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> As soon as it's worthwhile, there will be RSS spam targeting search engines. That can be solved with a web of trust. I don't mind showing my friends which R

> As soon as it's worthwhile, there will be RSS spam targeting search engines. That can be solved with a web of trust. I don't mind showing my friends which RSS feeds I subscribe to. But I wouldn't let all of them see my browsing history (if I even kept one, which I don't). I also might not mind them seeing some kind of normalized ratio of viewing time for articles from each feed. I would love to be able to rank my search results based on my friends-friends-friends opinion of the trustworthiness of any particular feed. Top-level domain isn't the right trust granularity. Feed probably is.

marginalia_nu 4y ago
I think a lot of the problems with domain ranking is domain expiry and dead links. It's extremely susceptible to domain ownership changes. If you monitor high value domains for expiry and then immediately purchase them and fill them up with links to your websites, you will effectively inherit that website's ranking power. HTML does not provide any information of when a link was created, and DNS and HTTP does not provide any information bout how long a website has been around or ownership changes. HTTPS isn't much use either. Maybe you can coax it out of a registrar, but the information is not readily available and not easy to interpret. It's really a bit of a design flaw. The WWW was just never designed with this in mind, it was designed around long-lived academic and government institutions, and it really struggles to deal the ephemeral nature of the public and commercial web adequately. I'm not sure if RSS feeds are much better. Not really sure what's a good and scalable fix to this that allows the linked resources to still be mutable by their owners.
- octoberfranklin 4y ago
  You are suggesting that Google and Bing don't account for domain ownership changes in their "link juice" algorithm. I find this to be a totally implausible claim. The high-ranking domains all have enough data in their WHOIS to detect an ownership change. Even without that you can detect a missed renewal date and pause the emission of link juice to new links appearing on that domain.

marginalia_nu 4y ago

I think a lot of the problems with domain ranking is domain expiry and dead links. It's extremely susceptible to domain ownership changes. If you monitor high value domains for expiry and then immediately purchase them and fill them up with links to your websites, you will effectively inherit that website's ranking power. HTML does not provide any information of when a link was created, and DNS and HTTP does not provide any information bout how long a website has been around or ownership changes. HTTPS isn't much use either. Maybe you can coax it out of a registrar, but the information is not readily available and not easy to interpret. It's really a bit of a design flaw. The WWW was just never designed with this in mind, it was designed around long-lived academic and government institutions, and it really struggles to deal the ephemeral nature of the public and commercial web adequately. I'm not sure if RSS feeds are much better. Not really sure what's a good and scalable fix to this that allows the linked resources to still be mutable by their owners.

octoberfranklin 4y ago
You are suggesting that Google and Bing don't account for domain ownership changes in their "link juice" algorithm. I find this to be a totally implausible claim. The high-ranking domains all have enough data in their WHOIS to detect an ownership change. Even without that you can detect a missed renewal date and pause the emission of link juice to new links appearing on that domain.