Comment by garganzol
17 hours ago
To give it a different light: by using an indie web approach (i.e. self host), there is an intrinsic guarantee that a publisher has put at least some effort and resources to make their materials public.
This ensures that the published materials have certain authenticity and inherent amount of quality. Publishing them "the indie way" functions as a kind of proof of work: not a guarantee of excellence, but evidence that something meaningful was at stake in producing and sharing it.
By contrast, the corporate web has driven the cost of publishing effectively to 0. This single fact opens the floodgates to noise, spam, and irrelevance at an unprecedented scale.
The core problem is that the average consumer cannot easily distinguish between these two fundamentally different universes. Loud, low-effort content often masquerades as significance, while quiet, honest, and carefully produced work is overlooked. As a result, authenticity is drowned out by volume, and signal is mistaken for noise.
To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
> To sum it up: this is not so much a problem of the internet as a lack of discernment among its users.
This is very true. I've found that there's more good content than there ever was before, but that there's also much more bad content, too, so the good is harder to find.
RSS helps me, curated newsletters help me. What else helps build this discernment?
Hacker News, plus a few specific authors who link to others.
Human curation is still where it’s at.
Sorry for the shameless plug, but I built [Cloudhiker](https://cloudhiker.net) exactly for this: exploring great websites.
IME, this is just about the opposite of true.
I recently did a deep dive of an (allegedly) human-curated selection of 40K blogs containing 600K posts. I got the list from Kagi’s Small Web Index [1]. I haven’t published anything about it yet, but the takeaway is that nostalgia for the IndieWeb is largely misplaced.
The overwhelming majority of was 2010s era “content marketing” SEO slop.
The next largest slice was esoteric nostalgia content. Like, “Look at these antique toys/books/movies/etc!”. You’d be shocked at the volume of this still being written by retirees on Blogger (no shade, it’s good to have a hobby, but goddamn there are a lot of you).
The slice of “things an average person might plausibly care to look at” was vanishingly small.
There are no spam filters, mods, or ways to report abuse when you run your content mill on your own domain.
Like you, I was somewhat surprised by this result. I have to assume this is little more than a marketing ploy by Kagi to turn content producers who want clicks into Kagi customers. That list is not suited for any other purpose I can discern.
[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb
I once spend half a day or so gathering RSS feeds from fortune 500 companies press releases. I expected it to be mostly bullshit but was pleasantly surprised. Apparently if one spends enough millions on doing something there is no room for bullshit in the publication.
Do you intend to write it up? It would be interesting to get your take on how the classification works. And personally, as I know my feed is on the index as well, into which category my writing would be sorted.
Probably not. I lost interest when I figured out how poor the dataset is.
Thank you. We should each try to be authentic, pay the cost, and hope that is what gets us recognized by an audience we value.
Historical parallel: the advent of newspapers showed the same catastrophe.
Yeah, until I hook up Claude to my NeoCities ;)
This comment is an excellent example of low quality content. It's all wrong and hallucinated to point out a conflict between things that do not exist. An AI can generate this crap, but only if you ask it the wrong way.
Maybe publishing on HN should have a cost.