[nickreese]

I’ve been an SEO guy since 2006 and I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.

This helped the small guys thrive as it wasn’t just the big guys getting/building links... the little guys were attracting them naturally just by creating unique expert level content.

Today there are so few proxies for naturally occurring “curation” online that Google and others are obviously struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.

As long as links are the main proxy for curation and the average Joe just has a social media account I believe algorithms will continue to silence minority opinions.

A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.

[nickreese]

Follow up thought here.

There was a huge shift in the mindset of the average webmaster between 2006 and 2012 that preceded the legendary "Penguin" and "Panda" updates.

Running a website went from being a funky, cool thing to do if you were passionate about tech to something you did because you wanted to build a business.

Somewhere in there, people got privy to the value of links (blog comment spam was insane) and people suddenly got a lot more stingy about their links.

This coincided with a massive groundswell of people looking to build "personal brands" in all sorts of spaces and a huge rise in info products by relative experts instead of absolute experts.

Today the absolute experts (or people who are a few steps past a relative experts) are completely drowned out because of their lack of links, lack of domain history/authority, and the general noisiness of the web.

Weird to look back at this because I wasn't innocent in all of this either.

- I was one of those people who built a personal brand, had 10k people on my email list, and was going to sell an info product.

- I was one of those SEOs who built huge sites and ranked for all sorts of things simply because I had a stronger domain and knew I could push the smaller guys out.

- I was one of those guys who stopped linking.

- I was one of the people who caused this change...

- How can I be one of the people who undoes it?

---

The Mozilla news really has me shaken up about the future of the web.

We the people of hacker news are the people who have the power and skills to directly and indirectly shape the future of the internet. What are we going to do with them?

[nickreese]

Continuing this thread.

My buddy Greg Isenberg constantly is talking about the unbundling of Reddit and honestly he is on to something. [1]

As Reddit continues to unbundle, how can we shape these into curation engines so at least our algos can get some usable data out of communities instead of them being an endless popularity contest.

---

[1] https://latecheckout.substack.com/p/the-guide-to-unbundling-...

[catsarebetter]

To be honest, I can't really tell the difference between an absolute expert and a relative expert anymore, at this point I think everyone's just a relative expert

[zozbot234]

> If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything

We used to call that DMOZ. Maybe it should be brought back.

[jacobobryant]

> A great example of curation in the dev space is awesome lists. If someone could make a collaborative platform for awesome-lists for everything I believe that could be the foundation of a new type of curation powered search engine.

Hey, I am working on basically this. E.g.: https://findka.com/u/jobryant (warning, takes ~10 seconds to load fully). You make a profile, add your top article/book/movie/music/etc recommendations, then you get (1) a feed of recommendations from people you follow, (2) an Explore page that gives you algorithmic recommendations (collaborative filtering, currently via an off-the-shelf SVD library).

Right now the curation is a little basic, but today I'm adding filter controls to profiles so you can see a person's recommendations for a specific content type. Eventually, I'd also like to add custom tags so you can have recommendation/awesome lists for anything.

[nickreese]

I dig this.

The hard problem to solve is how do you get the absolute experts on the platform... and how do you get them to altruistically collaborate in the spirit of Wikipedia and the early web?

The opportunity is massive if you can solve this.

Take any sub niche of the internet / real world.

If you can find a way to get the 5 most intellectually influential people the subject to have their own profiles and work together to collaboratively manage a collection of important information for their community you've got a great asset platform.

If your platform does this repeatably and expands to a lot of other niches... you've got a unicorn startup on your hands because you now have a foundation for a search engine based on expert curation.

[dswalter]

I am on a 2019 macbook pro with decent internet speed, and it took >20 seconds to load.

[dna_polymerase]

> [..] I really miss the yesteryears where everyone had a blog and linked out to great content.

This. Not only for SEO but in general I'd love to see the sources to stuff I read, especially in news articles, which often do not link to anything. It would also be great for content discovery as a reader.

[zo1]

Doesn't google penalize websites for having too-many outgoing links? That would explain why you're seeing so few links to sources.

[nickreese]

Google doesn't penalize for too many outbound links, but SEO is a zero sum game. Being conservative or even stingy with links is higher reward strategy than being generous.

[qppo]

> struggling to identify what content is junk and what is worth surfacing.

If I had to make a really uninformed guess, the problem isn't identifying junk, but identifying what can be classified as junk without hurting their bottom line.

Because it's really easy as a user. Ratio of ads (or unrelated data) to content.