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I find that all Google results are increasingly useless spam. Even searching for programming Q&A is becoming less viable and I end up landing on one of those "y

• saalweachter 6y ago
  "Let's throw one away" thought experiment. You're rebuilding the internet, if not from the ground up, then {UDP,TCP}/IP up. What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet?
  • Shared404 6y ago
    Imho, try to keep it from going mainstream. If there aren't enough viewers to make advertising profitable, then many of the problems filling the current internet would not appear in the first place.
    • cameronbrown 6y ago
      Gatekeeping then?
      • DreadY2K 6y ago
        Either that, or have separate webs for different disciplines (maybe one for academia, one for arts, one for jounralism, one for programming, etc.) that are kept separate from each other. I'm not sure how it could be implemented, but a forced partitioning like that could probably serve the same purpose without gatekeeping (if the partitions are small enough).
        • lopmotr 6y ago
          No. I get spam for predatory academic journals every day.
        • cameronbrown 6y ago
          Sounds like filter bubbles to me.
      • Shared404 6y ago
        Not gatekeeping, I phrased my idea badly before, and I'm sorry about that. I would like to make it clear that I feel very strongly against gatekeeping, and against censorship. More like not pushing for more acceptance. Allow a community to form, but do not try to market your way into a larger community. Obviously this approach is not sustainable, at least on the first try, as the Internet itself shows. However, now that the internet already exists, a parallel internet so to speak would not have as much/any appeal to the average consumer/corporation, which ideally would lead to only those who are interested in the community/content arriving there.
        • cameronbrown 6y ago
          How is that different from subreddits - Or communities like HN? Those aren't technical decisions, but social ones, so why do we need a new internet to implement them?
          • Shared404 6y ago
            We don't necessarily need a new internet. However, it could provide another line of "defense" against corporate interests. If the only barrier to joining is a technical one, than anyone who wanted to could join, but the majority of people would not have interest in joining. Ideally, this would prevent AdTech from taking an interest. As for the fact that these are primarily social issues, I agree. A social solution is going to be much longer lasting and effective then any technical solution. However, it is also much more difficult to implement.
  • noobaccount 6y ago
    Nothing, we’re just all gonna have to learn to deal with each other this way on this scale and move on.
    • api 6y ago
      Overall this is the best big picture answer
  • naravara 6y ago
    >What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ads blocked by default on all browsers. The original sin with a lot of these comes from the fact that incentives drive towards maximizing clicks over building a subscriber base. Ads themselves aren't really the problem either. Magazine style ads, where you just buy space on the strength of a subscriber/distribution reach rather than paying per click, wouldn't be perfect but they'd align incentives between readers and writers much better than the current situation does. The core problem is that the metrics are too granular, so there's too much room to game them at the margins.
  • fossuser 6y ago
    I think Urbit is trying to do this: https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f149 https://medium.com/@noahruderman/review-of-urbit-e7cc4c35f14... Mostly by putting some cost to having an ID in the network.
  • lopmotr 6y ago
    Not sure you need a whole new internet. Maybe a search engine aggressively excluding commercial results. Even blogs with ads. Anything with ads or selling something would not be listed.
  • karatestomp 6y ago
    > What do you do in the next internet to try to avoid the spam and SEO problems on this internet? Ban (yes, legally) collecting & monetizing most information about users. But do that generally, not just for the Internet. Or at least make holding such data incredibly risky (enormous company-ending fines for leaks or misuse). No loading third-party domain content in browsers. At all. No images, no scripts. You can link to it. That’s it. Limit scripting to defining custom sorts for tables, custom regexes for form fields, and... that’s about it. Too easy to spy or do shit without the user’s express permission otherwise. That should take care of the worst of the bad incentives that have made the web so hostile and shitty.
    • api 6y ago
      You are forgetting the other half of the equation. The web must have a first class payment system. Nothing is free; money will be made overtly or covertly. If there is no honest overt method, there will be a dishonest covert method.
      • karatestomp 6y ago
        Maybe. Most of the best parts of the web are totally free, donationware (wikipedia), or illegal to begin with (library genesis). Ads served 1st party and aimed at a reading demographic, not at individuals, like all ads except junk mail before the web, would be possible regardless. But yes some kind of payment flow that is just about entirely controlled by the browser—special UI pages cannot mimic, a “you’ll find a way to accept what this form sends you, or you won’t take payments” attitude from the spec—might be OK. I’d have to think it through some more. It’d be easy to screw up in a way that let the Nu Web become overrun with bad incentives and dangerous garbage again (watch the “non-computer-literate”, which is a lot of people and yes that includes the next generation now entering adulthood, not just old folks, try to use the web to accomplish any task at all if you don’t get what I mean by “dangerous”)
  • forgotmypw17 6y ago
    web of trust for everything
  • asdff 6y ago
    Ban advertising. Users could pay for the websites they use by proportion of time spent per billing cycle for their internet plan. Popular sites with more demanding server requirements would be paid for by the very users who induce that demand directly, rather than through more dubious advertising.
    • saalweachter 6y ago
      Would this actually remove the incentive for spam and SEO?
• heavyset_go 6y ago
  I don't think it's a coincidence that Google prioritizes content that has people staring at more ads for longer periods of time.
• hagy 6y ago
  I never realized how bad Google spam could be for technical content until I had to start searching for solution to some Windows issues. Almost without fail, the first page would be littered would spam sites posing as informative answers. Many of them were just duplicating content from official Windows documentation with minor modification. The more sophisticated ones would provide enough real content to entice you into thinking the page had the solution only to reveal you had to sign up to access the full content of the page. I've never encountered this before when searching for linux or programming topics. In those cases, Google results always include relevant stack overflow postings and links to the appropriate section of documentation. I'm surprised Google hasn't penalized these spam pages, but I'd imagine there are some perverse incentives to keep them around. Wouldn't surprise me if many of these sites show adds through a Google-owned affiliate program or are in another way tied into Google's ad tech empire.