[jasonkester]

Anybody remember meaningful URLs?

As in, site.com/view?postid=1234 or site.com/view?userid=1234. Back when "the URL [was] the new command line" and you could easily discover all the content from a site and rework it as you liked. You could tell how many posts a blog had or how many users a site had by pluggin in a few numbers and doing a binary search. No need for an API or a feed. Just look at the URL and you could see what you needed to mess with.

Then SEO happened and URLs started looking like site.com/10-shocking-secrets-about-cat-odor-control-devices, which you can't really do anything with except shorten them to shrt.nr/Ssk and make them even less meaningful.

It always surprised me that nobody complained when we started losing that.

[sellandb]

I think that is an interesting point. I have always found "site.com/view?postid=1234" feels lazy vs. the alternative "site.com/posts/article-title". While there is a relatively small group of people who might poke around with the URL parameters regularly, the vast majority of internet users IMHO would prefer to see a URL with some indication about what is on the other side. That's not to say we can't have both either, just that you tend to only need one or the other.

[Avshalom]

on the other hand site.com/description combined with the habit of writing urls in english has allowed me to navigate a tremendous number of websites in languages I don't speak.