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>If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine, interested-motivated human curation to deliver results without falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-mo
by the_snooze 5y ago
>If someone can crack the problem of leveraging genuine, interested-motivated human curation to deliver results without falling victim to abusive, quick-buck-motivated spamming... they could replace search engines.
That's the tension right there. The moment someone solves the first part is the moment someone will try to hijack it for their own gain. The Internet is dark and full of husslers. They want to exploit people's goodwill and trust---that stuff is costly and doesn't scale, which makes it valuable. If you want genuine interactions, you go to a quiet corner with a handful of folks and be very very careful about who you let in.
- NoGravitas 5y agoPeople don't want to hear that the problem is capitalism, but the problem is capitalism.
- BizarroLand 5y agoFor instance, I'm imagining a wiki-search engine. The builder would need to load the first few hundred thousand results and then add some sort of user moderation system, where search results get a reputation and site submitters get a reputation as well. Donation funded, with maybe one sidebar section for curated ads that are tied to search results and not with a tracking cookie or fingerprinting. With a few tweaks, that would be a really good start, right? Once it reached a certain point, it would be overrun by the same systems, using human and bot armies to bias results towards the results that would make them the most money. As long as there is a profit to be made somewhere, people will undermine any obstacle placed in front of them to make it, and I can't imagine any fix for it that isn't "run your own servers and pay for it out of your own pocket".