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A comment on The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back. Parent comment

Re:The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back by majormajor on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @08:26PM (#30080492)
I agree with this. You can still do all those things! And there are still people doing all those things. It's just not novel or exciting to us anymore. And I might be more disappointed now that my Geocities about a comic book never gets any hits, while there are influencers on Instagram and TikTok making $$$$, than I was in 1999 when that wasn't really conceivable. (And then there are the neat things that weren't even possible back then - Roblox gets a lot of shit for its financial model these days, but 1999 me would've eaten up an easy-to-use game programming interface to show off cool shit to my friends back then.)

However, I do think there is a lot of lost value due to today's "search for it" attitude replacing curation. Yes, curation takes a lot of work, but that also makes it more robust against SEO spam and such. But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it - original web companies were benefiting from wildly optimistic funding numbers for "eyeballs" and display ad rates that are never coming back.

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Re:The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back by zozbot234 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @08:37PM (#30080566)
> But I also don't think it added enough value that people would pay for it

There was non-commercial curation back in the day, DMOZ was the most prominent example. In general, commercialism was very rare on the early Internet. "Business" sites were thought of as somewhat exceptional, not the norm.

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