Hacker News Reader

Comment by vitaflo | Hacker News Reader

I've had numerous people contact me directly with follow up questions about various info I've put on my website. Many of those have turned into further conversations and collaborations.

You can't have that if Google is plagiarizing your site and delivering the info.

View on HN

How many of those people found you by randomly searching Google versus via links via your profile on social media?

That's the real question, because younger generations use less and less Open Web.

That was actually one of the main concerns of Larry Page back in the day, that the majority of Web's information might get and be locked behind walled gardens, paywalls or whatever else.

The web is just as “open” as it ever was. It is just as easy if not more so to create and host your own content.

You’re complaining about “discoverability” which hasn’t been easy since 2000.

The most successful independent writer today is probably Ben Thompson’s “Stratechery”

https://stratechery.com/about/ https://blockbuster.thoughtleader.school/p/how-ben-thompson-...

Through organic search, you probably won’t find any of his free articles when searching for a topic on the first page. He had to put in the work over years and couldn’t depend on Google.

Walled gardens like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and others are the missed opportunities for the Open Web. Google nor any other search engine can't crawl their information, so Web users who are not on the aforementioned sites are missing a lot of useful information and social dynamics that would otherwise take place on the Open Web.

At least for Facebook, if the information is not publicly available via Google it’s because the content creator has decided not to make their content public.

Google very much can crawl information on Facebook and Instagram that people have made “public”

As far as “social dynamics”, do you remember Cambridge Analytics? Why would I want my social graph to be publicly available.

It’s bad enough that people have their contacts synced with Facebook.

If most information on Facebook is private, it’s because everything else gets spammed to hell. Same with discord. They are not a replacement to public, curated information put out by relatively knowledgeable people.

All of them, because I'm not on any social media. I also mostly put obscure things on my website that aren't easily found elsewhere online, so very specific searches tend to end up on my site.

Also probably why I get email from people visiting as it's one of the few places people can reference said info.

So you aren’t willing to put in the work necessary to get your site recognized in 2024 and you don’t see that as a problem?

Eh? My site is recognized and found on google searches. People find the info they are looking for and sometimes email me asking follow up questions. The site is working as intended so I'm not sure what you're talking about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com