We're going to have to go in the opposite direction and rely on directories or lists of verified human-made/accurate content. It will be like the old days of yahoo and web-indexes all over again.
A few years ago, some talk briefly circulated about local internet efforts, possibly run by public libraries.
Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans?
That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?
Does Nextdoor actually have the local news? The other day I kept hearing sirens outside for hours. I hoped to find on Nextdoor what was going on but I mostly got lost-cat posts and people trying to sell stuff like handyman services. This is how it goes most times I check on Nextdoor. Maybe it depends on the area.
No, we want real news! With some editorial oversight.
Local reddits were good for a while, but the bots and human moderators make their own rules. It's not consistent.
A nice place to start could be with old-school weather reports, where we can learn something again. It's all so superficial these days.
Local events, local political issues with objectivity, history and future outlook, the list goes on and on. Maybe muzzle the negative talk with strict categories and guard rails to avoid another Nextdoor?
This doesn't seem to be structured differently than a standard-fare social media app. All the same issues with human verification on those apps would apply to this too.
Unless you mean a platform only for vetted local journalists...
I feel like SEO trash has made this a must have for me for the past few years already. If it’s not stack overflow, Reddit, or stack exchange, I’m wasting my time
I had the thought the other day that one of the most valuable things a human-driven website could offer would be a webring linking to other human-driven websites
Perhaps a site could kick off where people proposed sites for Web Rings, edited them. The sites in question could somehow adopt them — perhaps by directly pulling from the Web Ring site.
And while we're at it, no reason for the Web "Ring" not to occasionally branch, bifurcate, and even rejoin threads from time to time. It need not be a simple linked list who's tail points back to it's head.
Happy to mock something up if someone smarter than me can fill in the details.
Pick a topic: Risograph printers? 6502 Assembly? What are some sites that would be in the loop? Would a 6502 Assembly ring have "orthogonal branches" to the KIM-1 computer (ring)? How about a "roulette" button that jumps you to somewhere at random in the ring? (So not linear.) Is it a tree or a ring? If a tree, can you traverse in reverse?
Web rings are a thing I've been thinking about a bit. Anyone know any good ones? There are a couple I reached out to for one of the projects I'm working on, to get my site on them, but I never got responses. There are also some webrings I've come across that have died or been retired. :(
Yeah, the dynamic (remote) web ring server I am conceiving would handle dead the links in the ring.
There's still the buy-in problem though. Convincing the owners of the sites you want in the ring to modify their HTML to dynamically fetch and display the ring links.
That's something I really enjoy about web 1.0: links pages. We need to bring back the days when every site had a giant list of links to other sites. I don't care if half of them end up as dead links. This is part of what made the web fun. You'd come across a site, see what it had to offer, and then you'd check the links page and find five, ten, or 20 other sites offering similar things. No need for algorithms tracking your every move to recommend things to you... the content itself would do that.
Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans?
That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?