like a lot of people on this app, i spend a lot of time thinking about lofty things like "the state of the internet" and how it changes over time. for example, how people say "on this app" now instead of "on this website". one of the things i realized recently is that the most valuable source of information right now, in early 2023, is reddit. i know. i'm not happy about it either.
there's a great post about this. if you search some topic you want to know about, especially if you're making a purchasing decision about it, chances are you'll find lots of SEO spam blogs. what do we do in this situation? we add "reddit" and read comment threads. that's where the real information lives.
the value of information is, at least in part, determined by how many knowledgeable people have contributed to it. a wiki is valuable precisely because it's been looked at and revised by its audience. the seo blog was probably not looked at by anyone but one overworked copywriter, and maybe barely skimmed by that person's boss. outside the content itself, that's the difference.
you know what else reddit is like? the old internet. reddit is not all that different from the initial organization of things, in yahoo directory, in newsgroups, in webrings. searching for information directly through web crawling might be the aberrational state, sandwiched chronologically between these community-driven bookends of internet information.
maybe there's a search engine concept in here; provable contributor count being a score for the quality of information. i sure don't know how to make it though
Before search engines, we had link directories. Topic-specific, or general, or whatever. We even had stupid link directories. Yahoo started as a really big link directory!
Search engines were the thin end of the wedge, in retrospect. That was the first "algorithm" that decided what you got to see; fully automated, no human in the loop. You had to and could learn how to query the old search engines like lycos and altavista to get useful results but you were still more or less at the mercy of the spider and how it indexed things. Google's big "innovation" was applying more algorithm. We should have seen what was coming.
But yeah if we want to unfuck things: Link directories. Bring links back in general! Put link pages on your websites!
Quoting @DecayWTF: "Before search engines, we had link directories. Topic-specific, or general, or whatever. We even had stupid link directories. Yahoo started as a really big link directory!" We even had a volunteer-edited link directory, which at one point was actually bigger than the Yahoo! directory. Wikipedia has the story on the Open Directory Project, known colloquially as DMOZ.
The Open Directory Project was unlucky in its corporate history: It was founded as GnuHoo in 1998, at about the same time that Google was founded. After various name changes it was acquired by Netscape and renamed the Open Directory Project, and then Netscape was acquired by AOL, with ODP a little project off to the side somewhere.
When the Mozilla project was founded, the ODP folks tried to take advantage of the positive Mozilla press, and the project was re-hosted at directory.mozilla.org (hence the "DMOZ" nickname), even though it had nothing to do with the browser. It trundled along for a few years before the rise of search engines, lack of funding, and other factors killed it. Its corpse can be viewed at dmoz-odp.org. (dmoz.org still exists as a domain with something behind it, but it gives you a "400" error.)
The Curlie project attempted to carry on the DMOZ legacy, and looks like it still might be active (for some minimal definition of "active"). If anyone really wants to revive link directories I recommend they take a look at it.
