

Riders on the Storm - unignorant
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/opinion/20brooks.html?ref=opinion

======
chipsy
I love the imagery of this article. I recall one of the attractions of the
90's Web was the unpredictable nature of every link - since the bulk of
interesting pages were personal and semi-autobiographial, it was a voyeuristic
trip into the lives of random people.

For me, it got less easy to do that when the Web shifted towards larger,
consolidated sites with more community behind them. The insane rants and
confessionals of the old homepages were overwhelmed in a sea of vague,
repetitive one-line comments, heavily edited Wikipedia pages, and
advertisements for various products I don't really need. It became comforting
and familiar to go to an aggregator of some kind and see "random" new links
that were usually, in fact, overly predictable and based on a trend or meme.

Occasionally, I still make an effort to go out and find something genuinely
new. It's hard to know where to start, but I usually succeed with a little
effort, so I know the old Web is still there.

