Somewhere between the late 2000’s aggregator sites and the contemporary For You Page, we lost our ability to curate the web. Worse still, we’ve outsourced our discovery to corporate algorithms. Most of us did it in exchange for an endless content feed. By most, I mean upwards of 90% who don’t make content on a platform as understood by the 90/9/1 rule. And that’s okay! Or, at least, it makes total sense to me. Who wouldn’t want a steady stream of dopamine shots?
The rest of us, posters, amplifiers, and aggregators, traded our discovery autonomy for a chance at fame and fortune. Not all, but enough to change the social web landscape.
But that gold at the end of the rainbow isn’t for us. “Creator funds” pull from a fixed pot. It’s a line item in a budget that doesn’t change, whether one hundred or one million hands dip inside it. Executives in polished cement floor offices, who you’ll never meet, choose their winners and losers. And I’m guessing it’s not a meritocracy-based system. They pick their tokens, round up their shills, and stuff Apple Watch ads between them.
So when we wonder where all the websites have gone, know it’s the curators we’re nostalgic for because the curators showed us the best the web had to offer once upon a time. And the curators— the tenders, aggregators, collectors, and connectors— can bring us back to something better. Because it’s still out there, we just have to find it.
Here’s the best part. You can be that curator right now, at this very moment. You can start to rebuild the interconnectivity that made the web fun to explore. And you don’t need to be a computer scientist to do it.
A year or two ago I got pissed off with how slow to navigate deviantArt had become, I had had an account there for almost twenty years, and posting images for 10, I had thousands of photos there, but as the site developed over the later years it just got worse and worse.
Finally, one day I had had enough.
I borrowed space on my dad's webhost, and built a simple HTML/CSS page with links to galleries exported from digiKam.
The page has no ads, no tracking (other than what the webhost does) and no user interaction, it requires no database, every page loads in less than a second.
It makes zero accommodation for mobile users, I only view it on my desktop and use it to show my photos to people nearby or friends/family.
The galleries does have some more advanced features, you can navigate through them with the arrow keys, they also have some pre fetch stuff, but that's it.
I am no expert in web design, but the page looks good, I played with some :hover in CSS but didn't go completely mad with it.
I won't link it since it has my real name on it.
I'll probably move the site to my own webhost some day.