Web Manifesto

Metadata

Now, shit posts and hate posts aside, so much fantastic content is lost amongst the crap on the above platforms. Some examples are excellent BBQ tutorials stuck inside a Facebook group or helpful info posts lost forever in someone’s Instagram stories. Outside these platforms, they’re undiscoverable! Even within the platforms, they’re only discoverable if you saw the content the day it was posted. Otherwise, they’re lost forever in a stream of endless crap. The priority of these platforms is to show their users a small set of what exists on the platform. Something similar happened with blogs when the chronological post order came into play. It signified that anything dated old was not relevant. (View Highlight)
I think the discoverability aspect of the web was lost during the time when blogs became means of monetisation and people no longer linked each other or other blogs of similar topics as they were now the competition, competing for page views for the measly cents per view that Adsense provides. I loved linking all my web friends’ homepages from my own back in the day, which formed a sense of community within the communities for whatever topic your page was about that particular month. (View Highlight)

Now, shit posts and hate posts aside, so much fantastic content is lost amongst the crap on the above platforms. Some examples are excellent BBQ tutorials stuck inside a Facebook group or helpful info posts lost forever in someone’s Instagram stories. Outside these platforms, they’re undiscoverable! Even within the platforms, they’re only discoverable if you saw the content the day it was posted. Otherwise, they’re lost forever in a stream of endless crap. The priority of these platforms is to show their users a small set of what exists on the platform. Something similar happened with blogs when the chronological post order came into play. It signified that anything dated old was not relevant. (View Highlight)
I think the discoverability aspect of the web was lost during the time when blogs became means of monetisation and people no longer linked each other or other blogs of similar topics as they were now the competition, competing for page views for the measly cents per view that Adsense provides. I loved linking all my web friends’ homepages from my own back in the day, which formed a sense of community within the communities for whatever topic your page was about that particular month. (View Highlight)