The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.
Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit
@bioluminescently @eaton that’s a perfect descriptions of what I loved about the Internet.
You could find the enthusiasts and get their expertise by simply reading what they wrote for the world to see.
EDIT: though that was also the time when running a Forum wasn’t a full-time job just to keep the spambots out …
@ArneBab @bioluminescently @eaton
Totally agree, it applies to basically everything with a product code or make/model number today.
The answer was a community of humans, it used to be called Reddit until someone burned it down. I have heard great things about Lemmy, though I have yet to try it myself. I guess that the best response to AI spam is the return to the original search engine, a 1st generation Yahoo like index with categories, and a way to keep the SEO out.
@james I think the first index — dmoz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ — with categories would be hard to scale.
The only thing getting close to it nowadays is Wikipedia.
…
And then I read up on it and realize that it’s actually still active: https://curlie.org/
That’s the followup project of DMOZ. License is cc attribution.
Eaton
bioluminescently
ArneBab
James Devine