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.
https://mebious.neocities.org/Layer/Wierd.html
It's a Thought Experiments Lain website
P.S. There absolutely is definitely going to be sound coming through speakers. Fair heads up.
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/.
http://www.rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com/
It's a site full of photos and descriptions of antique calculators!
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.
Cant wait to try it.
[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.
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?
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.
[1] https://maya.land :)
Here's mine: https://moonjump.app
I did this for quite awhile using bookmarks, and the link rot is real. If 10% of my historical bookmarks were valid, I’d be pleasantly surprised.
I'd say I could just use archive.org (or similar), but their (admittedly necessary) respect of robots.txt makes their archive incomplete.
I haven't had the time to figure out the details of how the pieces should be glued together.
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.
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.
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
One problem is that these things get lost in the timeline. So I made a StumbleUpon for Twitter threads [0]. Check it out!
O@https://mood.surf/build/routes/tweets/$tweetId-ID4B42CB.js:1:8106
Zi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:64683
li@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:74110
bs@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104095
Kf@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:104026
st@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:9:103886
yi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:100770
yi@[native code]
@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50511
@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:1:4097
_s@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50458
we@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:50393
Ve@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:7:98358
bi@https://mood.surf/build/entry.client-R3Z7O5RV.js:5:69948
bi@[native code]
onChange@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:31745
u@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:18647
@https://mood.surf/build/_shared/chunk-23IGV2EQ.js:9:26238
asyncFunctionResume@[native code]
@[native code]Could we come up with a privacy-preserving equivalent to stumbleupon today?
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.
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
Doesn't YT share some ad revenue with you if you're over a certain amount of views? :)
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 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?
(Thankfully my mum's not on social media)
It would have to support mobile, perhaps have a nice editor like the Medium mobile app had.
I like this clone.
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.
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.
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.