The Internet of my youth?

[snowcrab]

I've been noticing something the past few years and I wonder if anyone else has too. Does it seem to you that the internet is becoming more homogenized? When you do an internet search most of the results you get will be company websites or something run by a for-profit endeavor... and if not, it will be something either slicky produced, or using

Comments

[snowcrab]

It's strange but there's never been so much easily accessible information and yet, a lack of it. it's hard to explain what i mean but i'm trying to come up with examples.

For one thing, you can get a ton of info from Wikipedia, but some valuable/entertaining resources are missing. fan-created web sites about anime series, TV shows or movies.. jumptheshark.com, a site I used to frequent, is gone (bought up by a corporate conglomerate, which converted it to some staffer's blog).

To some extent these are replaced by blogs, forums and other sites. But a lot of that is transitory. Forums tend to get so much content on them that nobody goes and reads the entire message history usually. Websites had one advantage over them - presentation of vital information was front and center (at least, on good pages). In some cases it was simply the lack of flooding/overflow of info that made it readable.

I could do a good comparison about it if I had my web browsing history from say, 1999. it's sort of something i feel and remember but hard to present direct evidence of.

Snopes.com is a good example of an interesting, readable, content-driven site that can entertain a reader for hours, days, or weeks. As far as I know they haven't removed any content :) Sites like that I'm interested in. where you can find obscure/unique/occasionally useful information.