[ethbro]

Relevant: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

The presence of pure mercenary advertising increases the global noise floor, which increases the information asymmetry by decreasing the visibility of quality signals.

The irony is that Google sees itself as a company that increases access to information.

You know what that would look like in the ad space? Product testing, reviews, and endorsements. Something like "Verified by Google" (aka Wirecutter).

Instead, Google absolves itself of responsibility via algorithms, steered by marketing folks in charge of their primary profit center.

And we're surprised by the corporate decisions they make?

[6510]

What nice way of putting it. Google has indeed suppressed quality signals to the point you don't have to bother creating one. Making peoples homepage invisible was hard, some had to be hoarded into the walled gardens. Wait a few years then shut them down with very little effort.

I was naively surprised one time when I see quality writers shout down rating systems. Apparently making a popular quality product doesn't make scrutiny desirable.

[TeMPOraL]

Rating systems are universally garbage. They're thoroughly gamed and create their own shadow economy of paid reviews, spam, and bribes to take down negative reviews.

[6510]

The baby was tossed with the bath water. There are countless possibilities to create a rating system (or a system that describes the qualities of an article) I have only seen a tiny number.

The shortest description of the thought is: The meta data is more important than the data.

Back when google indexed peoples websites the organic ranking wasn't bad at all. People wrote niche articles about original topics, if you searched for one you would find those blog postings. I was often amazed by how specific the content addressed what I was looking for.

How well it works depends on the type of rating. It should probably start with things so obvious they are hard to game. Even self rating could work, something like: professionally affiliated with the topic 0-5 in the range 2-5 you get to provide an url.

I liked parts of PICS3.

I could see a system where we run our own rating service and rate things with a mix of original and unoriginal qualities. You use the bookmark list it generates or enjoy the persons work then subscribe to their ratings and add weight to it. We make collections of such subscriptions and use them the same way. When visiting a page the url (or other identifier) is passed around and a rating is returned. Similarly, people you've subscribed to crawl around the web and we arrive at a set of pages you should probably visit. If there is crap in the list a single click reduces weight on everything that endorses it.