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Comment by just_boost_it | Hacker News Reader

I can't see IRC coming back as there's just slightly too much friction for the common person to get up and running.

I could see websites coming back (I mean like the way people used to actually browse websites instead of social media). The problem with websites at the moment is discoverability. Google's SEO is a major roadblock to this at the moment. A way around it might be a "web of discoverability", with meaningful, relevant links on each website curated by the site owners themselves. At the moment, this seems to be a void filled by ads, which is a sort of tragedy of the commons.

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Yeah, chat and email basically prove that the vast majority of the public don’t actually want to run and maintain a server themselves, which basically leaves

* carriers (universally disliked by the population, tolerated at best, and pretty scummy trying to trap you into their own networks or bloatware if they can get away with it)

* apps that monetize using ads

* apps that monetize with payment

* an OS-level standard (iMessage is very successful, the Android chatting less so, and nonexistent on desktop OSes)

> and nonexistent on desktop OSes

At some point, MSN Messenger was the most used chat app, and then it simply... was left to die.

This was the single most anti-monopoly action of MS in all its history.

> a "web of discoverability", with meaningful, relevant links on each website curated by the site owners themselves.

Are you old enough to remember "web rings?"

Not quite it seems. I was a kid when Facebook came out. I remember what it was like to find websites that had real, bizarre, and innovative content, but I was too young to pick up on the terminology or appreciate how any of it worked.

I kind of do that on an individual level myself - http://www.ruffandtuffrecordings.com/SELECTIONS

Those are music picks I regularly update... It would be really cool if there was the ability to standardize the format for small web sites like this and then be able to follow others with similar interests... Pretty much reviving the old Myspace in essence, but with independent micro-sites for hosting curated links and other content from each user.

I like that, Bandcamp lets artists do something similar in that they can suggested albums/tracks ahead of the payment algorithmically selected suggestions.

In the early 2000s I remember lots of blogs about music where they just posted links to mp3s because there didn't seem to be a better way to embed tracks. I appreciate people based suggestions.

Wouldn't a search service that blacklists the giant players -- Amazon, Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. -- also serve as the same kind of "web of discoverability"? I imagine a search engine where the stewards manually whitelist websites that aren't full of SEO-speak, spam, and ads. Hell, I'm sure my own blog would rank pretty well!

IRC, not in the classic essence of connecting to chat servers, but browser-based options exist. It would be really cool if someone made a tool like Twitter spaces, but for one-on one conversations with random people... e.g. A voice-only chat tool that paired you with random people within different fields for conversations.

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