All Aoimirai and Daisuki sites and services have been permanently taken down.
(The K-pop MV list, partially restored, is still on this link)
It has been a long road from my first personal site in 1997, all thorough my professional carrier with over 500 sites in 3 different bottom-up frameworks, and then multiple hobbies sites simultaneously. The internet was born as a place were people could share information and their enthusiasm, to slowly become the ultimate symbol of late capitalism where each and every player eats their heads attempting to maximize exposition at a minimal profit on ad-spy filled huge messy pages. Social media killed reliable news sites, and are not even worthy mourning its current worst state of null value since it never had any.
Mediocre (to be kind) “everyone can edit and participate without a second thought” communities sites murdered actual discussion forums, and information aggregate sites collapsed under the weight of too much useless and incorrect sites to maintain, for free. Cursed be the moment anyone mention people should actually give a dollar for a site worth it.
We saw the birth of Internet Archieve, and now its struggle to keep going due to censorship, minimized sponsorship, and the sheer volume of rubbish they try to store while mostly nothing is actually worth it. Wikipedia became a war of nerds trying to prove each other right, and while a vast amount of people go around with the usual “Wikipedia is not a trustworthy source” completely ignorant to how much breakneck it is to try and add any information to that site without dozens of sharks demanding proof and trustworthy sources, it eventually came to the extent that a celebrity had to call lawyers to edit (and correct) his own wikipedia entry because the “editors” were too busy circle jerking their superiority in edits, that nobody actually cared if their information was ultimately incorrect.
Youtube went from one of the greatest advances on the network, bringing video life to the previously image only internet, to become a hog of manipulation, fake news, ads and fishing that it became unbearable to access your own “home page”, which used to list your subscriptions and some recommended but related videos, to be a sea of “sponsored” content with no end. Last week overhaul of their front page to further bury your actual interests and subscriptions under ads, "recommended" channels and frugal crap just proves the decline.
I remember when my Spice Girls site and a Titanic essay site, hosted on good old Geocities, were a hit. Top of the time (I’m talking 1998), the biggest problem was actually getting people to know about it: you had to submit the sites to “evaluation” on sites like lycos or yahoo, where they would put it neatly into a category. Now, if you want to be found, all you need is to lie blatantly with SEO techniques, sign Goggle spy- I mean, adsense, and then possibly bid for the third or forth place on keywords. Yet, when you search something, you will be hit with unrelated (but certainly high paying individuals), and any quality content will vanish.
The only current content of value on the internet is original content, which ironically (not to say tragically) is snubbed by almost all community. To top that, if said original content is not along the lines of the popular and accessible, with minimal text, and possibly some controversial (usually not really, but creating controversies is the first step to get your content seen) you will just drown. Its depressing to see what the top individuals on original content have to prostitute themselves on doing to get enough subscribers and watchers to justify or even "pay" their “work”.
During 18 years I run original or aggregate (statistics) contents, and during 18 years I fought with people stealing my work, criticizing for criticize, and ignoring any “donate” or “tip” signal. A good amount of people benefited from that, but the hassle is just not worth it. And the fact I pay for it is even worse. I paid about 17 of the 18 server years, but there is no returning to all the time I fought with my ISP for being down and treating me like a moron, my server being down and treating me like a moron, or sites I analyze barring and blocking me for the sake of doing it, or kids dismissing my work based on their own tiny knowledge. For me, the type of moron who has a Winrar license and actually donate to all freeware I use, understanding a world where everyone is a critic, but everyone wants things free, having to waste breath with the new condescending frugal generations took a heavy tool. I cant take it anymore.
Today’s ban of my server from Youtube for “crawling” them to keep an index of videos was the last straw in a long string of straws that always made me wonder “aren’t people who just use the internet happier”? The irony of Youtube, owned by Google, the largest crawler and indexer of contents in the world, telling me I should not craw and index them, is not lost, and don’t fret, my system was crawling one per minute, while I have, until the moment I decided to shut down my servers, an average of 15 hack attempts and 90 bot hits per hour from crawlers and leech bots. My Japan travel calculator was already copied (poorly) on enough sites that I don't have traffic, and the latest to "request" my code "forgot" the part where I asked for a small donation in return. People keep getting greedier and meanier each year.
It is no wonder that BBC (which truth be told, has also been a news and article outlet on decline, with rare moments of true journalistic might – The Guardian tends to have a better quality, yet, but you can see some slow down already. True unbiased and quality news are a rare dying breed) predicted the end of the Internet on their article entitled “The Global Internet is Disintegrating, what comes next?” - where they mention how China or Russia are fighting the ever reducing quality, trustworthiness and control by isolating themselves. Perhaps they are on to something, because quite frankly its time to review the “anyone can make a site and spread the word” idea of “freedom” without audit and consequence - The Cambridge Analytics scandal, the ever ongoing and increasing eavesdropping of all Social Media and Google, the manipulations and maquinations, and all the anti-science mud that permeates the top level of the current internet really makes you wander.
It was funny when we thought the internet was about cats on roombas. Good times. Now the internet is about nerds fighting nerds to see who can gather more followers to storm Area 51 while proving vaccines cause autism on the flat earth – with plenty of spyware and ads everywhere to manipulate your next “democratic” vote.
It’s time to quit. With no regrets. Time to become just a consumer.
C
p.s. No, I will not give you the source code or database I had. Do your own work and feel the "pleasure" when people trash it.