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.
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
In the early days of the web, pages were made primarily by hobbyists, academics, and computer savvy people about subjects they were personally interested in. Later on, the web became saturated with commercial pages that overcrowded everything else. All the personalized websites are hidden among a pile of commercial pages. Google isn't great at finding them, its focus is on finding answers to technical questions, and it works well; but finding things you didn't know you wanted to know, which was the real joy of web surfing, no longer happens. In addition, many pages today are created using bloated scripts that add slick cosmetic features in order to mask the lack of content available on them. Those pages contribute to the blandness of today's web.
The Wiby search engine is building a web of pages as it was in the earlier days of the internet. In addition, Wiby helps vintage computers to continue browsing the web, as pages indexed are more suitable for their performance.
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/.
I clicked "surprise me" and found a page that has a picture of astronauts on the ISS with SPHERES: http://www.madsci.org/
In high school my friends and I were on a team for a robotics/programming competition run by NASA and MIT that involved programming 3d models of these SPHERES to do some action in a virtual space against an opponent. But if you made it to the final round, you got to watch your code get executed by ACTUAL SPHERES on the INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION. We won 2 years in a row, and made it to the final round 3 times (while I was on the team, I think they made it to the final round once the year before I joined). I doubt I'll ever do anything nearly that cool ever again in my actual career now.
* Got a crappy knock-off Dustin Diamond page that wasn't official and looked like it was the result of a 12 year old and a copy of MS Frontpage and a case of Jolt Cola.
* A "furniture porn" site that was horrific. Not the modern usage where it's a lot of photos of nice furniture, the other interpretation. No humans, just weird ass pictures of chairs.
* Then something actually good: http://marc.merlins.org/linux/refundday/ Apparently there was a Windows Refund day in 1999 where *nix users could get a refund for the copy of Windows that came in their PC.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I doubt it will for marketing in general. It is a real red queen's race/prisoner's dilemma. Now discretionary spending can and will go down in a recession even among those who could afford it. Due to the gaucheness of showing off during bad times (ironically making things worse if taken in a vacuum).
Frankly it always struck me as kind of insane that it was considered a bad thing. Especially since the definition of selling out seemed to consist of any and everything while not being successful. Was it some hippie movement vestige or something?
As far as I can tell, selling out has always been a subjective thing and has always been directed towards those who turn their back on principles for personal gain. Of course, everyone has a different idea of what those principles are so pretty much everyone who is sucessful gets branded as a sellout by someone. While some of this may be a vestige of the hippie movement, I suspect most of it is not.
The book "The Rebel Sell" points out that creating businesses and selling products was central to the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. The "Whole Earth Catalogue" was not a 'leave a penny, take a penny' dish!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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):
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I miss old internet stuff to, but in a way I think it’s just morphed. First you have to look past the influencer/marketing cruft trying to pass as authentic but I find real great content is predominantly being created on YT and other video channels. The production value I see some amateur folks take is insane and has to be a massive hobby in of itself.
Also have to just realize the web is now public transport where it used to be exclusive. It’s like flying in 1962 versus 2022
Is it material for most? I’d bet it hardly offsets the investment in AV equipment as well as editing software. For a lot of people, learning video editing is path for content creation just like learning to code is/was for many others. To some degree, I’d venture they are in competition with each other. And code has more business value while video has broader appeal. So more so just pointing out how the trends have played out such that developers are not necessarily the “creators” of the experienced internet any more. They mostly just do the plumbing.
My YT watching tends to be around DIY stuff, how to, engineering and home/construction. These are people that in past would have made high quality blogs with tutorials but now just make videos. I’m consistently impressed by the storytelling and production value. Even if they technically receive an ad share I still think they’re amateur. There are a few that have crossed over into massive popularity and it’s probably significant but that’s not the norm. Even in the old days, people put ads on their tutorial pages and a lot of blogs so it’s no different, to me.
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.
I don't think they're talking about links but about content. No need for real links when the content is within reddit. For instance, I've curated my subs to all my hobbies: farming, watch collecting, coffee stations, coffee in general, musician fan pages, etc and they're mostly very small and have content very much like the old web I grew up on.
I can get with that. I'd say it's mostly semantics because at the end of the day, we're just trying to find interesting content and both ways accomplish that but there's really no way to win that argument. Lol
I remember when I first showed my mum how to use a computer, StumbleUpon (the FF add-on) was one of the first things I installed. She was hooked! And then she'd email me every time she saw something interesting - which was every 5 minutes...
I guess now the equivalent is your mum tagging you on Facebook?
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.
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.
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.
It was possible to open recommended pages in a new tab. This is one of the things we tried at StumbleUpon's quasi-successor, Mix. It was significantly less engaging for new users than having everything in one tab. Some people who had used the real StumbleUpon didn't just find it less engaging; they hated it and sent hate mail to make sure we knew. It was a distinctly inferior experience.
You can no longer deliver the full StumbleUpon experience through a web browser, at least not legally. The tightening technical constraints make it impossible to replicate what we could do 10 years ago. Of course now it's also harder for someone to enroll your machine in a botnet because you played a game, or steal your passwords because you installed a browser extension, so those things are to the better. But increasing attention to security and control also make it harder to offer "fun and weird" experiences of various kinds.
"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.
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.