A while back I saw an r/woodworking post where someone was asking for resources for woodworking plans. A few people told them to Google it.
If you Google it you get absolute horseshit. Just page after page of useless results. So we need to stop the fucking "let me google that for you" era and recognize that search is entirely broken in the modern day. We NEED human recommendations and information sharing now more than ever.
@lori The problem is that often when someone is looking for instructions what they really want is some kind of "mentoring."
This can come in the form of a community mentoring new members, or having experts peer review work and make suggestions so as to avoid common pitfalls. Search isn't optimized for that, and has a broken incentive structure.
I don't think search is broken - I think it's just the wrong tool to address what is primarily a social concern. Search works incredibly well for many things (e.g. StackOverflow answers, technical documentation, etc) but absolutely fails at acting as a mentor.
We need to create structures in our communities (online or otherwise) for folks to mentor and be mentored and leave gatekeeping out of it entirely.
lori
Jeremy 🇨🇦