I miss when the internet was a place for hobbyists. Before we had figured out how to monetize the internet, you made those kinds of things because you wanted to make them, there was no guarantee they'd be seen by anyone. You did it because it was FUN. Now, if it can't be monetized, if it can't be fit into an algorithm, why bother making a new thing? The hobbyists now just post things to Reddit because at least they'll get seen and get karma for it.
A few years ago, I was listening to a video game review/discussion podcast by some Polygon folks (The Besties) that had been funded by Spotify when they were still spending lots of money buying podcast exclusivity. A few months after the Spotify money stopped, they started talking about maybe winding down the show because they weren't getting the kind of traffic that made it worth their time financially to keep going, and I was just stunned by that kind of admission. I thought "you PLAY VIDEO GAMES and TALK ABOUT THEM WITH YOUR FRIENDS, what the fuck happened to the internet?"
For as much as Substack does remind me of the old web, the paywalls that most authors put on their content prevents me from actually being able to engage with most of them. The old bloggers (guys like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein) wrote blogs because they *enjoyed writing*, they had day jobs that paid the bills. There are several Substacks I've seen that I wanted to read because their article titles sound interesting, but 90% of their stuff is behind a paywall, how do I know whether I'll actually like it? The amount of free posts this blog has had me regularly checking in, to the point when I felt comfortable paying for even more of it.
There's a bit of entitlement to this rant, I get that. Serious professionals with actual skills and knowledge don't want to work for free. People being able to make money, make careers off of the internet has definitely been a good thing overall- more stuff exists because people can make a job out of making it, but it created incentives for a lot of the behavior that killed off the Wild West Internet of the past.
Man, I miss StumpleUpon. The internet was a much better place when it was around. Almost all of the major sites I check daily were introduced to me from there
I regularly visited Stumble Upon in ~2009-2010. I still remember a college friend suggesting I check out Reddit because I liked SU, which in retrospect is kinda like a drug dealer offering a casual coke user a free sample of crack.
Any chance this relates to the death of third-party tracking? In ~2014, if you left a platform, your activity was still being collected by the platform and later sold to advertisers. However, these tracking cookies were unpopular and they were soon regulated (notably by the GDPR in the EU) or optionally blocked by browsers.
Unlike a decade ago, twitter, google or facebook get no benefit from you using them to access other sites. It makes sense that they want to keep you on the app, where they can actually profit by collecting and analyzing your activity for advertisers.
I think the Free Web (used in the sense of "free world") is still out there — you just have to look a bit harder to find it. I have an account on Neocities, a free web host with some social-media-type capabilities to discover and comment on sites, and there’s some great stuff if you can filter through the generic fan sites.
For following, Fraidycat is really good — it’s a browser extension that, rather than the usual email-style interface of RSS readers, just links to each post with a separate tab for each blog/feed/account/whatever, so you don’t see less of someone just because they post less frequently. (I’m doing a poor job at explaining it — https://fraidyc.at/ has some screenshots.)
( Shameless plug for a collection of some more interesting links i’ve been tending to for a few years now: https://satyrs.eu/linkroll )
This really takes me back to 95, 96, or 97, one of those years we got internet in my house, and we literally went out and bought a book, an actual physical book, that detailed like 100 sites that were interested in visiting.
The first website I ever went to was called "the jihad to destroy Barney". So fun and random back then.
I do miss StumbleUpon, thank you for reminding me of it... I found you, for instance, just the other day on Tim Miller's Bulwark pod, I fear, but I've found all kindsa wonderful independents by first finding The Amercan Prospect and TNR. Then I accidentally found my old pal Jon Larsen at The Fucking News was up and running again but however I managed to find Cory Doctorow, I think that's how I found Rusty Foster at Tabs et al and Tom Scocca at Indignity and Ryan at Garbage Day and Matt Kiser at WTF Just Happened Today? and I am just thrilled and truly delighted to make your acquaintance. Yinz all give me hope.
STUMBLEUPON WAS THE LAST PIECE OF TRUE INTERNET
I miss when the internet was a place for hobbyists. Before we had figured out how to monetize the internet, you made those kinds of things because you wanted to make them, there was no guarantee they'd be seen by anyone. You did it because it was FUN. Now, if it can't be monetized, if it can't be fit into an algorithm, why bother making a new thing? The hobbyists now just post things to Reddit because at least they'll get seen and get karma for it.
A few years ago, I was listening to a video game review/discussion podcast by some Polygon folks (The Besties) that had been funded by Spotify when they were still spending lots of money buying podcast exclusivity. A few months after the Spotify money stopped, they started talking about maybe winding down the show because they weren't getting the kind of traffic that made it worth their time financially to keep going, and I was just stunned by that kind of admission. I thought "you PLAY VIDEO GAMES and TALK ABOUT THEM WITH YOUR FRIENDS, what the fuck happened to the internet?"
For as much as Substack does remind me of the old web, the paywalls that most authors put on their content prevents me from actually being able to engage with most of them. The old bloggers (guys like Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein) wrote blogs because they *enjoyed writing*, they had day jobs that paid the bills. There are several Substacks I've seen that I wanted to read because their article titles sound interesting, but 90% of their stuff is behind a paywall, how do I know whether I'll actually like it? The amount of free posts this blog has had me regularly checking in, to the point when I felt comfortable paying for even more of it.
There's a bit of entitlement to this rant, I get that. Serious professionals with actual skills and knowledge don't want to work for free. People being able to make money, make careers off of the internet has definitely been a good thing overall- more stuff exists because people can make a job out of making it, but it created incentives for a lot of the behavior that killed off the Wild West Internet of the past.
Man, I miss StumpleUpon. The internet was a much better place when it was around. Almost all of the major sites I check daily were introduced to me from there
I regularly visited Stumble Upon in ~2009-2010. I still remember a college friend suggesting I check out Reddit because I liked SU, which in retrospect is kinda like a drug dealer offering a casual coke user a free sample of crack.
“What can you do about all this? For one, you can subscribe to independent sites like this one”
A little ironic considering I’m reading this on substack
Any chance this relates to the death of third-party tracking? In ~2014, if you left a platform, your activity was still being collected by the platform and later sold to advertisers. However, these tracking cookies were unpopular and they were soon regulated (notably by the GDPR in the EU) or optionally blocked by browsers.
Unlike a decade ago, twitter, google or facebook get no benefit from you using them to access other sites. It makes sense that they want to keep you on the app, where they can actually profit by collecting and analyzing your activity for advertisers.
I think the Free Web (used in the sense of "free world") is still out there — you just have to look a bit harder to find it. I have an account on Neocities, a free web host with some social-media-type capabilities to discover and comment on sites, and there’s some great stuff if you can filter through the generic fan sites.
For following, Fraidycat is really good — it’s a browser extension that, rather than the usual email-style interface of RSS readers, just links to each post with a separate tab for each blog/feed/account/whatever, so you don’t see less of someone just because they post less frequently. (I’m doing a poor job at explaining it — https://fraidyc.at/ has some screenshots.)
( Shameless plug for a collection of some more interesting links i’ve been tending to for a few years now: https://satyrs.eu/linkroll )
This really takes me back to 95, 96, or 97, one of those years we got internet in my house, and we literally went out and bought a book, an actual physical book, that detailed like 100 sites that were interested in visiting.
The first website I ever went to was called "the jihad to destroy Barney". So fun and random back then.
The random link took me to a sliding block puzzle, that was unexpected nice
I do miss StumbleUpon, thank you for reminding me of it... I found you, for instance, just the other day on Tim Miller's Bulwark pod, I fear, but I've found all kindsa wonderful independents by first finding The Amercan Prospect and TNR. Then I accidentally found my old pal Jon Larsen at The Fucking News was up and running again but however I managed to find Cory Doctorow, I think that's how I found Rusty Foster at Tabs et al and Tom Scocca at Indignity and Ryan at Garbage Day and Matt Kiser at WTF Just Happened Today? and I am just thrilled and truly delighted to make your acquaintance. Yinz all give me hope.
Glad to have you TM! I just ran into Jon a couple weeks back at a Substack event, he's a lovely guy.