Exploring the internet together should be like exploring a vast old library with your friends. Wandering down different shelves, skimming the pages that catch your eye, and occasionally one of you hollers in a whispering voice, "come check this out!"
Azlentwitter.comExploring the internet together should be like exploring a vast old library with your friends. Wandering down different shelves, skimming the pages that catch your eye, and occasionally one of you hollers in a whispering voice, "come check this out!"
“If you're attuned to the thing you're interested in, you see breadcrumbs that are interesting everywhere. People like this tend to be on Twitter. Twitter is a powerful place because it's like a matching algorithm for people like this, but it's everywhere, not just Twitter.”
Frederik Gieschen • A Compulsive Search for the Most Interesting People with Patrick O'Shaughnessy - Compound Manual
When I first got access to the internet as a kid, the very first thing I did was to find people who liked the same things I liked — science fiction novels and TV shows, Dungeons and Dragons, and so on. In the early days, that was what you did when you got online — you found your people , whether on Usenet or IRC or Web forums or MUSHes and MUDs. R
... See moreNoah Smith • The Internet Wants to Be Fragmented

But even with all their flaws, the existence of dozens of massive, collectively-maintained, curated and organized libraries of communal culture are still something like a miracle of the web. Tellingly, these kinds of sites rarely get launched these days, and the ones that have survived all follow a fairly common set of patterns. They often start as... See more