I seem to have collapsed down to checking 5 to 6 sites.<p>Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest?<p>I can’t even really think of any other sites to visit.<p>Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”?
You explored it. That's it. Turns out there's less of it than you imagined.<p>There are, of course, plenty of sites that you could visit. Most of them will be incredibly boring. Years ago you found that interesting just because it was all new, but you don't any more because you've seen similar things already.<p>I suspect that most of those "5 to 6 sites" are aggregators like Hacker News where people seek out new stuff (or at least, new to them) and post it. Most of that new stuff is dull, because most stuff is dull.<p>You can always hit up Wikipedia's random link and start galumphing about from there.
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random</a><p>I got Guy Nadon, an actor in nothing I've ever seen, though he provided French dubbing for some video games I've heard of. Don't care? Me neither. That's life. The vast majority of it is dull.<p>That means it's time to turn off the Internet and go outside.
I've put some thought on this topic, and I think the driving force between the Internet seeming so small nowadays is a combination of changes to how search engines work, as well a move from forums to big social media which has meant a shift from organic community discovery to being drip-fed content from based on what an algorithm thinks will be engaging.<p>The Internet, as you remember it, still very much exists. Some forums have shut down, but there are still small personal websites, blogs, all that stuff. They're just really hard to find with Google and facebook/reddit/twitter.<p>Here are some cool and creative things I've discovered recently. I have no affiliation with these projects, I just thought they were cool:<p><a href="http://www.lileks.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lileks.com/</a><p><a href="http://dreamcult.xyz/" rel="nofollow">http://dreamcult.xyz/</a><p><a href="http://sod.jodi.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://sod.jodi.org/index.html</a><p><a href="http://godxiliary.com/" rel="nofollow">http://godxiliary.com/</a><p><a href="https://www.floppyswop.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">https://www.floppyswop.co.uk/</a><p><a href="https://www.dedware.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.dedware.com/</a>
Could it be that your over 30?<p>There is a problem known as the multi-armed bandit problem[0]. The problem deals with situations where you have to chose between different options you could take, but you don't start off with full knowledge of the options. You can spend time learning the options (exploring) or you can spend time using the best option you already know of (exploit). Importantly, you can't do both at the same time.<p>In general, good strategies start with a phase of exploring followed by exploiting.<p>Humans follow this pattern as well. For us, it seems we spend our late childhood, thru our teens, and into our early 20's in a heavily explore-biased state then switch to exploit biased for our 30's and later.<p>So the thing that happened to "exploring the internet" is you got older. Exploring for the sake of exploring is no longer as innately desirable to you know as it was when you were younger. You can still do it now. In many ways there are new tools that make it easier (see other posts) but it will likely feel more like work in a way which wasn't true when you were younger.<p>[0] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit</a>
I will sometimes start with a zone file, like com.zone. I search for keywords in registered domainnames. Then I filter by nameserver (registrar). Finally, I run a script to fetch the page titles. You would be surprised at how effective this can be in finding websites that you would never be able to find using simple Google searches. Of course, it is cumbersome; search engines can make this process very easy but they deliberately disable this type of exploration. You can query Google's index for a list of all websites with domain names that contain a certain keyword, but you will never be able to retrieve the full list of results, and certainly not in a "neutral" order such as alphabetical.<p>Arguably a web comprising a large number small, diverse websites, where each user may be visiting a variety of different websites, is less suitable for advertising than one where all web users are funneled through a few large websites that survive by selling online ad services, like Google. It stands to reason that those large, online ad services sites would have little interest in showing users an undiscovered portion of the web. They want users to congregate on "popular" sites. Good for advertising.<p>OTOH, using zone files instead of a search engine, social media or news aggregator site in the online ads (or VC) business, one can see all websites that have registered an ICANN domain name. No filters. No advertising-related algorithms. Popularity is irrelevant. The user determines relevance, not a third party.
It's because your interface to the internet is not browsing-based.<p>Back when we used things like the Yahoo directory as our main method of searching, we'd travel down different categories, finding unexpected websites as we went. That felt like exploring, because you were making choices about which direction to go, and that would determine what you saw next.<p>With a search engine, you tell the search engine what you want, it takes you there. There's no browsing there, so very little discovery.<p>The other main method of finding things today is aggregation: places like Hackernews, or Twitter. The reason using those sites doesn't feel like exploring is because they're just pushing new things right at you. It's not a matter of you seeking anything out, or making any choices, so it doesn't feel the same.<p>You <i>can</i> get that feeling of exploration on Twitter or (e.g. YouTube, Twitch, etc.) by using the relationships of individual people or channels as a path to travel down. But, that's not the most common way to use those sites, nor what they're optimized for: they want to show you a list of recommended new things based on an algorithm, and that won't feel like you're exploring, because you aren't; you're on a guided tour.<p>I think these companies gave us what we want most of the time, and one consequence is that the idea of a directory-based interface to the web went away, along with the feeling that using such an interface evoked.<p>Wikipedia is one of the only sites many people still use that is still organized like a hyperlinked directory, and meant to be used to serendipitously explore and find unexpected information yourself.
When I am in that type of mood I just head to my huge uni library and randomly pick a book. No unnecessary jabbering from the chimp troupe to deal with, and no wading thro all sorts of scams, advertising, self promotion etc. Todays internet just doesnt match a nice library.
For some reason this post brought to my mind the website of Fravia [1]. It is defunct now (he died 10+ years ago) but it is archived and various mirrors exist (have a look at the wikipedia page [2]).<p>I never really got to explore the website in depth but the few articles I've read I remember to have been very interesting. More important he had some tips on how to make better searches to uncover websites that might not be high on the results list. Granted this information might be outdated now but I think it is worth a look.<p>[1] www.fravia.com<p>[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia</a>
> Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”?<p>Written content on the Internet are much lower in terms of quality than before. SEO has taken over and so written content tend to be wordy or salesy. There is no mechanism for users to flag low quality content to Search engines or other users, so it is a free for all.<p>Online forums are long gone. People migrated to Reddit where discussion is much more shallow, or private communities on Facebook.<p>We could still find interesting stuff on YouTube, for now.
Counterpoint to all the gloom.<p>Most interesting content is indeed either<p>(a) on 5 or 6 sites, or linked from there
(b) on professional news or media websites<p>This is because only a tiny proportion of people have the skills, or need, to build their own website with their own domain. 99% of people - including 99% of people with interesting things to say - will say them on Facebook, Twitter, Medium or Substack. Then there are people paid to be interesting. You'll find them on the NYT, or (for my region) the Eastern Daily Press.<p>This is fine! Web browsers are read-only. Certain websites, built on the web, provide services for writing. People use them.
The entry to my particular rabbit hole is to read any wikipedia article in math and follow the references up to the primary sources. Thanks to libgen and scihub nowadays you can access immediately the <i>whole</i> math corpus. You get to read the first proof of any theorem you fancy in a couple of clicks. We are living in a golden age for historians of math. This is awesome!<p>It feels really to be "exploring the internet". In a glorious quality and extent that I could have never imagined when my dad brought home a modem in 1995.
1. Many of the creators of web sites and many of the users have changed. The creators often know diddly squat except some framework, they often work for a dullard and produce dull nonsense. The audience is often deeply "consumer" in the derogatory meaning of the word.<p>Result: When you're surfing you see so much of no interest that it's no longer fun.<p>(There is good stuff out there it's just so hard to find.)<p>2. The search engines also actively destroyed all those people who used to list interesting sites. Now the replacement for finding interesting sites is often some half witted algorithm, that's definitely not human, definitely hasn't the slightest clue and won't even let you take charge to get what you want.<p>3. People used to write their own material, experiment with program driven sites, be interesting. Now so many, even those who used to be interesting, make regurgi-posts all the time. They provide a link to an article that they've often not really read. That article is produced by somebody under time pressure who thinks the web is some text and a stock image or two, but mostly 100 times as much code as anything useful, so they can watch your every move, extract your money.<p>That's enough for now. If you want you can recreate the web as something that increases your intellect, not this destroyer abomination thing, choice is yours. If you have say five or so friends similarly inclined you can do it. Your choice.
Time for my pet theory!<p>Search is orthogonal to exploration. At first Google/yahoo/etc we're so bad that improvements in their systems made everything better.<p>But at some point they started trading one against the other because the easy wins were gone.<p>Because Google is the market leader (at least by the time this becomes relevant) everyone tried to compete with them and follow their path. Google optimized search <i>really strongly</i> over exploration. So much so that most users only interact with the very first result these days.<p>And thus exploring the internet is dead because there's not a good way to do it. This had knock on effects where nobody designs to be explored like they used to (or are explicitly hostile to it), so it's probably actually quite hard to build an internet explore engine at this point
I can save you the trouble. The internet is full of people: in short, avoid.<p>However, the internet is also what you bring to it. I took up playing synths last year and it's a whole new community of makers, hackers, and artists that was invisible to me before participating in that art. The same is true for any instrument. I have other pursuits that are almost completely unrepresented online other than some rich technical how-to's, which are great. Doing things whose online communities aren't representative of the real world activity makes me optimistic that the real world isn't like reddit.<p>Learn a thing and do it often, if not eventually even well, and it changes the lens you see the world through.
The interesting content is still there, but it is hidden under SEOed content. It is simply not as popular in relative terms.<p>Most of the popular content you see on FB or other aggregators are simply "preview"s to get your money. A "thoughtful" article that just mentions half-way through a book you should buy. A blogpost on some technical matter that just mentions they are looking for new hires. A funny video to get you to see ads. And so on, and so forth.<p>It is still possible to find interesting communities, like HN, but you should probably dig around the niche that you enjoy. Discord has some good servers. IRC is still around. It all depends on what you are interested in.
Recently I began "exploring the internet" again with the help of a niche search engine that was posted here on HN not that long ago [1]. Seems like it returns lesser known, interesting, contrarian websites where the authors speak their mind. For example I found websites that: speculate that milk and lactose might be a hidden cause for several chronic conditions [2]; try to re-explain evolution by re-positioning the relationship between life, organism, and DNA [3]; rich homepages like this one [4];<p>[1]: <a href="https://search.marginalia.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://search.marginalia.nu/</a>
[2]: <a href="http://www.nomilk.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nomilk.com/</a>
[3]: <a href="https://bwo.life/org/index.htm" rel="nofollow">https://bwo.life/org/index.htm</a>
[4]: <a href="http://www.valdostamuseum.com/hamsmith/TShome.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.valdostamuseum.com/hamsmith/TShome.html</a>
Here's a tortious causal chain that I think explains everything.<p>Computing evolved up the point of Multics. The military has always been a driver of computing research to some extent. The deployment of computing resources to help plan airstrike missions showed a critical need for developing a system in which a single computer could handle multiple levels of secure data. The research resulted in capability based security, which was in the process of being folded into Multics.<p>The folks at Bell labs happened to have a spare DEC machine, and having seen the complexity of Multics, decided to eschew capabilities, and instead relied on a much simpler, and quicker to implement system based on group and user IDs into Unix. This quickly spread to be the defacto multi-user model of security across the academic world.<p>Over time, PCs came to dominate the low end of computing. When it came time to implement multi-user and network systems, the Unix model, or a slightly upgraded model, based on access control lists (as in Windows) effectively ate the world.<p>Eternal September happened, and the internet went commercial. With this, we now have persistent internet, and are stuck with the oversimplified security model from Linux and Windows dominating everything. As such, no computer is actually secure.<p>Because computers aren't secure, you can't trust programs that run on them to be secure. Because of this, you can't trust the web browser on your computer to not get you into trouble if you click on the wrong link. This results in a very strong tendency to avoid clicking on links from unknown domains and sites among the general public.<p>Because the audience has settled into a few walled gardens, most of the authors of content have had no choice but to move to do the same.<p>And here we are, because capability based security is seen as too complicated (it doesn't have to be, in fact it can be simple to use), we're all stuck with facebook, twitter, etc.
It's still out there, especially when you find webrings that are still alive and kicking. I have a links page on my art/personal site that links to easily 200+ other artists, organizations, webrings, and interesting finds. May you find something fascinating enough to click on. :)<p><a href="http://www.kradeelav.com/link.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.kradeelav.com/link.html</a>
the problem is Search engines suck really really badly at finding good sites. I think the war between SEO spammers and search engines has been won by the SEO spammers. And the search engine filters are now so exclusive that 99% of the good content gets filtered out. this has been a growing problem over the last 15 years but it's getting so bad that even technical searches are starting to suck.<p>Just as an example: in the last few days all i wanted to find was a single Dockerfile setup that worked out of the box. and nearly every single example I could find in the top 20 results was broken.<p>I mean, try looking up subjects that many people have written about. For example: "Why does climate change matter?" Nearly every single top 20 search result sucks really bad with barely 3 to 5 paragraphs not even going into depth. We know for a fact there are hundreds of extremely in-depth articles that cover this subject with great depth and examples, and explanations.
It’s painful going to a new site, only to be greeted by huge hard-to-dismiss popups telling you to subscribe / disable your ad blocker / enter your email / etc, then a cookie dialog you have to parse and carefully operate in order to not get OneTrusted, then the whole page may refresh and take you back to the top because of these shenanigans. Oh and does this site have multiple video players attacking you from the corners? These days I do feel a twinge of adrenaline as I gird myself to load a new site, so I’ll prefer to stay on the ones I know.
Well for starters, we used to call it "Surfing the Internet" not "exploring the internet".<p>The modern web was designed to rope you in and keep you there. Look up random stuff that interests you, not using a big name search engine. Then if you find a site on a webring, and look at connecting sites.
There are a lot of really interesting things on Neocities. Check out their Browse section, enter a tag of anything you're interested in, set the filter, and check out what's there:<p><a href="https://neocities.org/browse" rel="nofollow">https://neocities.org/browse</a><p>I've also been having a lot of fun on minus which is a minimal social network that gives each user a lifespan of 100 posts max:<p><a href="https://minus.social/" rel="nofollow">https://minus.social/</a>
Check out Marginalia [1] which has been posted about and mentioned a few times on HN in the past. It’s a search engine which aims to show more text-heavy websites. I’ve found it to be very reminiscent of “exploring the Internet” and I have found some truly interesting sites while using it which I would have never found via Google.<p>[1]: <a href="https://search.marginalia.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://search.marginalia.nu/</a>
I'm using rss/news reader Feedly.com to follow > 100 sites daily, most entrys are "marked read" others saved for more close reading. The list of sites expand weekly by interesting links from sites like hacker news &c.
As the Internet grew, businesses built themselves around it. Metrics optimized websites for behaviors that aren't organic. You only check 5 to 6 sites because, either unintentionally or intentionally, for better or worse, they indulge you in ways that the old Internet did not.<p>Look for communities that are built around the humans in them, vs a single company. Web rings, Gemini, IRC are all great places to start.
Is it even 5 or 6 sites?<p>"I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."<p><a href="https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040</a>
Internet access became a commodity, that's what's happened.<p>Back in the days we had dial-up. I remember the rush. The excitement. The thought that every minute I was paying 6 cents. The monthly bill my parents received, and the (justified!) speech I got for being online too much. I remember downloading entire Usenet groups, reading them offline (cheap!). I also remember my browser crashing after I logged off [from the internet], while it contained various windows (tabs didn't exist yet), and it couldn't handle it for whatever reason. Session Restore? Haha, no, that didn't exist yet. It'd be like a reinstall of an OS: fresh. You'd have to put effort and patience into a post, too. Because you had to dial-in to post it, and who knows what might've been posted in the meantime?<p>Now we got always-on. Everything is very graphical, Web 2.0. You can get any content you desire. Any movie, any music, any book. Its all available, without any issue. It devalues the works, as does Web 2.0 with templates and what not. Its the same with synthesizer-based music. Everything is VST now. Back in the days, you needed an expensive hardware synthesizer (e.g. a 303) which was a specific investment. Its like the difference between the bioindustry daily and eating a piece of free-range meat every once in a while. Not to mention, search engines have become so good, it defeats the purpose of manually exploring in your own way. Efficiency killed curiosity.<p>And you grew up. As you grow up, things become less new and exciting. You can still explore though. For example, you could go to HN's newest submits [1] and upvote of the few which were worth reading. If a few do this, and its a match, interesting content gets more coverage on the HN front page. But that's the thing, too: you're doing work for other people. That's also part of what exploring is about: sharing your findings.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newest" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/newest</a>
> I seem to have collapsed down to checking 5 to 6 sites.<p>I check about 20 sites regularly even when I have other interesting things to do.<p>> Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest?<p>Search engines?<p>> Whatever happened to the idea of “exploring the Internet”?<p>It sounds like you would like to find lists of recommended sites that people used to have on their homepages. Most people don't maintain such lists anymore, because 1) nobody reads them 2) they are busy pushing updates and consuming those of other people. Most people find more interesting stuff than they have time to consume already. (Who even needs entertainment industry anymore?)<p>Also I don't frequent social media, unless HN counts.<p>Edit: Sometimes when I want <i>anything</i> to read, I search "is java dying" or "why c++".
There has always been something new, albeit I do it only two or three times a year.
<a href="https://wiby.me/surprise/" rel="nofollow">https://wiby.me/surprise/</a><p>Sometimes, I like visiting the older corners of the internet using the above link. I feel nostalgic somehow. It also helps you see how far we've come in terms of web design and development.
In the early days of the internet, search engines (and there were multiple, not just one major one) would show a broader variety of results so it was easier to stumble upon new interesting stuff and small, growing communities.<p>Nowadays, all the top results of Google are websites which are already popular so it's not possible to 'discover' a new community through Google. Other less popular search engines use very similar algorithms based on backlinks so they all show more or less the same results as each other.<p>VCs aren't interested in funding Google competitors, unfortunately. I'm sure there exists algorithms which are good at finding relevant websites and which are different than the one used by Google but it would disrupt the current economic order.
> <i>Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest?</i><p>Here?! HN is a collection of references to articles from the most varied www sources...<p><i>n</i> submissions per day over <i>m</i> different sites, from <i>l</i> users which provide partial indirect profiles: you think one may not find new interesting sources? It would be a job in itself, to check where the submissions lead you.<p>(<i>n</i>, <i>m</i>, <i>l</i>: maybe dang could provide stats, it would be interesting. Edit: since we are here: most common www sources; www sources with the best upper quintile of upvotes in submissions (i.e. when they are noted, they really are)...)
I think the need for AI/machine learning to predict what you want has kind of brought us here.<p>Imagine a Facebook or Instagram not mining your data to show you what they think you want - the results in your timeline will be a grand hash of all the think that's new and happening.<p>That would have been a vastly different experience.<p>Except for perhaps Reddit, every other big site today personalizes your content and this has made the internet boring for me.<p>The only place i discovew new content is Reddit, but again its front page is full of memes and American content.
>Where would I even go to find other sites that might be of interest?<p>Hacker News?<p>Or Twitter, at least half of my feed consists of people who frequently share links to a variety of tech-related sites. Also many people have an interesting site linked in their bio. (If you prefer just your feed without Twitter's ads and suggestions try <a href="https://tweetdeck.twitter.com" rel="nofollow">https://tweetdeck.twitter.com</a>).
Directory/portal death happened. That together with a good-working (but highly marketed) search shifted focus from exploring some areas to consuming little pieces of information. Sites also changed because to make it to the top of the search you have to produce eye-catching pieces, not a complete theme coverage. All sites are almost identical time-sinks so with time only on few of them you decided to land.
Hey, I have an answer to this!<p>and its part of a successful assumption I've been able to make for new ventures.<p>Basically, you do explore and visit <i>plenty</i> of sites, but you click through to them from timelines and what your friends shared in groupchats.<p>My successful assumption has been this: the URL does not matter. or more specifically, the TLD does not matter. .coms do not matter. By proxy, SEO <i>usually</i> does not matter either.<p>Your client base is going to click through to your domain name from seeing it shared somewhere else.<p>Or, lets get even more specific or perhaps grim: if your business model relies on people randomly finding your service from a search engine, or typing in the direct url, you have failed. if "failure" is too strong, then pointing out how much time and effort is being wasted from the strategy and how much alpha is being missed from better more relevant business models is more accurate.<p>so back to you, you explore from the timelines and chat rooms. if thats not good enough you need more exciting communities to be a part of.
I asked myself this question about a year ago. There are a lot of sites similar to Stumbleupon, but all of them were exhausted quite fast or had the same sites listed. That's why I built my own internet discovery website based on what I remembered from Stumbleupon.
<a href="https://stumbled.to" rel="nofollow">https://stumbled.to</a>
I used to frequent various forums. They all seem to have disappeared.<p>For some reason, "discource" has taken over as <i>the</i> forum software, but I don't ever remember finding it engaging or interesting.<p>Sure, the old forum software were kind of "old", pre-ajax. You had to click all the time. But somehow, it was engaging. People would post there, and threads could go on for days, and I would come and check every so often for new replies.<p>This all seems to have gone. Most programming discussion now takes place on HN and Reddit.<p>Almost all the discource based programming forums are mostly just Q&A (aka support).<p>Some discussions happen on Twitter, but Twitter is not really a good platform for discussions. I mean, it doesn't even have a good way of navigating all the comments on a thread!!<p>I think what killed it for me is that by design, discussions just fade into the "next" page after about two days, so you never see the kind of thread where comments keep pouring in for days and weeks.
I think it's important to ignore the commercial part of the Internet when discussing this, sure, back in olden days, commercial sites interlinked a lot more than they do now, but they had to, now they don't.<p>There's something satisfying in browsing some site, and following a link to the next.. That's really what I think of as "exploring". Exploring only works when you link to your friends sites (and when your friends has sites you can link to) and they link back..
The interlinking has probably weakened somewhat, I don't know why, but I suspect it to be partly because we've gotten so used to link rot, and nobody wants to have a site full of dead links..<p>That said, I still link to others.
And I must shamlessly plug <a href="https://geekring.net/" rel="nofollow">https://geekring.net/</a> as a tool for exploring (though, it's only about a hundred pages), you could add yours! :)
When I was first using the web, it was largely via Yahoo! directory [1] results. Most of the interesting sites were people's personal sites (with lots of URLs like something.edu/~user), and most people maintained a list of links to other sites they found interesting -- chances are if you liked their site, you'd like most of the ones they linked to as well.<p>Pretty much all that stuff is just gone now.<p>The closest thing I do like this today is probably Twitter: follow someone interesting, and you'll start discovering people/projects/sites/etc they find interesting. Similarly, HN/Reddit are maybe the closest thing to randomly browsing the "directory", but otherwise everything is via organic search results for a specific topic.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_Directory</a>
Number one: In 1945, corporations paid 50 percent of federal taxes. Now they pay about 5 percent. Number two: in 2004, 90 percent of traffic went to small websites; now it’s about two percent.<p>It’s called consolidation. Strengthen large corporations, weaken individuals. With internet advertising, this can be done imperceptibly over time.
The internet is bigger and contains more information than ever before.<p>You can't passively explore. You can't go to one or two sites and just consume a feed.<p>Think of interests you have, things you are curious about, cultures you want to know more about - and seek those out. That is what exploring is: navigating the unknown.
Can I equate this with "exploring the computer"?<p>Windows 98 was the first OS I used, played games on and explored internet on. At that time exploring the windows itself use to feel fun let alone finding all those new websites. Yahoo and MSN were a thing back then for the same reason I think. They were big and each had so much to explore and enjoy.<p>Now days with improved search experience and better internet speeds everything is more accessible and there is more of everything. You don't have to stick to one thing and explore it from A to Z.<p>I use to explore features of Windows 98 even XP but that all stopped and now I don't have those interest anymore.<p>Maybe your idea of why we are not "exploring" is just maturity and growth in this domain. We now don't need to explore like the way we use to because we have probably grown out of it.
What was that interesting Microsoft program where it was based on data vis, pixel?<p>Basically the premise was it was a new way to explore the web. An actual web. One topic lead to another, not just a series of web pages.
See data stats, zoom into high res ads; zoom in further for what print could never give us.<p>Pretty sure there was an impressive Ted talk on it, at one point.<p>Edit: it’s called pivot
<a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_point_for_web_exploration/up-next" rel="nofollow">https://www.ted.com/talks/gary_flake_is_pivot_a_turning_poin...</a><p>May have gotten it confused earlier with a ms photosynth talk.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Live_Labs_Pivot" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Live_Labs_Pivot</a>
Seems like we just have a better "map" now, but I don't otherwise agree with your idea at all.<p>HN has 30 or so unique sites linked from its front page that constantly are swapped out for other ones. You probably have never heard of many of them before. Why isn't this "exploring"?
I find new stuff all the time via HN, friends, etc. Today I saw this<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/26/22738125/adobe-photoshop-illustrator-web-announced" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2021/10/26/22738125/adobe-photoshop...</a><p>and I stumbled on this (no idea what it really does)<p><a href="https://www.adobe.com/products/aero.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.adobe.com/products/aero.html</a><p>and from HN this<p><a href="https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thisworddoesnotexist.com/</a><p>and<p><a href="https://www.thisfuckeduphomerdoesnotexist.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.thisfuckeduphomerdoesnotexist.com/</a><p>I don't find that any different than it was 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago really.
Most of my exploring happens on Youtube these days: mostly DIY videos from people explaining how to do certain things like home improvement, woodworking, etc.
My assumption is that a lot of the interesting sites have moved from text to videos on Youtube.
Long before MS deprecated "the blue E", you could still "walk the web" with Yahoo Categories. Yahoo shut down dir.yahoo.com years ago:<p><a href="https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370" rel="nofollow">https://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370</a><p>I don't know if there are any replacements for it.<p>Most of the archive.org links are still working and the directory is still worth exploring:<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140927131133/https://dir.yahoo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20140927131133/https://dir.yahoo...</a>
What I've been doing recently, is exploring Anonymous FTP sites again.<p>Backing the late 1990s, I was lucky to have (although I didn't appreciate it at the time) an unfettered always-on internet connection at work. I had to jump through some hoops to get it[1], but it was there, and unmonitored.<p>I spent most of my free time, wandering around FTP sites seeing what was there. It was a magical doorway to so much random stuff; source code, images, text documents... Most of which has now been lost to time.<p>I even managed to get a the source of Mosaic for VMS, and then compile it so I could use it on a VAXStation that was also in my office.<p>Anyway... So I've been exploring anonymous FTP again... They are a shadow of their former selves I think. There's a few nice nuggets out there, but mostly it's just mirrors of Linux distros, and fragments of the old SIMTEL and Walnut Creek collections.<p>What I did find out is that there are no Archie servers anymore. There's a few Web based FTP search engines, but that just not the same. So I'm toying with building one.<p>---<p>[1] Crawl under the floor of my office, splice a CAT3 cable to another one, then configure SLIP on my Windows 3.1 PC using Trumpet Winsock.
Disappearance of RSS.<p>So a rotation of a small number of sites. Because who wants to click through hundreds of bookmarks when 99% of the time there is no new content. Not a complaint, just that most sites don't update every day.
Good aggregators came along that basically perform this function.<p>Since the signal to noise is higher than just manually going over search engine listenings you have fallen into the pattern of just checking the same websites over and over. I’m sure the fact that this is more time efficient has reinforced this behaviour.<p>The disadvantage is that others are effectively acting as gatekeepers to your knowledge acquisition now. There might be things on the internet that you find incredibly interesting but will never see because the majority of other people don’t find them interesting.
A few years ago a few links on HN talked about "the small web", webrings, and drove me to a trove of amazing original little websites exploring the possibilities offered by the web 1.0 mostly. Just like back in the days. And some of them were real pieces of art. I never managed to find them again. For example I remember a website that told a story in the form of a calendar you gad to scroll down, it found it so creative that I felt the same amazement as my first steps with the web in '95.
There are more sites than the ones you find on Google. Some sites don't have the Google Juice SEO power and fall to the last page of rankings.<p>For example I tried to find a video of Dave Chappelle talking about Hollywood forcing black actors to dress in drags for some movies. Instead I get a lot of the Dave Chapelle on Netflix making fun of Transgender people. It is all in the SEO.<p>Then again there is a lot of crap on the Internet it is better to avoid with fake news and silly videos so you stick to 5 or 6 sites you know are good.
Fond memories - things like geocities, IRC, forums, and yes even web rings were a great way to move around the internet.<p>I feel like web rings or something like that could be a nice thing to have again. I am not sure what format it would take these days, but I like the idea of sets of curated sites that are "opted in" to being part of a collection.<p>Apart from that though, I personally find that Hacker News itself is a great source - either from the stories themselves, or usually the individual comments have some great links.
you can still find curated lists especially on github, eg: <a href="https://github.com/jnv/lists" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/jnv/lists</a>
From my side, I'd say "I have better things to do". If I can find interesting things here, or another aggregator, then I can more than fill my time exploring already at least somehow vetted articles rather than aimlessly browsing. Kind of the same thing that happened (for me) towards exploring books. If I have a backpile of dozens or hundreds of books that I know have some chance to interest me, there is no need to actively look for more, it's just more efficient.
I read a lot of personal blogs. Bloggers tend to link to other blogs, so it's somewhat self sustaining. I've seen modern approaches to webrings and other reinventions of Web 1.0 sharing tricks, but none have really adhered to my habits.<p>All of that to say: I think it's more about habits (and breaking out of the search engine hole) than anything else. It's still very possible (and easy) to explore the World Wide Web; you just need to overcome the gravity of the big sites.
Check out the "bang" operators on duck duck go.<p><a href="https://duckduckgo.com/bang" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/bang</a><p>When I search, I no longer default to Google. It's great for some things & awful at others. I try & think what communities might be better to search. I read random blogs or forums & those (even the popular ones) often lead me to additional niche (but still large) communities.<p>I'm constantly finding new niche communities.
The Internet is not limited to websites.<p>I find the resurgence of newsletters really interesting, reminds me of fanzines/textfiles from years ago.<p>Some subscriptions I find interesting:<p><pre><code> - Stratechery
- Suma Positiva (Spanish)
- The Pragmatic Engineer
- Unsupervised Learning
</code></pre>
If you want to discover publications, Substack would be a good starting point: <a href="https://substack.com/home" rel="nofollow">https://substack.com/home</a>
IMHO search, hyper-centralization of content creation, and dopamine addiction to bite-sized content happened. You can no longer see new things you don't know about. You no longer want to explore, since search is faster and more rewarding.<p>My suggestion to refresh the feeling of wonder is to go to site directories instead of the search engine of choice, like: <a href="https://dmoz-odp.org" rel="nofollow">https://dmoz-odp.org</a>
Quite a few people thanked me for recommending: <a href="https://theuselessweb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://theuselessweb.com/</a>
I miss webrings, those were nice for taking random walks through related sites. Blogs don't do this much anymore, and outlets like Medium and especially Substack keep you inside the walls of their author. Browsing geocities or angelfire used to be like taking a wiki-walk back in the day.<p>RSS is still viable, combined with link aggregators and newsletters for discovery of new material, but it's a very different experience.
Before search engines got good, websites had a links page they used to link sites about similar content. I used to play a game with friends to find something first by following a chain of those links. That was exploring the internet and that was what we had to do instead of googling.<p>I also visit only a few sites nowadays but I jump to dozens of random sites with either Google, DDD or HN.
I've recently read a first-person account of working with Naval blimps in WW2, researched RC blimps, read an article about a recipe for Russian marshmallow treats made out of apples, found a solution for repairing a set of vintage speakers, learned about Aztec gods, read a list of vintage sad Mac codes, and got clues as to what predator killed one of my chickens.
This is a great question.<p>The Internet to me does seem to have settled on an equilibrium level of variety which is quite narrow and perhaps to some degree stagnant, whereas in the past it seemed to represent a universe of more opportunity.<p>This is not dissimilar to how markets can sometimes price in the value of optionality. For example, I remember reading somewhere that the share price of a pharma co which has a wide pool of R&D avenues available for further investment can actually shrink when the co settles on a particular choice, setting its budget and strategy for the next few years on following that single (hopefully) star even though this is a necessary step for latent potential to actually be realised into practical reality.<p>The Internet has collapsed into a tool which serves the functions that are most in demand for the audience, and to some degree it has sacrificed possibility (who pays for that?) for utility.<p>Even the appetites of the masses (who provide the demand for what is most prevalent on the net) for fresh content are perhaps stabilising around particular 'centres of mass'. With large numbers of viewers, patterns and uniformity are now predominating which may have been muted when the internet was a platform for explorers and non-standard viewers.<p>The same thing could have happened with other forms of media, too. For example, movies now seem to increasingly rely on special effects to the extent that I sometimes now find it more of a disappointment than otherwise. Sure, it might be pretty to see whirly colours of space or magic, or fascinating to see buildings and glass facades bursting under shockwaves, or planets colliding, but only for a while - we can move on now. Even literary fiction quite often starts to feel same-y when browsing.<p>Also, it takes more work now for content providers to produce something that can escape from the gravitational field of established content platforms. Newness and optionality has value (ask Black-Scholes), and when it does raise its head, it is quickly mopped up by 'fast followers' with deep pockets.<p>A consequence of this, too, is that the reticence of content providers to share anything new without a pay wall has also increased.<p>Unintuitively, it may be that tides of people and attention associated with a platform's maturity tend to homogenise and flatten the landscape of original thought (even making it harder to find valuable newness).
We could always go back to the 90s when they printed out the Internet Yellow Pages. Just pick a random page, point and go check it out. Apparently you can still buy it.<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/1562057847" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Internet-Yellow-Pages-6th-ed/dp/15620...</a>
Shameless plug but I built <a href="https://theforest.link" rel="nofollow">https://theforest.link</a> precisely to try tackle this problem.<p>I want some randomness back into my internet browsing.<p>Another excellent place where you can start your exploration is <a href="https://are.na" rel="nofollow">https://are.na</a>
I miss k10k[1]. They had always something new to explore.<p>[1] <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20030207162038/http://www.k10k.net:80/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20030207162038/http://www.k10k.n...</a>
Here's one I found recently:<p>You can go to John Deakins' website and talk about cinematography. No money, no subscriptions, no ads, just make an account and log in and he talks to people who have an interest in amateur photography and film about his tricks and gadgets in his forum.
That would depend on your interests. Try to explore themes in the internet instead the internet itself. There is always something to discover<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fGJ8MgXkc4" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fGJ8MgXkc4</a>
When your definition of 'the internet' is websites, the limitation is probably you. There's so much going on that I consider websites to be the least interesting. There's social media, games, virtual worlds, commerce, art, events.. and so many more.
We think alike. Watch this space in coming months for announcement of a Alpha test of a solution. Code is running apparently as intended and currently am collecting the initial data, uh, a lot more than the 6 sites! Solution is novel in several important respects.
The difficulty in finding interesting internet reads has opened a niche now filled by content curators. My personal favorite is the Thinking About Things newsletter [0]. Another great one is Findka Essays [1]. Would love to hear about any others.<p>[0] thinking-about-things.com<p>[1] essays.findka.com
The Scout Report has been around almost as long as the Web - I visit it occasionally for new inspiration <a href="https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current" rel="nofollow">https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current</a>
You might get a kick out of this website: <a href="https://usefulinterweb.com/" rel="nofollow">https://usefulinterweb.com/</a>
It curates a list of 1000s of interesting websites, and adds about 3-4 new links daily
I wonder why no1 makes social network just for links, like i honestly don't care about other people's inarticulate opinions i constantly get on facebook and twitters.
I do however care about links some share.
Web sites and forums of old are mostly gone. Everything is centralized on Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Discord and similar platforms. Really hard to find niche sites and independent groups on the web now.
If you want to "recreate wonder of exploration" I recommend getting VR set (Oculus) and installing RecRoom or something similar.
At least I get the sensation of "earlier internet"
The web is in a race to the bottom. Most websites are bloated, ad-driven, content spam, crashing, slow, or borderline malicious. I’d rather check 5-6 places and go to sites vouched for by others.
There is still plenty to explore when you stop using mainstream websites. The internet is a vast place but most people box themselves into a worldview that doesn't allow for exploration.
<a href="https://search.marginalia.nu/" rel="nofollow">https://search.marginalia.nu/</a><p>This website has helped me find new and hidden gems. It was posted to HN last month.
We need the quirky geocities pages back.<p>You might like this.
<a href="https://twitter.com/wayback_exe?lang=en" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/wayback_exe?lang=en</a>
Blogs don’t make money, that’s about it. They don’t rank and content is paid for by interest groups and corporations.<p>If you want interesting stuff you’ll have to go to the fringe.
Really don't know what some here are talking about, you don't bookmark things that you have no time to look at anyway?<p>My exported bookmarks.html is 4 MB and that's probably on the small side, because some I lost, some I went through and deleted a few years back. There's also a lot that I saved on Reddit.<p>But it's pretty apparent that proper blogs a few and far between now and if you have some obscure knowledge, then you're better of writing Wikipedia pages about it, not starting your own site.
I agree with most of the opinions in the comments. Might be you, might be the internet might be both.<p>Might be you: You're bored and you're searching wrong. For a feel similar to geocities try the 'gemini' protocol. Its a text-only web that really feels like the 90s'. Lots of personnal passionnate content, new world to discover !<p>Might be the internet: There is a classic article "Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths" that present a classic subculture cycle [0]. 1:Passionate people start it. 2:It gains traction and looses some of its original taste. 3:Someone finds a way to make a profit out of it and optimizes it for money.
Maybe the internet is just in stage 3 and we're going to move forward ?<p>Might be both: There are websites that still have this old feel. I discovered some niches where things are like that. (Banjo playing, forging, local botany, local archeology) The common factor seem to be that the authors are usually neither young, nor technologically oriented. So they tend to do old-looking websites and cross referencing SPIP pages instead of "creating content" on a famous platform.<p>[0] <a href="https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths" rel="nofollow">https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths</a>
I'm going to date myself, and I'm not even "that old". When I was a kid, I used to call BBSs and find other numbers on those BBSs to also call. I downloaded ANSI animations, "anarchist cookbooks", strange and interesting posts by local aeronautical engineers and assembly workers, libertarian propaganda, programming tutorials, and probably what was considered the first of "blogs". As dialup faded away in the late 90s, we briefly had telnet to reach our beloved BBSs, then it was onto personal websites.<p>Today, personal websites are still by far the most interesting finds. They exist, they're just difficult to filter through the noise of social media. When using the search engines, shy away from anything on a major social media site and tend towards the modern tucows/geocities equivelants.
Sorry that this is offtopic, but please don't use celebrity names for your username. It's distracting and basically mildly trolls every thread you post to.<p>If you want to email hn@ycombinator.com to change your username we'll be happy to do that for you. (Same offer for anyone of course.) Until then, I'm going to ban the account for the time being since it's the only way to take care of this short of renaming.
Planets and webrings are still around, and are a valuable source. Other forums and message boards like HN, lobste.rs, tilde.news, lemmy.ml and reddit.com are also still doing well.<p>EDIT: IRC/XMPP/Matrix chatrooms are still doing well, too!
Ideally we need a new search engine that just automatically disregards the 'top' 10,000 Alexa sites, all the spam, paywalls, content farms etc, indexes the Show HNs and the subreddits where people post their own stuff.
"Web 2.0" was about monetizing everything you could visit that might be remotely interesting, and separating you from the content with a paywall. We're now looking into "Web 3.0" which will bring even more concepts of monetization, ownership and client-side computation. It's a mixed bag going forwards, but 'exploring the web' died with Web 1.0 as far as I'm concerned.
Something nobody seems to be mentioning: the 2008 crash happened.<p>The "cool" internet was largely populated by two things: People screwing around creating content in their spare time, with no expectation of profit ("Hobbyists"), and eager entrepreneurs burning through tons of money trying to find the "one weird trick" that would make them rich on the net. Most of #2 failed, but while it was happening it provided a host of interesting things to see, and spaces to hang out in online.<p>Then 2008 happened and it all came tumbling down. People tend to think more of the 90s ".com" crash, but there was another after the "recession." Suddenly there wasn't as much money to throw around, so #2 became more and more rare, and those that did exist were less casual and more dogged in their attempts to extract money. At the same time, #1 also collapsed, because people were losing their jobs, downgrading to worse paying jobs, working longer hours etc. People didn't have time for hobbies, and self-starters didn't have money for wild new experiments.<p>So innovation and expression on the web kind of ground to a halt. This happened culture-wide by the way, but certainly it was obvious on the net. What had once been a space for fun and experimentation became a wasteland ruled over by the handful of tyrannical companies that could survive the harsh conditions. That's why there are only 6 sites. Outside of SV, people aren't doing so well. They haven't been doing so well in a while. Maybe you noticed the protests and riots and crazy elections? People have other things on their minds besides having fun on the internet these days.