Comment by brianpan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianpan | Hacker News Reader

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I'm just pointing out we had all this before in the 90's, we loved it, and it didn't work. What's different this time? We REALLY want it this time?

The article doesn't point out anything that hasn't been tried. You're telling me that bookmark links is going to solve it?!

Maybe we can pay money for discovery instead of paying with our eyeballs, but do people even want the small web enough for it to work? I do, but I highly doubt enough other people do. And even if a high enough threshhold of people want it to work, what's going to stop the SEO/gaming arms race that happened before?

To me, it looks like the same problems of social media and eventual enshittification. I think despite the best intentions we had, this is the reality of the web (or maybe the reality of humans, or maybe the reality of capitalism).

We ? We the users have 0 say into what the web looks like, where it is heading, how it works and how it is financed. Indeed capitalism, through for-profit companies, decides why list of bookmarks are not sufficient anymore, why we need to fill pages upon pages of artificially generated crap, why strong superficial emotional reactions are more valued than thought-out reflexions, why instant comment is better than slow analysis. It's all about monetizing content, monetizing reactions, monetizing everything. We don't create to pay for the infrastructure, we are milked for personal profit. Not our profit. We haven't discussed at all how we want to share content.

Doing list of bookmarks is our way to organize ourselves. Always has been, always will be. Except now we know why we have to do it, compared to times before where monetization was an attractive light that we didn't know was a trap.

SEO won't work because we don't care about SEO. We care about personal touch, about lightweightness, about sustainability; none of those are provided by ad-based business because none of those are provided by capitalism, by construction. It's not about being the biggest, it's about being ours.

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