What’s old is new again. In the 90s we used services like Submit It to get an URL into all the crawlers and indices. Now the search engines aren’t the challenge, it’s the sites targeting specific audiences.

Was that creaking sound your knee or mine?

Hard to say, drkoop.com is a landing page now

And don't forget StumbleUpon...

Speaking of StumbleUpon, I'm not sure whether this was just luck or something about its recommendation algorithm/social graph, but it was the only service where I didn't see the usual flood of traffic followed by rapid decay, the classic Slashdot/HN effect. The curve felt much smoother.

I remember some bloggers at the time describing the same thing [1].

I'd be curious if anyone knows more details.

[1] https://mark.blog/2007/10/23/the-stumbleupon-effect/

I can see how that kinda makes sense.

We used StumbleUpon to visit interesting sites we wouldn’t otherwise find. It didn’t exist to keep you deeply engaged with a main StumbleUpon website.

The aggregators are meant to be the destination. The links are more like shiny dangling lures. Some of them (reddit) do everything they can to keep you from having a reason to leave the page at all.

So I suppose it would follow that one gets people engaged in your site, while the other kinda tries to keep them from doing that.

Delicious!

For those not in the know, this is a reference to del.icio.us, one of the OGs to use Domain (Name) hack technique.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack

Ha, a new/old webring. If you are reading this and know what that is, it's time for your prostate/mammogram check-up.

Haha or colonoscopy.

Kinda reminds me of DMoz.

Curlie is the successor to DMOZ: https://curlie.org/docs/en/about.html

But Curlie doesn't appear in the website linked in the parent post.

itsbeen84years.gif

Dmoz! Those were the good days. :-)

> Now the search engines aren’t the challenge

Although it can still be a gamble whether a small site made it to DuckDuckGo (Bing’s crawler)

But that only affects about seven of us anyway so your point stands

> Submit It

Trying to remember a different one…

ya i cant believe im seeing this again