Comment by dpkirchner
2 years ago
The web has gotten bad because of what big search engines have encouraged. If they stopped incentivizing publishing complete garbage (by ruthlessly delisting low quality sites regardless of their ad quantity, etc) then maybe we'd see a resurgence of good content.
I don't think so. I think it's the inevitable outcome of giving all of humanity the ability to broadcast without curation.
Or maybe we're saying essentially the same thing, but you think search engines should be doing that curation. But that was never my conception of what search engines are for.
I think we are indeed saying the same thing. However, I would like search engines to do some curation -- specifically, to remove results that deliver malware, are clones of other sites, and are just entirely content free (eg Microsoft's forums).
I'll give Google credit: I haven't seen gitmemory or SO clones in a while. It took a few years but they seem to have dealt with them.
I disagree, the bad sites people are talking about are spam, not bad personal takes. They are written by people being paid to churn out content. This is now being done with AI. This is a result of search engines listing them.
I don't think the definition of "spam" is nearly as objective as this suggests it is.
The web is bad because it is both popular and commercial. Every now and then I fantasize that just finding a sufficiently user-hostile corner would suffice to recreate the early internet experience of an online world nearly exclusively populated by anticommercial geeks.
I understand this is the tactic the Gemeni folks are using.