I was just talking to a friend about this. It seems like the old web is vanishing. I miss the random, often times horribly designed custom pages people used to setup. I hope we’re looking in the wrong place.
It's there but I think it kind of gets lost as people lost interest in ad-hoc curation. If we arrive at a page today it's normally because some large entity with a commercial incentive brought us there via a search engine or a social network. Meanwhile, people no longer really host link pages or curate webrings.
It feels like a bait and switch to me because search used to yield more interesting results, and social networks did relatively little to get you to buy something, but as their precision in achieving their commercial goals have increased that is no longer true.
Search used to rely on formalized 'ad-hoc' curation in the form of DMOZ and other web directories. Without it, SEO has become the main influence on results and search-engines are now heavily focusing on novelty and recency in the hope of turning up something that the user was actually looking for. Of course 'novelty' is the polar opposite of something like textfiles, or of many well-established online resources.
While links have in the past been used to rank webpages, it isn't strictly necessary. You could have billions of documents and still figure out which one answers a question simply with a good ML model looking at the text of the documents alone.
I really enjoy sites that have extremely long linkrolls on them, but they tend to always be static linkrolls of the homepages of sites or blogs rather than pointing at specific high quality posts or areas of those sites. Sites that have a 'cool links I was looking at last month'-esque Link section are very interesting though. Alexey Guzey's site[0] is a good example of this kind of thing.
