All the criticism and thoughts regarding both the topic and website are nothing more than personal perspectives.

...with a price :)

Yes, the core issue underlying the rot as described in TFA is the funding model for the internet. But that cancerous idea is older than the internet -- adversing, hawkers and scammers, they've been around since forever. It's an unfortunate side effect of "business" and if you turn the sanitation dial far enough, you'll get professions like Sales and Marketing.

So to fix the internet, you'd have to decouple the content from the toll to access it.

Henry is one of the most cutting edge designers out there today in my opinion. Check out his other sites.

Firefox's reader mode works on this one!

Unfortunately, most of these platforms end up enshittifying and using your content for it. A platform that you control can be a beautiful thing.

Yeah that really put me off the whole article. No problem with them having that sentiment, but keep it out of this topic.

The weakest part is the last one - and it's a big one. Personalsit.es is just a flat single-page directory (of thumbnails, even, not content - so the emphasis is design.) To be part of the conversation, you'd list there and hope someone comes along. Compare with Reddit where you start commenting and you're close-to-an-equal with every other comment.

Webmentions do get you there - because it's a commenting system. But for finding the center of a community, it seems like you're still reliant on Bluesky or Mastodon or something. (Which doesn't "destroy all websites.") Love the sentiment ofc.

Cannot agree more... Tired of flags being waved at the wrong places and times.

But I'm le tired...

Okay, well have a nap and then fire ze missiles!

I haven't tried on a laptop but on iOS (iPhone 13 Pro) and iPadOS (iPad Air)

It is quite nice on iPhone, while I agree font is smaller in iPad for readability.

Although, they didn't block zooming/pinching (I hate when they do) therefore I was satisfied with the overall design.

Pretty successful in terms of the content representing the intent. Which is in part, don't skim, don't scroll, read something if you want to actually read something, or go elsewhere for doom-scrolling and skimming.

I also found half-skimming it worked pretty well, using the images as markers to find what I really wanted.

Also it looks like it works pretty good on mobile, I thought it was small on my laptop too, but hey, thanks the heavens for built-in-browser zoom...

Agree with a lot that you’re saying here but with a rather large asterisk (*). I think that ecosystems like YT are useless to the wider web and collective tech stack unless those innovations become open (which Alphabet has a vested interest in preventing).

If YT shut down tomorrow morning, we’d see in a heartbeat why considering them a net benefit in their current form is folly. It is inherently transitory if one group controls it.

The OP article is correct about the problem, but is proposing throwing mugs of coffee on a forest fire.

Let me guess, you want a site that is just a singular column of text, plenty of space for ad breaks, and 3/4 of your monitor is just whitespace on the left and right?

People who were not technical then and are not now made it work with Myspace, Neopets and Geocities. There are a number of free microhosts out there. And the big social media sites also allow you to post a lot more crap.

I think bringing back websites like hawkee etc and providing an easy way to host is the right way forward, but it needs a catalyst (like most things) to become a trend.

Text is way too small for me… can’t read it without reader mode being on

Yet no mention of the real friction: buying a domain and getting hosting set up. There are a number of free alternatives out there but they are not well known by the public.

Unequivocally, 100% agree. Disagreeing with "them" on HN even on these issues the author agrees with would also have me consigned to the nearest gulag/re-education center. "As ever, unionize, free Palestine, trans rights are human rights, fix your heart or die."

The thing that I got stuck on most in 2025 is how often we complain about these centralized behemoths but only rarely distill them to the actual value they provide. Its only if you go through the exercise of understanding why people use them, and what it would take to replicate them, that you can understand what it would actually take to improve them. For example, the fundamental feature of facebook is the network. And layered on, the ability to publish short-stories on the internet and have some control over who gets to read it. The technological part is hard but possible, and the network part well - think about how they did it originally. They physically targeted small social groups and systematically built it over time. It was a big deal when Facebook was open to my university, everyone got on about the same time, and so instantly you were all connecting with each other.

I believe we can build something better. But I'm also now equally convinced that it's possible the next step isn't technological at all, but social. Regulation, breaking up the monopolies, whatever. We treat roads and all manner of other infrastructure as government provided; maybe a social platform is part of it. We always lean these thoughts dystopian, but also which of us technologically inclined readers and creators is spending as much time on policy documents, lobbying, etc, as we are schlepping code around hoping it will be a factor in this process. This is only a half thought but, at least these days I'm thinking more about not only is it time to build, but perhaps its time to be building non-code related things, to achieve what we previously thought were purely technological outcomes.

Appreciate the nature and scale of the internet... and also how it's changing though, yeah?

While I agree with much of the article's thesis, it sadly appears to ignore the current impact of LLMs ...

> it’s never been easier to read new ideas, experiment with ideas, and build upon & grow those ideas with other strong thinkers on the web, owning that content all along.

But, "ownership" ? Today if you publish a blog, you don't really own the content at all. An LLM will come scrape the site and regenerate a copyright-free version to the majority of eyeballs who might otherwise land on your page. Without major changes to Fair Use, posting a blog is (now more than ever) a release of your rights to your content.

I believe a missing component here might be DRM for common bloggers. Most of the model of the "old" web envisions a system that is moving copies of content-- typically verbatim copies-- from machine to machine. But in the era of generative AI, there's the chance that the majority of content that reaches the reader is never a verbatim copy of the original.

Yeah, a blog isn't just a place to quickly jot things down, it's actually work. And because it's work, and it's optional, you sort of have to feel like it's "the work you should be doing," or at least part of or ancillary to, "the work you should be doing," or else it will just feel like busywork, and/or get postponed indefinitely. Posting on an existing platform is lower-stakes. But then again, if you end up putting lots of effort into posts on an existing platform, you're still doing most of the work, and one could infer that you care about it at least that much. In those cases I would recommend doing the initial setup of an actual blog etc., which is just a one-time operation pretty much.

I thought it was https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/

I opened that webpage and the first thing I saw was a sidebar covering the text...

Thank you. We should each try to be authentic, pay the cost, and hope that is what gets us recognized by an audience we value.

Historical parallel: the advent of newspapers showed the same catastrophe.

Yeah, until I hook up Claude to my NeoCities ;)

I think for the next 20-30 years it still wouldn't be feasible to make it a red flag due to a non-negligable part of the older population not being on social media at all. I assume it is right now still be possible to enter countries with a mobile phone number, and those have existed for longer and are used more widely than social media accounts.

I would assume they also try to derive associations to social media accounts via passport information if you don't provide any to them. So I think it's rather an additional bureaucratic step added on their side rather than a red flag.

This comment is an excellent example of low quality content. It's all wrong and hallucinated to point out a conflict between things that do not exist. An AI can generate this crap, but only if you ask it the wrong way.

Maybe publishing on HN should have a cost.

Optimistically, I think this is similar to how it's viewed when dating in the US. They want to see how well behaved you are, what your empathy level is with other people, and what you're thinking about day to day.

Not to say I agree with the reasoning, but it comes from a place of fear. The more fear, the more scrutiny. The criteria you need to show is based on what they fear.

Merely having a somewhat populated account on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn passes the bar of being a "real person." You share a few regular everyday things, you get happy birthday posts, a handful of people usually like your posts, you get a green flag in almost every circumstance.

Not having a social media presence comes with this question that can make it the scary part: Is it because of disinterest, because you're not socially belonging, or because you got ran off the platforms? It's obvious to us that is is disinterest, but they no way of truly knowing. And based on what they fear it can scare them, that unknowing.

If you can convince the other person it truly it is simple disinterest, there is no problem. Unless they're really bent on seeing your everyday thoughts...

If you don't "integrate well," it scares some people. You're too different and they fear becoming the outcasted outgroup with your inclusion.

If you're banned, that's... not good :) Which is a terrible place to be for people who were unrightfully banned.

What they're really hoping to catch is the blatantly obvious people that are openly delusional or violent on social media. There is a non-trivial amount of people who do this. If you have a page like this, or worse if you don't disclose it, that is the huge red flag.

This is a social investigation we personally do with others at the inner relationship level, with people who are already in the US. Right or not, it's not surprising to me that this reputational criteria bubbled up to immigration.

Sadly, attention is all you need these days. If you get attention, you will be “set” in part because ads=money but mainly because human attention really is that valuable outside of advertising. Survival is still what matters and so most people judge “creatives” by big number because that means status.

I think people see the very western culture of haves and have nots where all that matters is big number dominating the digital landscape the way it does in the physical world. It is gross but not remotely new. You put the audience or perish pressure on yourself when you value big number go up opinions. Dont be friends with those opinions. They change nothing and have no real power if you dont depend on them for survival.

I thought HN's ideal website was a text file?

It's beautiful to be sure, I wanted to actually read what the author had to say, and stuff kept flying around my screen, so I did not get far.

Maybe if I printed it out...

Edit: Half joking with the printing (although I do find it much easier to read printed materials), but it definitely seems to me it that the author was trying to make a magazine and not a website. (A magazine where everything moves while you're trying to look at it!)

I thought the point is to pass along the message, though the one that is brought up quite regularly: sharing the joy of making websites, and such making as a way for anyone to contribute a little to the overall construction/improvement of the Web. Besides, it does seem to work without JS, though the layout is quite broken: header texts overflow (whatever is the window width), the text column is 45 characters wide instead of occupying the window width, all of which demonstrates the possible downsides of such diverse websites. That is not to say that they outweigh the benefits, but such downsides are not necessary to include, either.

Actually they could turn on reader view mode if they use Firefox, because this is website, all content present as the W3C standards, users could read the content as any form as they like.

There's no reason _not_ to use static sites for types of sites he's talking about (learning sites for hobbies, blogs, general sharing of information), created with things like Hugo, or even a simple script to generate pages with your own templating. There's nothing to exploit, because it's just HTML.

If you don't feel like keeping a server secure, there are free and easy hosting solutions (Cloudflare pages publishes at a press of a button, for example).

There are a myriad of ways to host small websites without dynamic code that are easy to secure.

You’re also the one that is being a little nostalgic for the past. Even 15 years ago bots would immediately hit sites looking for vulnerabilities in things like phpmyadmin, Wordpress, etc

That’s literally what TFA is about: how to proceed.

> and each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.

In the same way heroin proves itself more useful for everyone year after year.

Year over year, we eat more junk food and get more overweight than the previous year. This demonstrates that junk food and fat are becoming increasingly useful and beneficial.

Yup, I think human curration is the way forward. Email newsletters, RSS, etc. It's "old school" but it's the sanest way.

I'm doing my part on the human curration side. My shameful plug: https://randomdailyurls.com

A human curated newsletter and site if you just prefer that. Lots of people use email --> RSS. I don't block it or stop it.

I've often mused about how people get irritated by others being optimistic about change when the observers have tried change in the past and not been able to maintain it. I feel that the experience of that can lead to a position of cynicism that is defined by ones own limitations rather than the constraints of the system. They'll even suggest that people should be stronger in their resistance against the proven stickiness of platforms that use huge data to keep people in their ecosystems.

Related: https://img.ifunny.co/images/4664ef520c015b9017962facd187730...

Do you feel destroyed tho?

Mmm yeah I think I know what you mean. IDK if "If they stopped existing, we'd realize we shouldn't have relied on their existence" is plausible, but we have plenty of bitter lessons in centralized comms being acquired and reworked towards... particular ends, and will see more.

Also the collective capability of our IT is inhibited in some ways by the silo-ing of particular content and domain knowledge+tech, no question

> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.

This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.

RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?

IME, this is just about the opposite of true.

I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.

The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.

The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).

The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.

There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.

Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.

[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb

That's by design. Many people in America today (including many in the federal administration) want to transition to a world with much less immigration and foreigners (including less foreign tourism) than the levels of the past several decades.

I think that social networks are not meant to be moderated at scale. We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks': we occupy the same infrastructure but see content filtered to the style that befits us. Most social networks have the notion of friend symmetry, but I think that read-time filtering needn't be like that.

To that end, I made a trivial Chrome extension and an equivalent CRUD backend that just helps me store lists of users I like and dislike. The former are highlighted, and the latter are simply removed from comments.

As an example, the user I'm responding to is someone whose comments I like so I have had them in my highlight list for two months now and not regretted it https://overmod.org/lists/view?pk=ELpqNsanTYP9_wZXNjdF-FcEOc...

My personal tool is particularly idiosyncratic but I think information sieving is particularly important these days, so I recommend everyone build something like this for themselves. One thing I've found it particularly helpful with is the usual outrage bait. But I also killfile users who I think particularly misunderstand the comments they respond to, and I also killfile users who express what I think are low-information views.

I've read your comment before visiting the site, and it got me wondering -- how bad can it be? Can it be worse than those acid green on red sites of the 90s-00s?

Imagine my surprise, when I opened the site and it looked and felt just like a museum or art exhibit. This was the literal feeling I had -- being at an art gallery, but online.

I guess, these comments tell more about the commenters, than TFA. We should remind ourselves to be more critical to the content we consume, regardless where it comes from.

If you name your site "A website to destroy all websites" you're basically inviting people to judge it with extremely critical standard.

Unique is not a quality hard to achieve

And they are complaining precisely because it has pompous title. If it was "badly designed but personal website" there would be much less of that

Yup. Pretty much everything seems better when you're being nostalgic. And that is singularly due to the human tendency to forget the bad parts and remember only the good ones (it's a solid self care strategy).

I had fond memories of programming my CP/M machine back in the day, built a re-creation and was painfully aware of how limiting a 25 line by 80 character display could be. Nostalgia, remembering the good times, reality some things really sucked too.

Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.

Back in the early days of the web and SGML, the focus was reversed, which is to say "web" sites would just publish content and the "user" could apply what ever style they liked to get a presentation that worked for them. This infuriated web site authors who had their own idea about how their web site should look and act on your display. You were the consumer and they presented and if you didn't like it go somewhere else. You can still see vestiges of that with things like "use this font to show things" Etc.

So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)

The real trend is toward personalization on the user’s side of things. Instead of interacting directly with a website, your web-browsing agent will extract the parts of the website you actually care about and present them to you in whatever format, medium and design style you prefer.

I mean didnt Geocities solve this and many other problems?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities

> each year, a person spends more time on the internet (on average) than a year before, which shows that it is getting more and more useful for everyone.

How in the world does that sound like a reasonable conclusion?

I'm quite enthusiastic about my FreshRSS instance. I got to this article/these comments from there, and I've even worked out how to add YouTube subscription feeds, and comics. Just a straightforward, chronological list of the things I've chosen to follow--no ads, no BS. It's quite refreshing, I think it's had a material impact to improve my mental health. Of course, the things that the people I follow create, and the timing of their publications is inherently influenced by algorithms, removing my direct exposure to algorithmically-defined infinite feeds has been significant.

On the newsletter front, I really don't keep up with them and have thought about reducing the number I have showing up every week. I mostly just mass delete a lot of the mail in my personal inbox a couple times a week.

I wouldn't mind getting back to reading more from RSS over aggregators, even though I often appreciate the comments on HN. Aside: it's a shame that so many sites removed comment sections, and any attempt to create a comment extension for any site turns into a cesspool.

rss and private forums are the soul of the internet. find your people

I'm with you. Surprised by the negative reactions here.

A possible piece of the puzzle: I originally read the article on mobile, no issues. Then I opened it on my desktop, and found the design quite jarring. The margins are much too large for my taste, forcing the text into a single narrow column, and the header animations were distracting and disorienting (fortunately the page works perfectly with JavaScript disabled). Perhaps this triggered people?

Without wanting to sound overly pessimistic, I subjectively feel like comments on Hacker News have become more negative and cynical over the last 10 years. It often seems like the prevailing attitude is "let me try and point to a perceived flaw" or "here is why this is not good enough" rather than being helpful or supportive... We're staying away from the hacker ethos IMO.

It's by no means a perfect article, but the general message seems to be that we're not powerless to build the web we want, and you can host your own website, which is still true.

Back when I first got on the net I remember spending a lot more time on sites like Bellard's, where "like" means "no style (or would it be transparent style? brutalist style?) but tons of substance."

It says the same few things that always get hive mind upvoted on Hacker News. There is nothing new about this information.

Social media bad, Javascript bad, cars bad, old internet good, RSS good, personal websites good, HTML good.

If you want to farm upvotes on Hacker News, write about these topics. This content is like crack to developers.

Seeing bellard.org for the first time just warmed my heart.

This conversation on YT reminds me intimately of all the competition Twitch got over time. By all accounts, Mixer was more technologically advanced than Twitch is right now, and Mixer died 5 years ago.

Even Valve of all people made a streaming apparatus that was more advanced than Twitch's which had then innovative features such letting you rewind with visible categories and automated replays of moments of heightened chat activity, and even synchronized metadata such as in-game stats - and they did it as a side thing for CSGO and Dota 2. That got reworked in the streaming framework Steam has now which is only really used by Remote play and annoying publisher streams above games, so basically nothing came of it.

That's how it always goes. Twitch lags and adds useless fake engagement fluff like bits and thrives, while competitors try their damnest and neither find any success nor do they have a positive impact anywhere. The one sitting at the throne gets to pick what tech stack improvements are done, and if they don't feel like it, well, though luck, rough love.

There's certain level of friction to everything; that acts as a filter to separate those who choose to proceed anyway and those who don't. If you want to start painting, you have to buy a canvas, an easel, brushes, paint and set aside time to actually do it. Some people will abandon it because they like the concept of being someone who paints more than actually doing it. Some will proceed because they want to paint.

The same goes for website creation. You can post text, pictures and images on any social media site. The independent web is never going to be able to match that level of usability, and IMO it shouldn't try to. Part of the reason the indie web is interesting is because it's full of people who found their way towards wanting to build their own site.

I read the article on mobile and I thought it was great. Then I looked at it on my desktop (in Chrome) and found it much harder to read. There are even images literally blocking off whole portions of certain paragraphs. It's not good.

Hacker News, plus a few specific authors who link to others.

Human curation is still where it’s at.

There's a line from a 2009 episode of The Office that sums it up:

Jim: "Pam texted back saying we could give them all iPods".

Phyllis: Oh, if they don't have an iPod by now they really don't want one."

Website creation has reached its equilibrium rate of growth. Those who want a website will make one, and the rest won't. Personal websites are one of many media for public self-expression today; in 2004, the options were far more limited. Those who are on Neocities or mmmm.page or Bearblog etc., are the spiritual successors of that MySpace HTML template generation. They are a trickle relative to the number of people who'll start a Tiktok, Bluesky or Youtube account. It's not going to grow any faster than what it is, regardless of whichever points of friction in creating one can be eliminated.

I once spend half a day or so gathering RSS feeds from fortune 500 companies press releases. I expected it to be mostly bullshit but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently if one spends enough millions on doing something there is no room for bullshit in the publication.

> We are meant to have what I call 'overlay networks'

As Terry Pratchett observed in a 1995 interview with Bill Gates: “There’s a kind of parity of esteem of information on the net”.

Equal internet votes means any propagandist with a human or machine bot army can bias whatever they want. Now we have people with unimaginably large propaganda machines drowning out those who act with integrity, intellectual nuance and selflessness.

I definitely want an "overlay network" for those sites that have hijacked the term "social network". Also I'd like one for movie reviews too please.

I read the post first. The website is gorgeous, but not pleasant to use on an iPad Mini. I couldn’t keep reading without reader mode.

But damn, it is absolutely beautiful. The fonts and paintings, wow.

Yeah, its a really beautiful site.

Me too! The website actually looks like a curated art version of something; beautiful font.

These are people who don't understand whimsy or other forms of contrast enhancing rhetoric. Designed to make reading interesting, points extra clear, etc.

Not designed to fool anyone into some random extremist view.

It may be that people who don't pick up on subtext humor, post more than average.

Hm. I read the title differently - that we create "A" personal website to break the monopoly of the "All" websites like the social media sites he mentions.

The singular destroys the monolithic many.

Y'know, the thing which you did is probably the best way to make use out of nostalgia.

Like of course you had your CP/M machine and it had its restrictions but you are seeing them now with the added information of the current stage

There were also things that you liked too and still like and they may be better than somethings in current time

So you can then take things that you like and add it to modern or remove previous restrictions by taking access to modern upgrades.

> So yeah, nostalgia is never a good motivation for a manifesto. :-)

I think the problem's more so spiritual. The social contract is sort of falling off in most countries. So there is a nostalgia for the previous social contracts and the things which were with them like the old internet because to be honest the current monopolistic internet does influence with things like lobbying and chrony capitalism to actively break that social contract via corrupt schemes.

People want to do something about it, but speaking as a young guy, we didn't witness the old era so we ourselves are frustrated too but most don't create manifesto's due to it and try to find hobbies or similar things as we try to find the meaning of our life and role in the world

But for the people who have witnessed the old internet, they have that nostalgia to end up to and that's partially why they end up creating a manifesto of sorts themselves.

The reality of the situation to me feels like things are slipping up in multiple areas and others.

Do you really feel that the govt. has best interests for you, the average citizen?

Chances are no, So this is probably why liberterian philosophy is really spreading and the idea of freedom itself.

Heck I joined linux and the journey behind it all because I played a game and it had root level kernel access and I realized that there really was no way to effectively prove that it wasn't gone (it was chinese company [riot] so I wasn't sure if I wanted it)

I ended up looking at linux and then just watched enough videos until I convinced myself to use it one day and just switched. But Most people are really land-locked into the Microsoft ecosystem, even tiny nuances can be enough for some.

using Linux was the reason why I switched from trying to go from finance to computer science. I already knew CS but I loved finance too but In the end I ended up picking CS because I felt like there were chances of making real impact myself which were more unique to me than say chartered accountant.

So my point is, I am not sure if I would even be here if I had even the slightest of nuances. Heck, I am not even much of a gamer but my first distro was nobara linux which focused on gaming because I was worried about gaming or worried about wine or smth. So I had switched to nobara.

Looking now, I say to others oh just use this or that and other things and see it as the most obvious decisions sometimes but by writing this comment, I just wanted to say that change can be scary sometimes.

> Then there is the paradox of freedom to deal with, specifically if everyone is free to change anything they like to be the way they like it, other people will hate it and the entire system will be "bad." But for everyone to use the same basic frame work, and the dislike for the lack of freedom will be a common cause that builds community.

I would say let the man have his freedom. I would consider having more choices to be less of a burden than few choices in most occasions. Of course one's mind feels that there is a sweet spot but in longevity I feel like its the evolution of ideas and more ideas means more the competition and we will see more innovation as such.

Where are my hypermart.net peeps at? Iconoclastic, even in 1995, represent.

Yeah I've been using RSS to keep track of new mods for Cyberpunk 2077, Skyrim and Starfield. It's been fantastic to keep them all organized.

It's just a fun title, don't read so much into it

Could you please tell us a bit more? It sounds great

Where is that a trend? It really doesn’t work in most cases because often the information and the design are not separable. One needs the other to convey the intended meaning.

I miss RSS too

I don't think it's a bad analogy but I think there's some tension between the visual interest and making a design that makes it pleasant for someone to actually read your article through. Though even if you format it optimally for that few people bother so maybe this guy has the right idea.

I always thought MySpace was the natural evolution of this. Flame GIFs and all.

Yeah really love the density of information, and also love the discussion boards and irc. Back then we gathered together on those boards or in the channels to wait for the new year.

while i agree with you; I also think that sound ideas are sound regardless. i don't think the negative comments are helpful at all. If people wanted new information, go read nature, science, cell. There's plenty of journals. HN is not for new information, it is for interesting information which allows refactored info imo.

There is freetube which had rss really easy to work with for youtube subscriptions.

One of my biggest issues was that on some occasions, Youtube algorithm would give me home run so I would still frequent Youtube algorithm

Another issue was that smh, youtube's rss feeds couldn't really find the difference between shorts and normal videos.

So if you have a channel which makes lots of short form content, you would see that so much more often.

Like I remember taking a few hours out of my life to fix it but ended up giving up.

Although now thinking about it, I feel like what can be done is seeing all the youtube videos and seeing all the shorts videos from an api or similar I guess and then seeing the difference and having it for an rss or such to pass another rss.

But one can see the pain in the ass for that and I am not sure how that would even work.

I must comment, Hackernews has been the perfect spot between algorithmically generated and completely self feed as it gives me new things.

is there anything like Hackernews but for youtube/video content?

Yeah agree. One interested in CS can literally stay there for years. This guy is so smart.

Whenever I see something I like, I vote it. It feels awkward to me to type a bland show of praise when many other users have already done (and will continue to do) the same*. When I see something I dislike or disagree with, I feel it easier to go into more detail as to why, as I rarely see people sharing similar criticisms.

* As a sidenote, people who just say "This." and "Cool." irk me, and I don't want to elicit the same annoyed reaction in others.

Treat it as something you can pick from, like a pile of books, not something you have to finish, like a pile of books.

Assuming that your observation is true, I would guess the average age of HNers has increased YoY, which is likely to have something to do with it.

I'm looking at the article now, and where I am in it, the header "The Invention of the Automobile," the image of someone driving, and the first paragraph of that section are all overlapping each other. I came here to type the above, then went back to that tab to find the layout had changed without me doing anything, so now "Part two," the title, and the picture are overlapping, but not the first paragraph. And the title is cut off.

That's just one complaint, but it's not me, it's the site.

The one sitting at the throne is the one with the content, not the one with the tech. People don’t care about frivolous features. There are like 20 different streaming services, I’m sure some have better tech than others but ultimately people are only paying attention to what shows they have

Oh my god, I didn't even get to the bottom, I thought you were being hyperbolic with that quote. Insane.

Neocities is fairly well known and often listed in present-day personal website tutorials. Wordpress.com is also still there. Even if you get your own domain & hosting you usually have a nice web interface to drop the htmls into unlike in the old days when you had to FTP into the server and all that.

Manually writing html is more of a barrier than this. Back then there was a multitude of wysiwyg html editors like FrontPage, or Composer which was bundled with Netscape Navigator.

I understand that, but that's not really my point. Yes, they have an isolationist and xenophobic bent. But while it's understandable that having a social media presence full of sketchy / terrorist / trafficking / whatever might now be a reason for a country to deny a visa, it creates the question of what they do with innocent people who simply refuse to participate. My question is what happens if you don't have any social media or smartphone at all? Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?

I designed an extension with a roughly similar aim that filters based upon various phrases and characteristics rather than the poster of the comments themselves. It collapses comments (via automatic triggering of HN's built-in collapsing feature) and adds a "reason" tag to the comment information, so I can choose whether or not to read it anyways. I feel the features with the most positive differences are the capitalization detector (hides all caps or all lowercase) and the character requirement.

Sorry for the shameless plug, but I built [Cloudhiker](https://cloudhiker.net) exactly for this: exploring great websites.

Do you intend to write it up? It would be interesting to get your take on how the classification works. And personally, as I know my feed is on the index as well, into which category my writing would be sorted.

Beware of trapping yourself in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable

There's an assumption, that people sometimes state explicitly, on HN that the discussion is more interesting or valuable than whatever's on the end of the posted link. Sometimes that's true - often even - but sometimes it's not.

That's not necessarily a value judgement on the discussion though. From me, at any rate, it's more often a personal perspective: sometimes I'm just more interested in or charmed by the thing, and in digesting and coming to my own conclusions about it, than I am in reading other peoples' thoughts and perspectives on the thing.

But, yeah, to me it felt almost like an old magazine: the typography, the layout, the way images are used. A lot of the discussion about web design in the 90s came about as a result of people coming from a traditional publishing background and really struggling to do what they wanted with the web medium, so to me it sort of hearks back to that a bit, does a good job of embracing some parts of that older aesthetic, but works well with modern web capabilities. Mind, I'm looking at it on a desktop browser, and maybe the experience on mobile is less good (I can't say), but overall I like it. It has some personality to it.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more. I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind. I also dislike animations that seem to be made for a certain scroll speed.

Having said all of that, I certainly don't think it's bad, nor is it a commentary on the arguments being made. It's just not my cup of tea.

I too think it’s a beautiful website and really refreshing in its simplicity. Too often “good design” means “needlessly complex.” The design of the site also nicely fits the argument being made in the text.

I did the opposite, I opened the website before looking at the comments and thought it was like a beautiful art gallery too. Then I read the top comment, and thought 'What are they talking about??'. Had a complete opposite feeling.

I think we can agree it's uncomfortable to read though: the font is too small, for instance. I had to use Firefox's reader mode.

Each year, I spend more time in my car during my commute (on average) than a year before, which shows that being stuck in traffic is getting more and more useful to me.

Each year the gambler spends more time, money, and energy on slot machines. Obviously his gambling habit is getting more and more useful to him. /s

My blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham radio” has received the most hits out of all of my other posts. It got me an interview with IEEE Spectrum and basically cemented my name as a ham radio influencer.

Amateur radio is a remarkably niche hobby so that kind of attention is rare, but it took ragebait to do it. A title like “The Next Generation of Ham Radio” would have flopped. I know this because that’s what I titled it first, and after 40 views in 2 months I slightly rewrote it and reposted it under the new title and within a day it appeared on just about every ham radio forum, facebook group, numerous email reflectors, and so on.

You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.

I really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really hate the design trend of confining tiny text into a tiny narrow column down the middle of my browser. It's an awful stylistic decision, and this is the petty hill I'm willing to die on. It's so bad that I really can't take a site seriously that does it.

Now, someone's going to come out of the woodwork to remind me, "Well, ackshually, research suggests that it's easier to read text that's constrained by blah blah blah blah" I don't care. It sucks. It's always sucked. It will forever suck. I have a nice 27" monitor, and I want to use the whole thing. I don't want to have to hit ctrl-] ten times just to have text that is readable and spans my monitor.

Thinking about it. There are some things which can be done to better sooth the private forums.

Like to me especially signing up to each and every forum and then waiting to be accepted by a person feels good but has tons of friction and has some stress attached because you never know how strict the community is as well, it might take a day or two, perhaps this is the reason why we got the dumpster fire of mega internet forums called reddit or twitter of sorts

To me, federation feels better in this context since I can still have a single identity of sorts across multiple forums and you got better idea / ways to filter as well if need be

Another thing I feel about private forums where users have to wait for permission signing up is that I feel like something even as simple as having a cute cat or cute apple LOL or anything relaxing could make it less stressful for people to join. I assume its impact would be few but it would leave a deeper impact on those who do want to join.

I see it similar to writing books. Everyone can write it (dictating to someone else is also writing), it can be good for person (putting ideas in understandable way, sharing inner ideas). Buuuut not everyone wants to do it.

I guess fetishising books and personal blogs has a limit.

It's annoying that you guys clutch your pearls over an imaginary gulag while actual people are being actually rounded up and sent to camps.

Is that bad?

I black-hole plenty of sites via pihole above and beyond the typical adblock lists. On a very few rare occasions I have turned off the pihole to unblock a site because I was curious after following a link that was blocked by said pihole. Every single time I quickly learned why that site was blocked, and visiting that site gained me nothing.

That is very cool. It would be cool to see what you decided to filter on (other than the same-case filter and the char limit). I had a similar idea where I would run comments through a fast cheap LLM to evaluate whether they could be tagged in a certain way. I originally tried just pure word-stemming and phrase-based blocking and found that I couldn't tune it well for my uses. I also found that collapsing comments lead to my opening them out of curiosity.

Thank you for sharing what works for you. I think it's great other people have been doing this style of read-side filtering. It's a pity that there's no way to inject code into mobile apps safely (i.e. this is an easy path to app-store rejection). Perhaps there's no option there but to push `shouldFilter` out to a server where you can run the logic. My use of my phone is the weakest link in my filtering strategy.

Probably not. I lost interest when I figured out how poor the dataset is.

I think the problem really is more of: Beware of being actively trapped by deep dossier leveraged algorithms, in a manufactured social bubble of emotional comfortable, created by corporations that are expressly farming you.

People talk about social media is if it were passive, when its deep intel, deep analysis, manipulation. Where everything we do, is not just used to manipulate us, but in aggregate, improves manipulation overall.

It is amazing what toxins people will accept, if the toxins become baseline familiar.

> Will we be completely excluded from being allowed to travel freely unless we post our thoughts on a daily basis?

Yes, because even if you do, they will find other ways to exclude you. Their stated goal is to exclude as many non-Americans from the USA as possible, regardless of whether they consider you "innocent" or not.

> I usually find artwork that accompanies a text to be distracting. I love reading work that can stand on its own, invoking images in the mind.

But the images are a part of the work, not separate from it, no?[0]

You might have a preference against that, which is absolutely fine, but I think you're making an artificial distinction.

[0] There's obviously a separate conversation to be had about how much that part contributes or detracts with any such work, but the point stands that I tend to view such works as all of a piece including all constituent parts.

> My personal taste for the presentation of a piece of writing is that less is more.

TFA works with iOS reader mode, which is all that matters to me. I use it instinctively as it makes style more or less uniform and lets me focus on the content of the article.

I thought the same when loaded it on mobile. When I went to the desktop version, it is kind of glitchy and the images overlap the text: https://i.postimg.cc/bJgjcDD1/desktop.png

You could scale it to 120%, font would become more readable and it would even remove the text overlap with the tilted image in part three. At 100% font looks similar in size to the one on HN, but a bit less readable, I agree.

Depends on your age. I remember being warned in my 20s that older people couldn't read 10pt font, 12pt was a stretch, I didn't really believe them.

Now I'm in my 40s, oh wow. Small, illegible, font is everywhere. Instructions on food is especially bad for this. At least on the computer you can usually force 125% font rendering.

Point being, the site is probably quite legible to people in their 20s.

> You choose to spend your time on a place A instead of the place B, it means that the place A is better than the place B. Why else would you do it, if B was better? It is a simple logic.

Your logic seems to be wanting.

I choose to spend more time at work than on vacation. Do you think I like it better, or can you imagine one reason explaining why I work?

It’s absolutely not the case that people are good enough in general at optimising their time and lives that the things they spend the most time on are the “best” they could have done.

Most people will readily admit to this, especially when it comes to the internet, and it’s well documented that many people are not happy with how much time they spend on the internet or how it impacts their lives.

Correct. When I spend more time in the bar and fewer time at work and with my family then this is a sign that the bar is more useful and better for me than work and family.

Network effects and anti-competitive practices defy simple logic. Intermediate logic is unavoidable, I'm afraid.

I'm sympathetic to that view, but I'm also aware of a particular way it doesn't explain the world. Often I make local choices that I enjoy while nonetheless regretting them later. Text social networks are the most common way this happens to me. But the other common failure mode was with food.

Without the retatrutide dose I'm on I frequently consume large amounts of food. I love apples, and blueberries, and chicken and rice. I can easily eat an entire Costco bag of Envy Apples at a stretch. Inevitably, I regret this once I have exited my fugue state of food consumption. So why do I do it? My behaviour on retatrutide is far superior at getting me both total content and joy (in the sense of area-under-the-curve rather than point-in-time).

This concept has been explored for a long time[0]. The earliest documented I know of is the concept of Akrasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia from the Greek philosophers. But I think any notion of utility must build in the notion of regret and perhaps the bicameral mind and perhaps also the notion of non-rationality. My utility functions for the things I do are not time-translation invariant, therefore I think any model that optimizes for greater content and greater joy must necessarily involve temporally non-local terms. I don't yet have a strong model of this.

But we know this is common to many mental disorders. Part of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is an interruption of some mental pattern. My wife and I have a game we find amusing to play when we want to overrule the other's temporally local preferences: we challenge the other to a game of rock-paper-scissors to see whether the countermanding applies. When she exercises it, I frequently find that even if I win the momentary desire has passed.

tl;dr: Utility functions have different values depending on the temporal stride they take

0: Recently, Elon Musk claimed that the aim for Twitter should be "unregretted user minutes". Sadly, despite this stated aim, I found that his changes decreased these and increased regret so I had to stop using his platform. I agree with the notion of maximizing (value - regret) expressed in some abstract form, however.

Except social media feeds are designed to addict. A smoker will spend their time smoking instead of not smoking. Does that mean that smoking is good? Why else would they do it, if not smoking was better? It's not that simple. When we blame the users, we forget tech monopolies are spending billions to engineer systems which are stealing our time.

Do you also like watching tennis matches from up close? It’s a similar head motion…

“Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.” - Christopher Hitchens

To some it felt like nothing as they couldn't render the content.

The challenge when tackling difficult problems is to bring in solutions to those problems.

Subway offered an alternative to junk food. By offering custom flavors of choice, giving consumers more control over what they eat. I don't see any fresh food at subway. Does it mean what they did is futile? No. Can't we point out this is another type of junk ? We better do.

The site is wonderful when rendered with JavaScript. A web to aspire to is one where the system font is set by default, at least could be chosen.

All valid concerns looking at an endeavor discussing a better web. The author may even take note and iterate, there was no claim it was definitive work.

If it happens it happens. I can only hope that the result is boredom rather than increased engagement.

I think when you make such strongly opinionated design decisions on your website, you're deliberately inviting strong criticism. They could have used a readable vanilla bootstrap theme and HN would be actually discussing the actual text content instead of the design, but they didn't, and here we are.

The issue is that it's beautifully designed for a portrait phone-ish-sized screen. Try viewing it in 16:9 and it's a mess. I'm not saying this to criticise; the author owes me nothing, and if I shrink my browser window down then it looks lovely. But I think this is where the confusion is coming from. Half the comments are from people looking at it on a widescreen and half are on a portrait monitor or a phone. "What this website looks like" can be two very different things and nobody bothers to ask which we are talking about.

You chose to do it, so it means it was better to you than all other choices. Why would you still do it otherwise?

If your goal is to suffer as much as possible, it does not matter. You are still making choices that lead you to your goal as fast as possible.

Your comparison may be apt for Tiktok. The OP talks about the Internet. Researching, learning, communicating, paying, shopping, entertaining, via the Internet, have steadily increased.

I finished reading this comment wondering what should I take away from it. Is it better to include alarming titles and be read? Or the other way around? Or what would be the sweet middle point?

When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much everything that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to gambling, it scares me quite a lot.

It also could happen because tech companies have optimized their products to maximize the amount of time that people spend on them, often in ways that directly result in a worse user experience (by showing ads instead of the most relevant search results, for example).

Addiction & Tolerance. You choose to take bigger doses of Heroin more frequently instead of living a healthy life. Your logic seems a bit too simple.

Or that B got worse.

not essentially private per se, but usenet groups and bbs had a natural vetting because it required some competency to even access it

I mean, that is a US problem - or the problem of any country which chooses to destroy its own tourism sector. And searching social media is ancillary to that, as you say, if the main goal is simply to exclude people.

I'm talking about (per the article) whether self-exclusion from social media will soon become a worldwide red flag for travel.

Actually, HN wouldn’t be discussing it at all, most likely. At least not this much. The design is not only good, it has also successfully incited a passionate response from a bunch of people who don’t appreciate it. Win-win!

The idea that opinionated design is intended to court controversy or criticism is, itself, very cynical. The corollary to that is that all design should be vanilla to make it as unobjectionable to the widest audience possible.

Design and content are inseparable. When design reinforces the point of the content, that is good design, even if it's ugly, even if it's not aesthetically pleasing to you, even if it's not how you'd do it.

But I'd argue that questing for neutrality is worse than taking a stance, even the wrong stance. Besides which, what one now considers "neutral" is also a giant set of design decisions - just ones made by committees and large corporations, so the blame for its drawbacks can be passed off, and there's plausible deniability for the designer.

Someone takes risks and makes something creative they consider artistic. You're reducing their choices to a question of whether they intended to be popular or to court criticism, flattening the conversation into one about social media credit, and completely discrediting the idea that they had true intent beyond likes and points. That response itself betrays something slightly cowardly about the ethos of neutrality you're proposing.

that's an interesting point. A echo chamber could lead to fatigue and boredom.

Reels is able to keep me engaged because it is able to surface similar content I would like but from different users. And they have such a breadth of producers these days.

The X home feed algo is not so good apart from it being text only, even for infotainment content. YT shorts also does not work as good as the Insta algo

It doesnt mean that it getting more and more useful though. The alternatives could be getting worse and worse. Or there just aren't alternatives.

Maybe this is just a disagreement of what it means for something to "become more useful"? As an example, If I need a bank account and every bank goes online only and shutters their physical locations, that is not online banking becoming more useful to me. I was perfectly happy going to the physical location, but i am now spending more time doing banking on the internet.

People spend (on average) the vast majority of their time on the stupid addictive stuff, that's documented.

Nah, no bans. People should be free to spend their money and time as they please, but let's not pretend that 2000 calories of M&Ms a day is a healthy diet, either.

I'm really curious how a blogpost titled “Millennials are killing ham sandwiches” would fare, in comparison.

One of the most frustrating and perhaps thought-terminating clichés on the internet and social media at large is alluded to in this reply:

“I personally could not view this page [because I turned off JS], therefore I will dismiss it out of hand as it didn’t cater to my needs.” A choice made by the consumer somehow makes the author accountable for it.

Or more succinctly, “but what about me [or people I’ve anointed myself as spokesperson for]?”spoken by someone not the intended audience for the piece, trying to make the author responsible for their need.

The answer to which, I think, is either, “it’s not for you then so move on,” or perhaps even “misery is optional, just enable JS ffs.”

The idea that the creator of a work must bend to the will of those that consume it seems to be highly prevalent, and is pretty much at odds with creativity itself.

Wow. I had (just now) made one comment on the bad layout. As you might guess, I'm on desktop, and looking at the site in a window wider than it is tall. I saw your comment and shrunk my window to be half as wide as it is tall, and the layout corrects itself and changes -- dramatically.

I chose to give that nice man my wallet instead of taking a bullet, but that doesn’t actually reveal as much about my preferences as you seem to think it does.

When somebody talks like this, ready to ban social networks, videogames, pornography, the whole internet, and pretty much every freedom that billinons of people enjoy, by comparing it to drugs, it scares me quite a lot.

It makes no sense what you say. If the experience with A was really worse than with B, people would stay with B.

Yes, but that still means A is a better choice than B to a greater extent than it was before.

A lot of these arguments are really arguments about an unstated "baseline" that we feel we deserve.

Listen while I tell of Christmas 1983, when every 14-year old with a VIC-20 got a cheap modem.

Seriously, haven't we been working tirelessly to expand the circle of access? Nostalgia reflects when the circle was smaller, and we felt that we knew everyone in it.

Oh my bad, since you mentioned American tourist visas I assumed you were only talking about America. I have not been following similar laws in other countries, maybe their motivations are different than the American intentions of completely shutting off immigrants from the USA.

I have found that HN is, ironically, a horrible place to post experimental work on, with a few exceptions - e.g. things "written in Rust" etc. I think it's because the majority of the commentators here haven't really made anything from scratch.

Surprisingly, I had the art exhibit impression opening it on 16:9 desktop. It's sparse, as a gallery, or a luxury boutique, where free space accentuates value of content. It looks OK on mobile, but on desktop it's the sparse, but non-monotonous layout, that guides attention and provides a second layer to the content.

No, you chose to be able to go back to your loved ones in one piece. That very much reveals your preferences. Do you think someone who was in depression, who had a terminal illness might do differently?

That’s a massive leap. Recognizing a fact about those things does not equate to being ready to ban those things. The same is true of drugs!

This is absolute gold, thank you.

I think the arguments you're currently having with people come down to: To what extent do I control what I myself do?

People have a tendency to push blame to external forces rather than take responsibility for their own actions. But personal responsibility cannot be the full story, because (almost) everyone acknowledges that drug addiction is something over which people have starkly reduced control.

So the question remains: What about other things "in the middle" like social media or porn "addiction"? Is it the fault of the person, the external force (which you must admit is consciously organised with the goal in mind of promoting the addictive behaviour, since their bottom line depends on it), or some mixture?

The original poster said “more useful”, not “better”, so you’re already arguing something different than what was said. I might spend more time with something less useful because its time efficiency is one of the things that makes it less useful now.

Regarding your argument of “better” you seem to be arguing by definition.

Edit: I now realize you are the original poster who said “more useful”, so why did you change it?

More useful is one of many ways of being better. What are you talking about?

You vote with your feet. If you can only follow the world would be exactly as simple as you make it out to be.

If you write things for your own website you would make more of an effort and it would ideally find an audience that enjoys your world view or insights into your topics.

It would be great to lure you into that experience. HN is a terrible dating agency. Gathering down votes here is the opposite of making friends. It is however great for discovering authors like Henry.

He could have spend his time complaining on x how bad it is.

If you’re arguing that there are different ways of being better than your argument falls even further apart since you might choose a worse option because it is better in some way…