Re:Leonard Kleinrock on what went wrong with the internet
by ineptech on Tuesday October 29, 2019 @12:01PM
(#21388661)
You've misunderstood. I'm not saying "my site is so awesome that you should be surprised no one goes to it!". The thing I'm saying is surprising is the disparity between the reaction on day 1 and on day N.
I know it sounds like I'm whining, I'm really not. All I can say is, if you weren't there, it's hard to describe how much "I found a neat site" was part of the currency of social interaction online twenty years ago. To get a dozen positive comments and emails but no shares or links was just not a thing that happened. People shared the urls to weird/funny/awesome things the way they share memes today. And I guess that change is not surprising - memes don't have ads, don't have google analytics, don't beg to put you on a mailing list, etc.
In the early days of the web if you put some time into making a funny site there just weren't all that many other funny things to link to. You were one in 1k or in 10k. But now there are so many other options, many of which publish new funny things every day, that you're one in 100k or in 1M.
A link to a neat site your friends haven't seen yet it still a valuable thing (and more or less the premise of HN, Reddit, etc) but the bar is higher.
(This is a good thing!)