I wish there was something like Reddit that could be organized by topic, but had the simplicity of HN's design instead of the monstrocity Reddit has become. My guess is it would still succumb to the Reddit Hive Mind effect without a reasonably benevolent moderation team though. For all the times I've said that HN basically does the same thing, I have to admit that it is much better about keeping it in check.

Reddit has been pushing to be like other social media sites now. They've added profile pictures and avatars, not to mention they're pushing video content like nothing else. They've got livestreaming and try to saturate your front page with as much video as possible. They've also changed the way their app handles video links to be more like TikTok or YouTube.

It used to be a lot like HN - discussions around links to articles. I wish there was a community with the feel of HN with the wide net of Reddit.

It feels like all social media is converging; Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, all an endless stream of ai-curated short videos that you can swipe through over and over.

I use third party Reddit apps that largely resemble RSS feeds, and pull directly from the API. So you don't see any of the new social media features. You don't even see ads!

The same is true for desktop, with with the Reddit Enhancement Suite browser extension. My Reddit has looked largely the same for nearly 10 years!

> It feels like all social media is converging; Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Youtube, all an endless stream of ai-curated short videos that you can swipe through over and over.

It's likely that AI curation is the future because no humans can shift through the vast amounts of data and content being made. Things that can't keep up without curation or with just human curation have died or will die.

Good AI curation can bring you the exact content you're looking for, can but not will. I've seen it work times and times again, but I've also noticed that you have to be aware of the flaws of the tool to be able to use them or it gets really bad really quick.

You can't let the AI take control, if it derails to content you don't like you must know what it uses as a quality signal and give it a thumbs down, if it is intentionally derailed, you must stop using the platform.

TikTok recently released an update to their algorithm, it ruined my FYP and replaced my content with inane videos made by people nearby - hyperlocal garbage. The feedback mechanisms given no longer work, before that update they did.

I do think that even people being nostalgic here about the "old internet" should try and learn how to turn AI curation for their own advantage instead of just being sad and nostalgic.

Some subreddits are decent. Use old reddit and go straight to your subreddits so you never see the home page.

I don’t know about userbase but old.reddit with disabled subreddit CSS is quite usable for me.

Yahoo did this in the 1990s and it was cool for a while, but the net got too big to maintain the directory. There was an open alternative but it got inundated by spam of course.

I exactly had the same thought few weeks back on Twitter. Since I have ditched the whole 'social media bubble' for my mental health, it seems sometimes I wish there was some sort of HN-like aggregator for Tweets from my favorite topics and people.

Gemini protocol might be something here. But it's probably too "techy" to get widespread traction.

The Gemini protocol will never gain widespread traction because its designed to appeal to a specific tech-contrarian anti-modernist mindset with restrictions that most people won't find appealing or useful.

And as soon as the mainstream knows about it, and it no longer feels quirky and niche, it will be declared dead and abandoned anyway.

All the cool stuff has gone back to IRL. Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space. I would recommend hackaday.com because it hasn't changed in quite some time.

I used to go online to escape the boring, unimaginative people and the world they create. Now I have to disconnect to escape them.

You have to know where to look online, very rare these days.

FWIW, Siemens recently bought hackaday (or well, Siemens bought a company called Supplyframe which was the owner of Hackaday), so lets see how long that will last..

>Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space.

Entire new genres of creative output - music, fiction, fandom, films, cosplay, hobbyist and enthusiast communities have been spawned by the modern web. It's never been more vibrant.

I'll never understand why people on Hacker News seem to believe the internet stopped evolving as an expressive space just because services replaced the need to design websites by hand. That's like believing literature ended once scribes were replaced by the printing press.

Yeah, the internet is bigger now - all of the weird fringe stuff from enthusiasts is still there and there's even more of it. One thing that has happened is that the mainstream is there too now, so if you don't venture outside that its easier to not see the more interesting stuff. In the old days, when just having a "homepage" placed you a bit outside the norm, stumbling on something non-mainstream was more of a given.

And the mainstream has become more interesting as a result. It's not uncommon to watch anime now, D&D and video games are no longer niche, people's interests are becoming more diverse as media is no longer being gatekept by communities, geography or publishers, and everything becomes available to everyone. People might see that as a negative, the Eternal September effect eating their favorite thing, but I see it as a positive.

> Once people stopped making potato gun websites, the internet really stopped blossoming into an amazingly vibrant space.

Have they or have you stopped looking? I'd say the former.

Google still works, you just need to be very specific on your search criteria (e.g. site:). I do agree on the premise that good quality data, art and content has been lost to the winds of time.

Needing to use 'site:______.com' in the search query defeats the purpose of an internet search engine.

I agree that it is necessary today, due to the sheer amount of useless sites that pop up on page 1 of the search. I wish Reddit invested more into making their internal site search better. If people did their searches directly on websites, Google would have an incentive to improve search results so it wasn't always the same 10-20 websites topping the list for nearly every query.

You either have to visit aggregating sites that have likeminded people (HN/Reddit/Obscure FB groups/Group chats/Forums) or know exactly what you're looking for.

The article is about link rot, not cultural rot.

And it seems to overlook a pretty straightforward question: in the era of the search engine, how much of an issue is link rot?

I've hit bad links before. Four out of five times, I can do a general search for the title of the document that should have been at the link or the quoted excerpt that the document I'm reading pulled from the link, and I get a clone of the document posted somewhere else.