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What I want is a Yahoo-style directory for blogs. Blog owners can put their blog in exactly one category. Users can star the blogs they like, similar to GitHub,

What I want is a Yahoo-style directory for blogs. Blog owners can put their blog in exactly one category. Users can star the blogs they like, similar to GitHub, and identify the low quality click generators/marketing blogs. I personally find Medium to be a horrible way to find content. Maybe it works for new content, if that's what you're after.

gen220 6y ago
The success of search engines prompted Yahoo to ditch its original product (the curation and categorization of the web) in favor of its competitors automated (and thereby game-able) crawl-index-search approaches. Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles? Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium. Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.
- bachmeier 6y ago
  I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my browser homepage until the day they removed it. I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you. On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
  - Jaruzel 6y ago
    > You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
- olah_1 6y ago
  > Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
- manigandham 6y ago
  Wikipedia doesn't struggle for funding. It just happens to be like many other organizations that eat up whatever funding they get regardless.
  - goodmachine 6y ago
    Not sure why you're getting downvotes. Wikipedia looks to be well funded indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
- ivanhoe 6y ago
  > Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, The problem is that the second it becomes an authoritative source, every spammer and marketer will start trying to game it, just like the SEO does now. Corruption is a huge problem with that approach. I'm old enough to remember how much influence yahoo categories editors had, and that many have asked for money to include you in the list, or they would use the position to simply block all the competition to their own sites. Same story is happening with Wikipedia, just it's more about personal wars and agendas instead of straight down racketeering.
  - gen220 6y ago
    Yeah, this is/was a real problem, and I don’t know if there’s a perfect solution. Anecdotally, @dang and friends do a very good job “editing” hn. They’re presumably paid well for their job, and seem to be passionate about their roles (thank you!). I feel like the key to good curation might be good moderation. In other words, allow people to submit links to be on the list, but there must be humans to control for SEO and marketing spam (like there is on HN). Making those humans incorruptible is hard but maybe not impossible, if they’re well compensated and hired thoughtfully. That being said, I’m doubtful that such a strategy of moderation would scale to hundreds of thousands (or tens of millions, shudder) of active voters and submitters. At some point, it would need to federate, with different mods owning different lists, and it would be difficult to avoid a devolution into Reddit.
godot 6y ago
Fun anecdote -- in the late 90s I maintained several web sites (personal/hobby ones) and by far the best source of traffic for them was Yahoo directory pages. I didn't know the SEO game (if there was even one at the time) and while search engines brought a small amount of traffic, majority of visitors came from Yahoo. When I launched a new hobby site, the goto marketing plan was to apply to add it to Yahoo. Granted, we're talking about the range of dozens to maybe a hundred or two visitors a day, so it's not web scale :)
kickscondor 6y ago
I run a Yahoo-style directory for blogs and articles I find: https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/. I'd personally like to see more personal directories rather than big monolithic directories of everything - those tend to collect spam.
- johntash 6y ago
  I like this idea, but I feel like it's shifting the problem to "how do you discover cool directories made by other people?" Maybe an idea would be something like what you have, but using some sort of standard that could be pulled down similar to rss feeds?
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    Well, it’s my opinion that technology can’t solve the discovery problem. I know we want it to. But at some point the technology has to evaluate the content. It can’t - so technology gives the content to humans to evaluate. However, it can’t evaluate the humans’ capabilities. :/ You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
- kfk 6y ago
  This is great. Will you allow other "friends" to create their own directories to? I'd like to contribute. Just found: https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-paths-to-graceland/ https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-pat... Thanks!
  - kickscondor 6y ago
    Certainly - if you email me (kicks@kickscondor.com) a link to your directory, I will absolutely include it here: https://href.cool/Web/Directory https://href.cool/Web/Directory There is also some discussion about this kind of thing here: https://forum.indieseek.xyz https://forum.indieseek.xyz Good to meet you, Alessio.

gen220 6y ago

The success of search engines prompted Yahoo to ditch its original product (the curation and categorization of the web) in favor of its competitors automated (and thereby game-able) crawl-index-search approaches. Now, decades later, there seems to be a shared yearning for the curated web, perhaps in response to the low signal:noise ratio of search. Isn't it funny, how the world works in cycles? Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. I think the GP has a point, that the need for a sustaining business model tends to strongly conflict with this equilibrium. Wikipedia has sort of evolved to partially fill this niche, but it periodically struggles with funding. I agree there's not a similar filling for blogs, yet: maybe GitHub will evolve there, but it will face the same pressure of other platforms owned by public for-profit companies.

bachmeier 6y ago
I was probably one of the last users of their original directory. It was my browser homepage until the day they removed it. I eventually stopped using it because it didn't keep up. These days, search is for many purposes completely useless. If I want to find someone to do work on my house, the last place I'll go is Google. It's truly amazing just how worthless the results are. You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. I imagine it's a fraud-ridden garbage dump if you actually try to use Google to find businesses to do work for you. On the topic of blogs - not completely useless, but overrun with shallow, uninformative trash posts by SEO experts. I think Google is more vulnerable now than at any time in the past 20 years.
- Jaruzel 6y ago
  > You'll get results from Michigan and Florida and Oregon all for the same search, in the same town, and claiming to be a local business. It's worse if you are non-US. Google seems to think that anywhere in the UK is local to me for businesses, and that's AFTER I've added loads of filters to stop American results from showing.
olah_1 6y ago
> Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, with some grokkable categorization and full-text search) might be the nirvana we're searching for. Moving away from ads towards human-centric curation is a primary design feature of the decentralized web.
manigandham 6y ago
Wikipedia doesn't struggle for funding. It just happens to be like many other organizations that eat up whatever funding they get regardless.
- goodmachine 6y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvotes. Wikipedia looks to be well funded indeed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation
ivanhoe 6y ago
> Curated search (domains chosen by a set of humans with no financial conflicts of interests, The problem is that the second it becomes an authoritative source, every spammer and marketer will start trying to game it, just like the SEO does now. Corruption is a huge problem with that approach. I'm old enough to remember how much influence yahoo categories editors had, and that many have asked for money to include you in the list, or they would use the position to simply block all the competition to their own sites. Same story is happening with Wikipedia, just it's more about personal wars and agendas instead of straight down racketeering.
- gen220 6y ago
  Yeah, this is/was a real problem, and I don’t know if there’s a perfect solution. Anecdotally, @dang and friends do a very good job “editing” hn. They’re presumably paid well for their job, and seem to be passionate about their roles (thank you!). I feel like the key to good curation might be good moderation. In other words, allow people to submit links to be on the list, but there must be humans to control for SEO and marketing spam (like there is on HN). Making those humans incorruptible is hard but maybe not impossible, if they’re well compensated and hired thoughtfully. That being said, I’m doubtful that such a strategy of moderation would scale to hundreds of thousands (or tens of millions, shudder) of active voters and submitters. At some point, it would need to federate, with different mods owning different lists, and it would be difficult to avoid a devolution into Reddit.

godot 6y ago

Fun anecdote -- in the late 90s I maintained several web sites (personal/hobby ones) and by far the best source of traffic for them was Yahoo directory pages. I didn't know the SEO game (if there was even one at the time) and while search engines brought a small amount of traffic, majority of visitors came from Yahoo. When I launched a new hobby site, the goto marketing plan was to apply to add it to Yahoo. Granted, we're talking about the range of dozens to maybe a hundred or two visitors a day, so it's not web scale :)

kickscondor 6y ago

I run a Yahoo-style directory for blogs and articles I find: https://href.cool/ https://href.cool/. I'd personally like to see more personal directories rather than big monolithic directories of everything - those tend to collect spam.

johntash 6y ago
I like this idea, but I feel like it's shifting the problem to "how do you discover cool directories made by other people?" Maybe an idea would be something like what you have, but using some sort of standard that could be pulled down similar to rss feeds?
- kickscondor 6y ago
  Well, it’s my opinion that technology can’t solve the discovery problem. I know we want it to. But at some point the technology has to evaluate the content. It can’t - so technology gives the content to humans to evaluate. However, it can’t evaluate the humans’ capabilities. :/ You discover a directory like mine just as you would discover any other link, johntash - by coming across it as you read, perhaps on Hacker News. If there were more directories, they would be easier to discover. They happen to be richer discovery points than a normal blog or profile page.
kfk 6y ago
This is great. Will you allow other "friends" to create their own directories to? I'd like to contribute. Just found: https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-paths-to-graceland/ https://www.kleptones.com/blog/2012/06/28/hectic-city-15-pat... Thanks!
- kickscondor 6y ago
  Certainly - if you email me (kicks@kickscondor.com) a link to your directory, I will absolutely include it here: https://href.cool/Web/Directory https://href.cool/Web/Directory There is also some discussion about this kind of thing here: https://forum.indieseek.xyz https://forum.indieseek.xyz Good to meet you, Alessio.