@glightly@CptSuperlative I like the idea of community-curated directories. It may be an idea whose time has come again.
Still, I really do need •search• for my daily life: an esoteric error message while programming, a book whose title I can’t quite remember, a question about some scientific fact…no amount of community curation can do that. Both and!
@glightly@CptSuperlative I wish I had a nice way to do that to hand to you on a platter, or to invite you into! I am hopeful that the Internet is tilting back a little bit more toward being community-driven like this, so here’s hoping….
@inthehands@glightly@CptSuperlative one thing I've been thinking about—a tangent to this tangent—is an updated take on the old webrings. For blogs and other websites, using some kind of combination of tags, pingbacks, and algorithms to generate recommendations and related links. One of the things I miss the most about the old timey web is the feeling of "surfing"—not just getting a stream of content from a central feed, but chains of association. I still get it from Wikipedia, and that's it
@alter_kaker@glightly@CptSuperlative I’d even be happy with this as a non-API-driven, non-dynamic, manually authored thing that people just toss on the personal blogs they’re now resurrecting.
Web comics folks often still do this. Note for example QC’s “other good comics” links smack dab in the right margin, taking up space on every page: https://www.questionablecontent.net
@inthehands@glightly@CptSuperlative so you'd sign up to some sort of community maintained webring server, implement an API, and get dynamic lists of links to put on your pages to pages from other sites in the "ring"
@glightly Sorry for the jargon in your mentions! The simple version is just “people should mutually link to each others’ personal web sites more, that would be cool.”
And I’ll be sure to un-CC you from any further technical replies.
@SkipHuffman@alter_kaker@CptSuperlative It is of course against FB’s business interests to create lots of out-pointing links, so I imagine this is not accidental. The “web” in “world wide web” runs against the interests of a whole lot of businesses.
@alter_kaker@inthehands@glightly@CptSuperlative you could get a lot of this if more sites supported MarkDown (or full html) so people could write synthesis posts with references and sources. "I saw (this) and (that) today it made me think about (thing) like (person) did (here)." Facebook and Twitter and their descendents only make a single link easy. So posts tend to be reactions to a single linked item. This leads to single dimensional conversations that only point up. "(Link) is wrong!"
I think — and this is speaking with my software engineer hat on! — that the biggest and deepest questions here are about the human relationships: Who knows who? Who decides what? Who shares what? •Some• parts of that can’t / shouldn’t be automated. With clarity around that, tech can help reduce friction! But the fundamental system scaling problems here are social.
@SkipHuffman@inthehands@CptSuperlative is difference between the internet then and now is that the Internet is just a lot bigger and much more diverse so we need tools that will both be able to express the exponentially higher amount of relationship between different nodes and also be easier to use and be more automated. Thinking about how we can harness algorithms and automation and scalable systems for the benefit of humans rather than business is important
@SkipHuffman@inthehands@CptSuperlative The question that I was asking myself was what is different about the internet today from the internet in the late 90s or early 2000s during the heyday of web rings, and I also asked myself what kind of technologies do we have to update those things in a way that compliments and mitigates the ways that the internet is different today. I'm not a big expert at this kind of design thinking but I wanted to try
@inthehands@SkipHuffman@CptSuperlative I agree. So what are the social scaling problems, and how can technology help address them while leaving humans in the drivers seat?