Hackernews is itself one of these arcades that have supposedly disappeared. We're the flâneurs.
I thought about reddit and subreddits while reading this article (and HN is just an off-brand subreddit), and I can't disagree more.
These kind of websites are funnels that can satiate someone's need for novelty, while exposing them primarily to pages and ideas that a sub-community assembled around and collectively agree upon. The exploration hits a hard wall of very diminished returns once the explorer meets the sub-culture and the ideas they like.
In many ways, the links in my Facebook timeline are a better vector for exposure to new things because my IRL friends and relations are a wider variety of people than congregate in a subreddit (or other specific social forum).
(from the article) "... the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about."
There is definitely a theme to the articles that show up here. However, I've been visiting this site for a fairly long time and still find it a good starting point for discovering new sites and information I haven't seen before. It is still rather like browsing the windows of shops.
Maybe reading HN alone doesn't make a flâneur, but I don't really see the variety of it as being a problem. Old web rings used to have topics or themes in the same way. Even so, HN is not the only site I browse in this way and I assume the same is true of most of the people here. As it is with this site, the others provide convenient jumping-off places for exploring, even if the kind of content that shows up has a loose theme to it.
Does that collectively build a very similar experience? I think it does. The format is a bit different, but the effect is the same.
Maybe the trouble is that places like HN have a less exploratory feel than browsing used to? Now you have a decent idea of what you're going to be seeing when you click a link. A web ring's "Next" button might have a more exciting or adventurous feel to it, but people used to use BBSes for the same thing as we now use HN and others.
Maybe its that the kind of links that flood the web today are seemingly mostly to websites operated by businesses? Personal webpages seem few and far-between now, and that gives the web a different feel. People still "surf" or explore what's out there like they have in the past, though.
It seems that the thrust of the article is that more people are doing things like never leaving Facebook when on the web. They get their content embedded in a Facebook frame. This is true. People like my mother are on Facebook and are likely not going to be doing any flâneuring. But this is different from saying that nobody does anything other than that.
In fact, I'd bet there are more people than ever doing actual surfing. They just make up a smaller percentage of the overall web user population than they used to because so many people are now on the web.
This is a cool website here!
www.davidrumsey.com