> That's basically how Google works and is probably the only use case I can think of where backlinks help Which also opened up for a massive spam problem, whic

> That's basically how Google works and is probably the only use case I can think of where backlinks help Which also opened up for a massive spam problem, whic is obvious in retrospect. The only reason Google sort-of works is because it is not a protocol but a centralized service, outspending bad actors with a massive amount of warm bodies involved. It is a common theme of well thought out hypertext system, both Xanadu and the Semantic Web which both have had a massive amount of research poured over them, that they aren't designed to operate in an adversarial environment. Trustless systems such as the bare bones hypertext that is the original web didn't have this problem, in part because it wasn't ambitious enough. This can be seen to validate worse-is-better, or how vast permissionless systems can scale, or simply a stroke of luck. No matter in which perspective, it was a massive success.