[novas0x2a]

Do you remember when the only way to make your site discoverable was to 1) get yahoo to add you to their hand-curated list of sites or 2) trade banners with a super scummy link exchange? If we still had that internet, the only sites that would get any traffic at all would be the ones that could justify their existence with traffic, i.e. these[1]. How do you get traffic if you can't get listed? You can't unless you advertise through other media.

Is everything better? No. Privacy's worse, signal to noise is worse (that's a natural consequence of availability, anyway). Are a lot of things better? Yep. Niche sites can get traffic in a way they never could before. That's the natural consequence of taking humans out of the loop- instead of having to interest Jerry or David, now your only requirement for indexing is to interest anyone who is also interesting.

Let's keep working to make things better, but let's also not forget the improvements that have already been made.

1. https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites

[dingaling]

I never did either of those but more commonly one could:

3) Join a web-ring

4) Add a link in Usenet signatures

5) Ask to be included in the WWW Links section of your interest group's magazine

Or

6) Not worry about discoverability at all because the Web wasn't about growth and profit

My preference as a publisher and reader was for web-rings, they exemplified the attitude of sharing and mutual assistance on the early Web that has been largely lost nowadays.

[hollerith]

You forgot to mention the blog, which stands for "web log", that is, a log of an individual's experiences on the web.

In particular, one way to make your site discoverable was to write to bloggers that might be interested in it.

[DanBC]

I remember when websites were discoverable because they were good. People would link to good content.

That's how pagerank worked. Ads destroyed that.