruined is a strong term. The signal to noise was greatly reduced though, among other things. Even in the context of social media sites, My Space allowed for a lot more "weirdness" than what you can do with today's popular social networks. Facebook had features that made it feel more "alive" when it first launched compared to today as well.