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!
