> Is this just basic nostalgia, people wanting to recreate the dial-up days or even BBS days?
That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.
Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)
If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.
That's certainly not why I created my search engine. Old isn't an end, its a means to cut the bullshit.
Like I read a lot of old books, not because I'm nostalgic for yellowed paper, but because they consistently have much better signal to noise ratio than most of what you'll find on a screen or printed past 1990 or so. (When people bought books in physical book stores and weren't primarily ordering books online, books weren't judged by their page count as a proxy for how much content they contained, and thus had a lot less filler and anecdotes.)
If you gave me a method of selection that was as reliable for identifying good books among contemporary books, I'd probably read more contemporary books as a result.