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