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The Return of the 90s Web

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Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#161

Post by esfandia »

majormajor wrote: post #92
nextaccountic wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we really need is a new Google, built on open principles (decentralized / peer to peer, fully free software, backed by a nonprofit), and focused on indexing the long tail of insightful content that is neglected by Google because it lacks SEO, popularity, links, and other metrics that Google find interesting but we don't necessarily do.

Any new google will become the current google because it will be gamed. I agree with the parent poster about hand-curated directories being the key to finding better stuff. It's necessarily much more distributed - because one person can't index everything - and therefore much harder to algorithmically game. Google has conditioned us into thinking that "an algorithm that automagically separates the wheat from the chaf…

So we have hand-curated directories, and we have social networks. Put them together and you could have a scalable, crawlable, searchable, customizable and non-gamable decentralized indexing system. Just don't know why nobody has come with this yet. Maybe lack of (monetary) incentives? Maybe something for IETF or WWWC to initiate?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#162

Post by WalterBright »

rkagerer wrote: post #158
WalterBright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. The internet is far too large to use human curation, an algorithm is needed. 2. An algorithm can always be gamed. You're stuck.

Can you substantiate #1? The content on the sites I visit is created by humans. Until automation genuinely overtakes us, I'm not ready to accept at face value the scale of the internet has grown so large that humans couldn't tackle the problem.

Google says there are 2 billion web sites. Each one may consist of a huge number of web pages (see wikipedia.org).

All I can say is, good luck with your human curation startup.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#163

Post by tdeck »

tomc1985 wrote: post #47
kickscondor wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still creating great stuff along these lines - you just won't find it through Google or Facebook or most of Reddit. Complex, interesting hypertext creations and web sites are still everywhere. But try typing "interesting hypertext" into Google or Facebook and see where it gets you. You can't search for something that's off the beaten track. This is where directories come back in. Check some of these out: *…

If DMOZ could have held on for a few more years...

I remember checking out DMOZ 15 years ago and it was already irrelevant.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#164

Post by akdas »

mrfusion wrote: post #114
kickscondor wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except: - Most subreddits are hostile to self-promotion of Web stuff. If you're unknown, you're going to have to be socially involved there enough that people know your name. (Though I agree that small subs like /r/esp8266 are begging for self-made content.) - Related: people don't know your name because it's in small gray text. You're just another comment. - You need upvotes. A personal directory requires only one u…

There’s no problem submitting blog articles though. Even your own.

I've had my blog post removed from r/algorithms for self-promotion.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#166

Post by RNCTX »

esfandia wrote: post #161
majormajor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any new google will become the current google because it will be gamed. I agree with the parent poster about hand-curated directories being the key to finding better stuff. It's necessarily much more distributed - because one person can't index everything - and therefore much harder to algorithmically game. Google has conditioned us into thinking that "an algorithm that automagically separates the wheat from the chaf…

So we have hand-curated directories, and we have social networks. Put them together and you could have a scalable, crawlable, searchable, customizable and non-gamable decentralized indexing system. Just don't know why nobody has come with this yet. Maybe lack of (monetary) incentives? Maybe something for IETF or WWWC to initiate?

Social networks are also gamed.

Since Twitter is their preferred platform, go put the activity of journalist Twitter accounts into a relational DB and start searching for who always boosts who. You'll find patterns. Of course there's nothing inherently wrong with this, but at the end of the day I don't need to know what a dozen NY Times journos think of a NY Times oped which is clearly written in bad faith, pushing a false narrative about a particular news event.

Non-gameable ultimately means people who influence the results can have no monetary interest in the results.

example:

Twitter thread...

https://twitter.com/jiatolentino/status/1263208982614814722

...vs reality...

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/jia-tolentino-parents-teachers-...

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#167

Post by rkagerer »

WalterBright wrote: post #162
rkagerer wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you substantiate #1? The content on the sites I visit is created by humans. Until automation genuinely overtakes us, I'm not ready to accept at face value the scale of the internet has grown so large that humans couldn't tackle the problem.

Google says there are 2 billion web sites. Each one may consist of a huge number of web pages (see wikipedia.org). All I can say is, good luck with your human curation startup.

Sure, it also estimates more than twice that many people in the world with access to the internet. And Wikipedia is already well-curated by humans.

If there were orders magnitude more pages than humans, I'd agree. But I'd also ask: Who created them all?

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#168

Post by revskill »

Actually it depends on the kind of website you'll build.

Some years ago, i made an app with Rails and turbolinks and some "tricks" to make ajax work smooth. The first version was built in 6 month, then i rebuilt the second version with React in 3 weeks !

The pain is in refactoring and adding new features as well as speed of development.

That's the day i discovered React. The way i develop Rails app is just make api json response to match mocked json on the React frontend, nothing more to think or trick!

There's a reason (or many reasons) I and many other chose React (or similar libraries/frameworks) to get the job done.

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#169

Post by japanuspus »

esfandia wrote: post #161
majormajor wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any new google will become the current google because it will be gamed. I agree with the parent poster about hand-curated directories being the key to finding better stuff. It's necessarily much more distributed - because one person can't index everything - and therefore much harder to algorithmically game. Google has conditioned us into thinking that "an algorithm that automagically separates the wheat from the chaf…

So we have hand-curated directories, and we have social networks. Put them together and you could have a scalable, crawlable, searchable, customizable and non-gamable decentralized indexing system. Just don't know why nobody has come with this yet. Maybe lack of (monetary) incentives? Maybe something for IETF or WWWC to initiate?

This is alive and doing well: https://wiby.me/

Re: The Return of the 90s Web

#170

Post by WalterBright »

rkagerer wrote: post #167
WalterBright wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google says there are 2 billion web sites. Each one may consist of a huge number of web pages (see wikipedia.org). All I can say is, good luck with your human curation startup.

Sure, it also estimates more than twice that many people in the world with access to the internet. And Wikipedia is already well-curated by humans. If there were orders magnitude more pages than humans, I'd agree. But I'd also ask: Who created them all?

Wikipedia is one website. There are 2 billion. I don't believe wikipedia's methods scale to the internet.

Also, any setup that allows everybody to be a moderator will be promptly gamed.

What you want is what yahoo used to do - a hand-curated search engine. It worked when the internet was small, but got buried under the eventual avalanche of web sites.

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