[bE9a3S5So8igd3]

Now with the idear of delicious coming back, your comment makes me consider all the good low-to-mid scale shit we've lost over time. In ~ 2008 it seems like there were just more fun/interesting sites around. Maybe I was just in an exploratory phase - late teens - and was discovering new things often. Or maybe the barrier to entry today, in terms of design/polish/product is weirdly high, and has pushed out the seeker-net in favor of normie-net.

[glenstein]

I think the most obvious example I would add to this list you are thinking of would be livejournal. I also had a handful of SoundCloud-like medium scale music sites that I went to, like Purevolume.

I also remember this as a time when Google didn't yet have a reputation for abandoning everything they touched, so you could get inspired by, say, Google Knol or Google Wave. I had hope that Google Reader might grow into something, and the was a fraction of a second where we all wanted to believe in Google Plus.

[no_wizard]

I am still upset about Google Wave.

So ahead of its time! I have never understood why that got the axe, it took everything they where doing great at that time (chat, video, email, and the newish At the time G suite apps (called something else then) and just meshed them together in a surprisingly useful and pleasant way. Also the whiteboard features were really good particularly for it’s time.

This Mashable article does a good job explaining it in more detail[0]

I can’t believe it to this day they couldn’t figure it out. It was very ahead of its time

[0]https://mashable.com/2009/05/28/google-wave-guide/

[ghaff]

There are no real barriers to blogging or using an RSS reader if you want to. (RSS feeds are less ubiquitous than they used to be but they're still common.) And, of course, for saving and sharing bookmarks, it's Pinboard that's buying del.icio.us.

I never really tried out Wave but Knol suffered from the problem you'd expect if everyone gets to write their own self-promotional competing article on a topic.

[glenstein]

>There are no real barriers to blogging or using an RSS reader if you want to. (RSS feeds are less ubiquitous than they used to be but they're still common.)

I'm perfectly aware of this and have used RSS feeds on a daily basis for more than a decade, so I'm not sure what's being suggested here.

[robertlagrant]

> but Knol suffered from the problem you'd expect if everyone gets to write their own self-promotional competing article on a topic

Now we have Quora, of course.

[kerkeslager]

The barrier to entry for most interesting things is <$100 and a few hours time.

The barrier to entry for making money is a different thing.

[bE9a3S5So8igd3]

The point I made is more nuanced than that. I didn't say there is a large financial barrier to entry for the production of a modern website. The point is, Delicious, Digg, etc. would fizzle out today pretty quickly. Consumers have come to expect a certain refinement of design, usability, mobile-bullshit, etc. etc. that web companies of yore weren't exactly known for. What we're left with today is a bunch of crap that looks good but lacks novelty.

It's mostly due to this principle actually that Facebook usurped Myspace despite having far fewer features.

One exception to the rule lately is Roam Research, which looks like dog shit but is apparently popular.

[kerkeslager]

I understood your point, I'm just rejecting it. If your measure of success is scaling and making massive amounts of money, then sure, all the successful website are boring. But there are plenty of interesting websites still out there. There are still PHPBB forums which "look like dog shit" but host vibrant communities. I'm not sure on what basis you would consider these communities to have "fizzled out".

[bE9a3S5So8igd3]

I think it's clear by your response that you didn't get it.

> There are still PHPBB forums which "look like dog shit" but host vibrant communities

There are small communities that predate modern web/Facebook, which is irrelevant. There is also craigslist, and its shitty design is remarked upon constantly. It's frequented by the elderly so falls outside the scope of discussion.

You're married to the idea that design standards haven't changed, or that the web as a platform hasn't become much more sophisticated over the last ~decade.