The eldest among us remember the First Web, before search engines were Good Actually. They used secret magics to make sense of the chaos that was the First Web.Site directories.Web rings.Home pages linking to trusted sites.Homework and jello shooter re...
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The eldest among us remember the First Web, before search engines were Good Actually. They used secret magics to make sense of the chaos that was the First Web.
Site directories.
Web rings.
Home pages linking to trusted sites.
Homework and jello shooter recipesstudy notes.Now that the Search Engines have fallen it is time to bring those ancient tools back, for ourselves and the youngest among us who never knew the First Web.
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@randomgeek we absolutely advocate for all of these things
we will say that the thing that worked well was "hi! I am the owner of this site and you can tell I'm a real person because my personality is evident throughout it! here the ten links to other sites I really love"
"click here for the next site in the web ring" was less useful, we saw it got used mostly as a power grab by whoever set up the ring. kind of a dirty move socially
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@randomgeek it took a few years for everybody to figure that out the first time around, so, to whatever degree anyone listens to us, we thought we'd save y'all some time and tears
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@randomgeek it's worth noting btw that the reason everybody stopped doing those lists of favorite-site links is that google sucked in all the data from them and built their business on it (a form of citation analysis...), and eventually it became a thing where if you had a list like that people would offer to pay you money to be on it, which felt yucky so the sincere people stopped bothering
so like. please do try again, just, know how you'll react when that happens
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@randomgeek when we DO learn from history, we are NOT condemned to repeat it
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@argv_minus_one @randomgeek at least maybe we get to do our own thing while watching though
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@irenes @randomgeek Also, part of that that occurred to me was that Google built their search engine and then their business on the rich environment of pages-linking-to-other-pages that existed then.
Which, Google's corporate interests notwithstanding, that still works *very* well today. I feel like one part (definitely not the whole) of Google's/search in general's decline in quality is that there's been a decline in (non-ephemeral) links… partly because of the shift to “just Google it”.
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@boredzo @randomgeek yeah, in a very real sense Google cannibalized it. the company stole the social reward that people used to get from feeling like their list was helping people, by cutting the original site out of the loop. so people stopped. now the search engine is in trouble - for mostly-unrelated reasons. oh, dear. whatever will we do.
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@irenes @randomgeek Another part is the shift to social media, where people get that social reward you mention, but posts are ephemeral and disappear into the ether, not indexed by search engines.
I want something like Google to exist. It was useful to be able to find something without a known route to it. Still is, when it works.
But for that to work, folks like me need to post stuff where Google can see it, so it can benefit people (not just some company) in the long term (not just briefly).
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@irenes @randomgeek (An interesting asterisk on that bit about social media being ephemeral is Cohost: Maybe the *least* ephemeral social-networking website, in spite of its anti-discovery design ethos. I suspect this has a lot to do with how surprisingly massive its Google juice is.)
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@boredzo @randomgeek well keep in mind - cohost has a very high person-to-spammer ratio, and the things people write there are very free-form and personal in nature. very valuable to google, for all the same reasons the early web was. so yes, it has a lot of google juice. we wouldn't have predicted it, but it makes sense.
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@boredzo @randomgeek we do think that the future of the internet, whatever it looks like, needs discovery mechanisms. we're unsure that a for-profit search engine can be that, because, like... the history we're describing is about how human flourishing is, in the eyes of capitalists, surplus value that must be claimed. we don't think making small changes would alter that fundamental truth, and we absolutely think the company would eat everything all over again if allowed to.
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@boredzo @randomgeek please note that our criticism is of Google the corporate entity - the super-organism, if you will. it's not a critique of individual contributors, many of whom are very thoughtful and caring. it's not even really a critique of C-suite, who are doing their job by seeking profit wherever it can be found.
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dirty badwrong personreplied to Irenes (many) on last edited by@irenes @randomgeek
> we saw it got used mostly as a power grab by whoever set up the ring. kind of a dirty move socially
i never really found webrings useful but i also never made that connection either, but now that you put it into those words it makes a lot of sense -
dirty badwrong personreplied to Peter Hosey on last edited by
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Irenes (many)replied to dirty badwrong person on last edited by
@apophis @randomgeek @boredzo we think the most accurate metaphor is predator, personally, but that's a very minor nuance compared to how you said it. either way, yep, it sucks.
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Irenes (many)replied to dirty badwrong person on last edited by
@apophis @randomgeek yeah
