4 ms·

I think SEO is a large reason why popular sites do bother with semantic tagging.

by phgn 5y ago

fleddr 5y ago
True, but at the same time there's an incentive against making semantics too good. The separation of data from presentation competes with the need/desire to monetize. For example, somebody had build an app that scrapes free recipes from the web, so that it's shown without ads and the ridiculous fluffy lectures that are typically part of it. Great for users of that app, not so great for the recipe authors depending on this model. This is also why RSS is dead. Both Twitter and Facebook had it before, but killed it. You don't want to give away your goods for free. It's easy to put this problem at the recipe bloggers or Facebook, but we're just as responsible for this. We don't want to pay for anything so it's ads. Then we avoid and block ads. We lack a payment culture.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  Unsolicited advertising should be made illegal. Then there'd be no reason to optimize the web to serve up ads, because legally you couldn't. The world needs to switch away from advertising for the good of humanity.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    Hey, fine with me. But do come up with an alternative monetization strategy.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      Paywalls, donations, selling a service, kickstarters, have something physical to sell, etc..
      - fleddr 5y ago
        These are (sometimes) good solutions for highly specific high value offerings, but that still leaves some 95% of the rest of the internet to cover ;)
- notriddle 5y ago
  This is one of the problems, and it might be the biggest problem with the modern web, but it's not the only problem. Non-experts are bad at producing remixable content. * A significant number of people do not really use file names. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbnails-in-the-file-picker.html https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna... * Twitter offers no official way to make bold or italic text, but some people make it work using math symbols. They either don't know, or don't care, about all the accessibility and search tooling this breaks. * Try downloading a C program off the internet and compiling it on anything other than the original developer's computer. In none of these cases does anybody benefit from the lack of usable metadata, yet nonetheless the metadata doesn't exist.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    You're absolutely right. The vast majority of web content goes undiscovered because it lacks any and all metadata.

I think SEO is a large reason why popular sites do bother with semantic tagging.

by phgn 5y ago

I think SEO is a large reason why popular sites do bother with semantic tagging.

True, but at the same time there's an incentive against making semantics too good. The separation of data from presentation competes with the need/desire to monetize. For example, somebody had build an app that scrapes free recipes from the web, so that it's shown without ads and the ridiculous fluffy lectures that are typically part of it. Great for users of that app, not so great for the recipe authors depending on this model. This is also why RSS is dead. Both Twitter and Facebook had it before, but killed it. You don't want to give away your goods for free. It's easy to put this problem at the recipe bloggers or Facebook, but we're just as responsible for this. We don't want to pay for anything so it's ads. Then we avoid and block ads. We lack a payment culture.

pmoriarty 5y ago
Unsolicited advertising should be made illegal. Then there'd be no reason to optimize the web to serve up ads, because legally you couldn't. The world needs to switch away from advertising for the good of humanity.
- fleddr 5y ago
  Hey, fine with me. But do come up with an alternative monetization strategy.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    Paywalls, donations, selling a service, kickstarters, have something physical to sell, etc..
    - fleddr 5y ago
      These are (sometimes) good solutions for highly specific high value offerings, but that still leaves some 95% of the rest of the internet to cover ;)
notriddle 5y ago
This is one of the problems, and it might be the biggest problem with the modern web, but it's not the only problem. Non-experts are bad at producing remixable content. * A significant number of people do not really use file names. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbnails-in-the-file-picker.html https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna... * Twitter offers no official way to make bold or italic text, but some people make it work using math symbols. They either don't know, or don't care, about all the accessibility and search tooling this breaks. * Try downloading a C program off the internet and compiling it on anything other than the original developer's computer. In none of these cases does anybody benefit from the lack of usable metadata, yet nonetheless the metadata doesn't exist.
- fleddr 5y ago
  You're absolutely right. The vast majority of web content goes undiscovered because it lacks any and all metadata.