Google emphasizes popularity over accuracy

"information has never been easier to find!"

I think it depends what you're looking for. I realize this is obscure, but I can't find any reference online to a big Facebook Platform developers' conference that happened in 2007. It drives me nuts because I was there at Chelsea Piers with 1,000 people, but it's like it never existed.

>Said commenter, as they type a comment in a marketplace of ideas where people discuss fairly complex ideas.

Hacker News is, in the most charitable interpretation, an act of charity by pg and YC to attempt to provide a forum for a specific subculture. It's obvious from the goal of the project: "things that hackers would find interesting".

But what most people get from the Internet is not a product of someone with effectively unlimited funds (and legendary software engineering ability) building a website to support their community. They get to choose between eyeball-extraction megasites or clunky off-the-shelf vBulletin or Wordpress clones run by underqualified volunteers. It certainly is nice to be among the target audience of Hacker News -- but what if I weren't?

A very good thought, but I don't think all feeds are equal. A strictly chronological feed under user control is a wonderful thing. I have that, for example, in my RSS reader. What sucks is the popularity-contest nature of most feeds. At the top of my Facebook or Twitter or Google News feed is a bunch of stuff that I think is crap, any semi-sensible algorithm could tell that it's crap, it shouldn't be shown to me anywhere. Meanwhile, content from my actual friends or people who I have demonstrated interest in is pushed way down or all the way out. All because of popularity and some very misguided notions of engagement. Bad feeds ruined the internet.

I actually do think likes, stars, upvotes, whatever you want to call them are valuable forms of feedback. I like specific reactions - love, laughter, anger - even better. But I do wonder what it would be like if those only went to the poster. If they weren't shown to anyone else, and didn't affect what was shown to anyone else. I suspect that it would make "the feed" a usable model again, instead of the abomination it has become.

What I would like to see is a way to build charters and algorithmicly enforced governments, and then fork communities when divide exceeds concensus. What I mean by this is a subreddit where you can choose how votes are tallied, and instead of a fiefdom, becomes an open source template for other communities who can inherit the historical record.

When you create the community, it gives you a mad libs style page, where you can choose if you are a democracy, republic, autocracy, a mix of them. Vote weighting, whos votes count for what things, vote prediction and extrapolation. Conditions and Voteing for changing the charter rules, votes for how content gets posted, votes for leadership boards and mastheads. The ability for editors to strengthen or amplify certain voices or voters in a community. If you could seed a community with "role model voters" and then use the other voters who vote like them to extrapolate how they would vote on stories they havent seen. There is this common misunderstanding in the word that votes are only used as votes, and not as a signal to indirectly form a decision.

Every AI feed I've ever used (prismatic being one that comes to mind) buckles under popular vapid content rising above. Extremely strictly moderated feeds do exist tho: https://aldaily.com https://longform.org/ https://longreads.com/ I just wish there was a way for a group of strangers, who arent math experts, could spin up a collaborative feed reader (something that autoingests rss/twitter), and through their collective upvotes posts it to a more static page. Counterparties did something like that with Percolate.com and was able to still use the product once it pivoted markets. https://www.techmeme.com, https://www.mediagazer.com and https://www.memeorandum.com/ do the same thing. But those were all close knit teams that knew each other, their underlying tools arent accessible to spin up your own. I'm sure these tools exist for newsrooms, with the abundance of modern CRMs coming to maturity, a place to chat and edit before things get published. But they arent built for strangers to create community together.

It would make sense for these communities to more resemble Wikis with more static content, instead of the endless feed first. /r/personalfinance wiki being the front page, and the feed being something on the side powering new content to add to it.

Id really like to see something that combines reddit, git, fandom/wikia, techmeme, rtings.com, slant.co, kit.co into a collaborative consumer reports, wirecutter, or metacritic, rotten tomatoes. A place for people to gather to build consensus around something in a more structured way than wikipedia, and then publish it. Places like https://letterboxd.com succeed in some ways, but only through the existence of a shared culture and keeping to a specific topic.

There could also be an element of customizability for the end user. A metacritic or rotten tomatoes where you can weight certain critics votes, or a wirecutter where you can express your preferences for certain traits and then have it output a ranking list. Not completely dissimilar to rtings.com's magic tv ranker.

The web wasn't mob-like at all in the beginning. Most of the content was created by reasonably educated people who were publishing because of passion, not profit or other motives.