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There's a lot to unpack here, but just to start: How is having search engines be the gatekeepers to knowledge preferable to a community like Wikipedia?

• leephillips 6y ago
  I think this is a good question. Part of my answer is that I’m optimistic about Google being disrupted, in the not-too-distant future, by a search engine with a better idea, just as Google disrupted the existing search engines because pagerank worked better than hand-assembled directories. I think it’s obvious to everyone that Google’s algorithms have not been producing results as useful as they did in the past, for several years now. So I hope that this is an opportunity for the search monopoly to be broken up, by a company with enough capital to implement something better that can scale to a billion sites. Also, we are not entirely dependent on search engines. A domain expert can link to other articles from her articles, and so on...forming something like....a web. But we need to encourage the practice of linking. So many people write now (typical Medium articles, for example) without linking to anything much, as if they are the only ones to have ever thought or written about their topic.