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How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of
by pyinstallwoes 2y ago
How might you see solving this problem? How could we distribute the task or goal of curation amongst individuals? How do we incentivize and enable discovery of maven/curators?
- isodev 2y agoI don’t know, webrings?
- smetj 2y agoYes.
- detourdog 2y agoThe scale of the internet is too large for individual consumption search engines and word of mouth are the methods I see for distributing access. Search engines need individual Judgement to evaluate results and word of mouth provides context clues and trust. Business prefers search engines to scale their monetization efforts but the quality of results are unknown.
- bandrami 2y agoIDK; the sites I regularly visit nowadays are all either one-off personal projects I learned about through word of mouth or user-centric portals like HN where I get that word of mouth. I guess it's kind of what digg used to be.
- prmoustache 2y agowe definutely need a return of webrings AND curated links page on decent internet pages.
- egeozcan 2y agoWebrings were a lot of people doing work for free or with little return. Nobody has time to do this anymore, and the only way to support such project would be paid membership (hard to gain traction) or ads (back to square one). Sorry that I sound pessimistic but I just am.
- rendall 2y ago> Nobody has time to do this anymore Can you say more about that?
- egeozcan 2y agoThank you for the question. It really needs an explanation. Times have changed. While there are significantly more open-source projects, online communities, and all kinds of available help than ever before, the proportion of active contributors relative to the number of people online has decreased. Consequently, the time required for each volunteer to process input for a project like a "webring" has increased significantly. I also feel that it's become harder to motivate people, but not because they've become lazier. Rather, the tasks have become more demanding, so "nobody seems to have the time for them anymore".
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- skeeter2020 2y ago>> Nobody has time to do this anymore By every measure don't people have more time than ever before? I think it's more a dramatic shift in how people use & view the internet. The (unfortunate in a lot of ways) answer is probably create something new and exclusive, but universal enough for the target audience that's going to do all the work to align incentives, try to pull along the good and leave behind the bad. There has been and will continue to be a lot of false starts & failed attempts. If successful it will eventually be co-opted and ruined too. So it goes.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bandrami 2y agoI think people in general have more time now than they did 25 years ago, not less?
- mft_ 2y agoI've been through this thought-process many times. 1. Google isn't working well any more. 2. Therefore bring humans back into the system of flagging good and bad pages. 3. But the internet is too big - so we have to distribute the workload. 4. Oh, a distributed trust-based system at scale... it's going to be game-able by people with a financial incentive. 5. Forget it. --- Edit: it's probably worth adding that whoever can solve the underlying problem of trust on the internet -- as in, you're definitely a human, and supported by this system I will award you a level of trust -- could be the next Google. :)
- Galanwe 2y agoI think the solution to this is both unique and trivial: you cannot trust something that is freely expandable,or did not require some amount of stake from the other party. That stake can be anything, time, work or money. If you want to trust a review, it's needs to have required a non expandable resource from the reviewer. That amount of resource should be an optimum of what an average user would be willing to expand without missing it (so that barrier of review is low), while being prohibitively expansive if an actor want to cheat the system and generate millions of reviews.
- mft_ 2y agoI like your thinking, but there's a middle ground before full automation: when humans are incentivized, one way or another, to provide the biased reviews. This might be via straight-forward employment of people in lower-cost places (e.g. via Mechanical Turk) or other incentives. For example, note how a proportion of Amazon reviews are gamed and unreliable. At the moment, the only tasks (that I can think of) that come close to the 'time-consuming-enough to not scale, but not quite annoying enough to put off committed individuals' are the various forms of CAPTCHA - which is unsurprising, given that we're discussing a form of Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. (And of course, there are CAPTCHA-solving farms.) But would people invest time in a review system that required them to complete a form of CAPTCHA regularly?
- withinboredom 2y ago> That stake can be anything, time, work or money. I think you'll find that money should be removed from your list. There are some untrustworthy people that have tons of money. Sadly, I think trust must be EARNED, and that requires giving effort (work) and time. You cannot buy trust with simple money.
- flipbrad 2y agoPlurality of search engines?
- turtles3 2y agoHonestly I think Google needs to be broken up. It's not a novel idea but the more I think about it the more I like it. So, Google becomes two orgs: Google indexing and Google search. Google indexing must offer its services to all search providers equally without preference to Google search. Now we can have competition in results ranking and monetisation, while 'google indexing' must compete on providing the most valuable signals for separating out spam. It doesn't solve the problem directly (as others have noted, inbound links are no longer as strong a signal as they used to be) but maybe it gives us the building blocks to do so. Perhaps also competition in the indexing space would mean that one seo strategy no longer works, disincentivising 'seo' over what we actually want, which is quality content.
- ohcmon 2y agoI’m afraid the problem is not indexing, but monetization. Alternative google search will not be profitable (especially if you have to pay a share to google indexing) because no one will buy ads there - even for bing it is a challenge
- turtles3 2y agoThe hope though is that by splitting indexing that puts search providers on an equal footing in terms of results quality (at least initially). Advertisers go to Google because users go to Google. But users go to Google because despite recent quality regressions, Google still gives consistently better results. If search providers could at least match Google quality 'by default' that might help break the stranglehold wherein people like the GP are at the mercy of the whims of a single org
- withinboredom 2y ago> Google still gives consistently better results How sure are you about that? I find them to be subpar when compared to Bing, especially for technical search topics (mostly, PHP, Go, and C related searches).
- sanroot99 2y ago
- elorant 2y agoThis was already solved in the past. Don’t just build a web site, build a community. This way the community will advertise the site and attract more users.
- hosteur 2y agoHow do you build a community if google prevents users from finding it?
- nxicvyvy 2y agoSame way people built a community before google?
- j16sdiz 2y agofacebook/twitter ads still works. I know what you gonna say, but... ya... you knew.
- FullstakBlogger 2y agoThe existence of meatspace never stopped the early web from flourishing, so why should the existence of the modern web stop anybody from making a second web? The only reason that Google was useful is because it tapped into the trust network that already existed before it. I feel like the social media churn has destroyed people's brains, because they're more interested in stopping people from doing things they don't like than doing something awesome themselves.
- HPsquared 2y agoThat's exactly it, the people are different now. They don't have the same time or energy as before.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoBefore people knew the web was vast and required digging through. Now people think google is the web, so if it doesn't come up by the third search it might as well not exist.
- pembrook 2y agoYou’re writing this comment on a site with an upvote/downvote based algorithm. The answer is simple, allow some level of user feedback from proven real users (for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret) and apply it mildly as a ranking signal. As long as it doesn’t become the only factor in ranking, you still retain strong incentives to do all the old SEO stuff, yet with a layer of human sanity on top.
- rvnx 2y agoGoogle Maps reviews are working like that and are often gamed. If you pay close attention, you can spot fake reviews because they usually come from “Local Guides” (so supposedly the most trusted users). Reddit is somewhat better at ranking and filtering spam, due to local mods, like there were in the times of web directories and webrings. One of the former bosses of Google search explained that the key metrics they follow to consider the success of “Search” are the number of page views and the total revenue. So if a user doesn’t find what he needs but keeps coming back it’s a win for them.
- shotnothing 2y ago> for example, only people with gmail accounts that are over 5 years old and who use them at least 3 times per week to eliminate fakers—-but keep this a secret tbh this is just a bandage, its just going to get botted once people discover the pattern (a lot of premium bot farms do offer mature or hacked gmail accounts anyway) and its going to be worse for legitimate discovery
- pembrook 2y agoThen you quietly change the rule, and get years of success until it's widely gamed again. The point is, there's experimentation that could be done and there's absolutely solutions that could be found. Early Google did tons of experimentation with the search algorithm to maintain the integrity of the results. There was definitely an active game of cat and mouse back then that Google actually cared about staying on top of. But as a decades entrenched monopoly, Google lost all incentives to tinker with anything anymore. The "operational" folks took over and any change to the search algorithm is now a multi-year endeavor involving thousands of stakeholders.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoThe fix is a decentralized search network with nodes linked to people or legitimate businesses. You manually distribute trust to friends and businesses you like, and you can manually revoke that trust, with some network level trust effects occurring based on spammy/malicious behavior.
- pixl97 2y agoYou know why you don't see systems like this at any scale Because they don't work.
- Twisell 2y agoExcept the whole fediverse... ahem...
- zaphar 2y agoYep, create a small closed off community that shames outsiders and you can have what you want. Everything in it will be local and very much a bubble. It won't have the failure modes of a Google or Facebook though. So I guess pick your poison.
- CuriouslyC 2y agoDecentralized communication absolutely works, and we have plenty of decentralized tools now. Decentralized search is a legitimately hard problem, both because it needs strong protocols (which are getting there but still WIP) and user adoption (which isn't really happening).
- Kalium 2y agoAsk an email administrator how well decentralization works at scale. It should be concerning that email has re-centralized to deal with all the problems that come from federation and decentralization.
- 2y ago
- perlgeek 2y ago> How might you see solving this problem? Break up google, disentangle AdSense from Search. Then the search division doesn't have incentives anymore to prioritize websites based on AdSense presence.
- layer8 2y agoHow would the search division make money? Serious question.
- perlgeek 2y agoSearch can still serve ads on their own pages (which Google calls "AdWords"), and (iirc) makes the most revenue for Google. AdSense is serving ads on third-party websites, which is very different.
- don_esteban 2y agoDoes it need to? How large does it needs to be? Can it be treated as 'essential infrastructure'?
- mrweasel 2y agoI don't think that's necessarily required. Google has always done well, even without pushing ads as hard as they are now. The problem is that Google / Alphabet has become to reliant to the money from ads to finance other non-/less profitable products. We've seen Google sell a profitable business, Google Domains, because it didn't make enough money for Google to bother with. For some reason Google believes that it is entitled to make some insane profit, rather than being content with having a reasonably profitable ad supported search business. Google Search sucks because of the current financial model they, and most of society works under.
- swarnie 2y agoPivot to paid search engines where you are the customer not the product. Thanks @Kagi - I attribute three solutions last week directly to you.
- corn13read2 2y agoWe are working towards this if you'd like to get in touch. I feel like "web3" as an interface/discovery platform is a very good topic.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoWhat are you working on?