Attention is limited though and that has shifted away from websites like this so maybe it's gentrification of attention
It looks as if it's "not zero sum" because a random user can supposedly check out anything on equal footing, whether it's Facebook.com or some guy's hobby personal website. They're both there and available.
But in reality that's never the case. A person taken at random is never equally likely to visit this or that (except in the sense: I have 50%-50% chances of winning the lottery today: I either win, or I don't). The gentrified one's would have way more exposure, be promoted as way more essential (socially, and even professionally) to be on them, they will have all the trappings of fashion, like modern design, mobile client apps, and such.
Back in 1999 that wasn't yet the case. At least nowhere near to the degree it is today.
This is reflected in viewership numbers of course, where a gentrified behemoth might get 99% of the traffic, and the rest long tail 1%, despite consisting of billion times more websites.
I do have a website since last century and I stopped posting on FB since a few years ago. My website gets negligible traffic except scan bots but still more than me on FB. If people google me they might find me on FB and realize that my page is dead. If they insist they'll find my site.
Not disagreeing with you. It's just the modern web is a trap. A game you will lose, as your attention is abused, misdirected and monetized.
Maybe it’s more like Rome being surrounded by hundreds of miles of malls, and parking lots, and highways, and those highways (and Google Maps) only leading you to those parking lots and malls. You’d have to stumble upon a backroad that’s not on the map to find the old Rome.
Just like it was back then... There was a very steep path for the entrance to he^W the Internet, and then it was easy to find those places. Now you can access the Internet easily but it's harder to find those places.
EDIT: typo
Some of these sites will never see SSL, and so they are indeed as roads not on a map.
(It isn't relevant how easy or hard ssl and obtaining certs are. The reality is, these older, static html sires sometimes don't have ssl, and will never have ssl.)
The empire never ended.
—PK Dick.Edit - I think this was it, but looks like it needs an account: https://millionshort.com/
A lot of smaller sites just aren't indexed any more, it's a common complaint you read here...
"Smaller site, we don't use adwords, we're getting crawled 500x/day which is 40% of our bandwidth, still not indexed after 6 months"
Maybe using an ad blocker to build a list of "websites that serve ads" (in addition to domains those ads are served from), and using that list to filter out results from an existing search engine API (like Duck Duck Go) would get you part of the way. But you'd probably need to search really far before you start finding sites that don't serve ads.
Not sure how useful it'd be, but I would use it!
It would probably be like Google circa 1999-2000
Apparently not even the coffee mug now, which is bitterly disappointing.
This is just amazing, thank you (and OP) for the link!
Does one have to tilt their trolley at every pillar on every train platform. Or find a friendly worm type thing to show them hidden entrances?
Mojeek is an alt search engine with an independent index that returns this site so obv indexed.
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell
I see another one there for Dutch locations
http://pkazil.free.fr/e2hnl.html
disclaimer, I used to work at Mojeek.
//added
which is often the case as per comments in this thread with people generally feeling the commercial web has gobbled up original and niche content. Surely it can only be that way because the gateways to the web have made it so.
Just pressed it, it sent me to https://holyjoe.net/, a personal website of a reverend from 1995, last updated in 2020 based on its 'poetry' page.
The web is, I think, friendlier now than it was in 2000-2005. And much, much more useful in general.
I'd replace "is" with "looks".
Yes. This is a taste of what the web was like before it became shit. And it's the way it should be again.
Weird, quirky, fun, no ad-tech, no trying to hard sell anything.
God, I miss this era.