The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

The Internet today feels like a big box strip mall in suburbia. While visiting my home town, I looked for a local, independent hardware store. There was only Home Depot and Lowe's. Then I realize how few independent businesses were left.

On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).

Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.

> Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.

Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to.

Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore.

I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation.

[1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-c...

A big problem today is that platforms only highlight only popular/trendy or paid content. What I would like to see are platforms that give regular people a chance either through chronological or random discovery. There is so much great content out there that doesn't make it into the limelight because of algorithm bias or because creators don't have the money/resources to boost their content.

Such a good way to put it. I couldn't agree more.

Yeah I think the long tail really suffers with a lot of popularity algorithms. Instead of a mixed bag with a bit for everyone you get the absolute lowest common denominator.

Yeah a lot of the aggregating effects start from search engines, which is why SEO rankings are such a big deal.

The problem is, a lot of the content quality is pretty bad. I remember being a kid in the '90s and viewing page after Geocities page on "Pokemon hacks" which were collections of hearsay versions of what is now known as MissingNo hack, many of which were just plain incorrect. Some of these sites would ask people to send in $5 to get access to the hacks (which was obviously a scam.) The reason the SNR of independent sites is so high these days is because independent sites aren't under any competitive pressure; they're often made specifically to avoid dealing with the corporate web. A world made up of independent websites would suffer the same incentive and spam problems that today's walled gardens face, with none of the walled garden protections.

Incentivizing good behavior and disincentivizing bad behavior has _always_ been the challenge on the net. People are getting emotional about SNR on the Web these days because it's much more ubiquitous in our lives, but Usenet and Email suffered from the same spam problems the web faces. Usenet faded away but Email also became, in practice, highly centralized the way the Web became, because the problem of spam (whether commercial or by crazies) is so hard to fight.

Discovery really is hands down the biggest issue. I follow a lot of cool blogs and read a lot of neat stuff from them, but I found them mostly by stumbling upon them on Mastodon.

Actually side note one of my favorite ways to kill time is by going to https://wiby.me and hitting "Surprise me" and reading whatever comes up. I've really discovered some quirky but extremely fun spots on the web with it.

> On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).

Is it really? I think that was true for a period of time, but that period had come and gone for the most part.

Google searches are pretty bad, and it's only a matter of time before it even loses its remaining relevance with normies.

Amazon, I can't really find much wrong with to be honest.

Reddit hung itself by its own rope with its redesign that turned it into yet another infinite scroll content site, taking the focus away from conversations and to memes and gifs. The site is a garbage can, and it's mostly crazies who are left. Reddit will remain relevant until people no longer use it as an alternative for finding real opinions that they can't find using Google. Its days are definitely numbered in terms of relevancy. You know it's bad when you're on your home feed and they shove in a live cam of a girl jiggling her rear end that you never subscribed to.

Facebook? I know almost no one under 60 who actually uses it or makes posts. Everyone's moved on to Instagram. I have 20 cousins and we communicate through Messenger (not my idea, I'd prefer Signal at least), but even a handful of them aren't even on Messenger anymore. Most of the groups are crap, though the Marketplace is halfway decent, which isn't hard to do when your only competition is Craigslist.

Twitter has remained relevant because of celebrities and journalists, and fewer and fewer people care about either of those groups anymore. More alternatives for different niches are going to pop up and while Twitter will never go away, it's well on its way to being nothing more than a sad joke.

> Discovery needs to be reimagined.

Right-o. As someone pointed out the other day, I think big search engines in their current form are on the way out. Hopefully we can move on to something that can rely on independent niche search engines instead of allowing megacorporations to be the gateway to the web. At this point I'm either using `site:` syntax with DDG or using the search features directly on certain sites. The only search terms I seem to get much useful for with DDG or Google is coding documentation. Anything else seems rigged and controlled.

I definitely agree with this point. Discovery in the long-tail of content (without resorting to sort by new which is a nightmare) is a must solve problem in a independent/decentralized web.

I have a feeling the "answer" is "all of the above" options; the ability to choose what discovery/recommendation mechanisms to use. Being intentional about which lens your viewing your recommendations through. Being able to easily swap between lens. Allowing for corporation owned lens and community owned lens. Allowing yourself to look at an issue through the lens of an individual or institution that you trust.

> people are really bad at linking to each other I wonder if the underlying point here is that the initial set of recommendations comes from small "communities". The readers of a certain blog suggest similar content to others in a non-spammy way. An independent music label links to artists that they enjoy listening to. I think there's missing infrastructure that makes it hard to form these communities though; any barrier to entry makes it less useful. I could see the "web3 ownership economy" thing helping here if it ever becomes a thing; creating this infrastructure as a side effect of the other stuff they want to accomplish. It'd be like if a subreddit was automatically created for every content creator, which could then be used to find recommendations of similar content.

I think this is exactly the wrong way around. Discoverability is the cause of the destruction of original content on the internet, because as soon as something is discoverable it turns commercial and mainstream and gets blown up.

Niche internet communities could exist when they weren't discoverable because that was the only reason people who mess them up stayed out of them. Keyword 'Eternal September'.

The internet is now almost entirely transparent and everything that is transparent is uninteresting, because the eyes of everyone are on it, and nothing that's actually fun ever happens in public.

We're human beings. For the best of us, 90% of the conversations and thoughts we have are junk and most of us are worse than that.

Always has been. Probably always will be.

Expecting any internet community to put out more than 10% of good content is an exercise in futility. The only reason why it seemed so much more engrossing and interesting when you arrived on the scene is that you had not acclimated to the room yet, and you were consuming the best, easiest to acquire thought morsels that the community had scrounged out of the trough and recycled until it could stand the test of time within that community.

Then, once you have consumed that bit of the best, you think the rest would be like that as well but instead you find yourself in a room full of people who all know the same things and think similar thoughts, and you season along with them, getting the better secondary and tertiary thought morsels, and maybe contributing some yourself. And then, finally, you see bright fresh faces coming in, following the same trail you followed, coming to the same wrong conclusions you came to, and you think, "There goes the neighborhood" and tell yourself how good it used to be when you were ignorant and didn't know any better.

Eventually you reach the next point, which is realizing that it was always like this. You just didn't know any better. Now you know better, and you also know there is nothing you can do about it. You can stay and help others enjoy their Halcyon days, or you can flee in search of greener pastures.

Suffice it to say, the internet has always been terrible and it has always been great, because it's full of people.

I was reading a security paper today that made a killer observation about trust infrastructure: public trust systems will always succumb to problems of informational asymmetry (moral hazard, adverse selection) so responsible users must always rely on private trust assessments first.

Same problem with information discovery—trust, reputation, it’s all the same social mechanism. Any public signaling will be degraded by information asymmetry. My point is that content discovery is a hard problem.

> public trust systems will always succumb to problems of informational asymmetry (moral hazard, adverse selection)

Ironically, this is something that the "smart contracts" powering some future development of Web 3.0 might eventually solve. By making it possible to verifiably put real-world money behind one's assertions and trust assessments, these problems are significantly reduced.

We can try to be better. DAOs or some form of self-governing community are a strong option.

If done correctly, they can provide the 'manual moderation' needed for these smaller communities.

The long tail isn't in unalloyed good for producers of long tail content/products. While some sales/views are better than no sales/views no individual site is making bank on sales.

It's great if you're Amazon or Google Ads which basically serve the long tail. They benefit from the entire tail.

I think I'm misunderstanding. Wouldn't this just make us trust the people with the most money?

Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting site where people put money behind opinions and lose it if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving a sort of wisdom of the crowds. This of course is still subject to some authority who can say what is right or wrong on any particular issue so doesn’t escape the trust problem. Also the credulousness of the current crypto users makes me question how valuable any signal from it would actually be.

The idea of merely trusting people because they’ve spent money is hilarious in the face of propaganda and advertising.

I used a "high street filled with shops" vs "public library filled with books" analogy for the current internet vs old internet a year or so back:

" ...imagine you live in a town which has a high street filled with shops trying to sell you things, and a public library filled with books trying to tell you things. If you want to buy something you go down the high street to look at the shops, and if you want to read something you go into the library to look for a book. Both activities can co-exist - good libraries do not put shops out of business or vice versa. But you don't want both activities to happen at the same time - you don't want a library filled with salespeople trying to get between you and your books, because that would be distinctly unhelpful at best and downright annoying at worst. The problem is that the internet has turned into a city that is all shops and no libraries. Not even local independent shops at that, just giant out-of-town retail malls... "[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25454867

That's assuming there is something to sell.

A page like this is absolutely fascinating, but not something you'd ever find on the major platforms, and also isn't helped at all by Google Ads: http://www.jamesriser.com/Machinery/Machinery.html

Discovery is an existential issue for the net now, it wasn't back when it started, because there are 100000x more places to go these days.

The old web was simple, but it was also small.

> Being charitable I think they mean some sort of betting site where people put money behind opinions and lose it if they are wrong or gain it if they are correct. Giving a sort of wisdom of the crowds.

They're called prediction markets, and they already exist!

* https://www.predictit.org

* https://www.metaculus.com/questions/

Ahh, creeping dystopia!

I dunno, I don't think it's necessarily a bad idea. Exploiting the wisdom of the crowds to make predictions could be a very good thing in fact. Unfortunately they fall afoul of gambling laws in some states/countries, so they're pretty limited right now. Scott does a decent overview here:

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/metaculus-monday