Hi, so a few people have asked me why DN was discontinued on the 12/3 and Ill try to explain here, there are a few points!
So Im basing this info off some tests I made; I logged what words people searched for, the date they were searched, and what results that search returned. These logs were temporary, anonymous and have been deleted.
The results:Basically, I made a fundamental mistake about how people use the old web. I assumed they would know what they wanted and therefor search for it, but in reality people don't think like that. Instead, when someone is on the old web they want to just click and explore; so when I presented them with a search bar they had no idea what to search for, so all anyone did was search themselves! That's not very interesting, so they would do it once then leave
Sadly its also a little less wholesome than that, DN was getting hit with a lot of searches for illegal content, thankfully none was being found, but it made me unhappy. Im not sure where that traffic was coming from, but I did not want to associate my site or other peoples sites with that kinda traffic. As someone creating a directory/search service, I think its somewhat my responsibility not to expose the sites I promote to abuse if I can help it
Besides all that, the site traffic was quite low, and the work in keeping it online was quite high. Although this version of DN is MUCH more stable that the first version in 2017, it was still work!
So I concluded that it was best to close the site.. I have to admit I'm feeling way less stressed since them
Although Im sad to have lost this thing I made and loved, and some of you perhaps liked too.
The Future!Im not done yet! I have loose PLANS in the works! Possibly to create some sort of directory service site (I know everyone's doing it these days!) based on the DN style. Annd maybe merging that with something like MelonTown, or a 3D explorer.
In the meantime though, for those of you curious, I have open sourced the DN code here:
https://github.com/Melonking906/Daniels-Network-Search its all there and if you have the skills it should not be hard to start up your own node.