We Need Something More Like DMOZ, Not Search Engines and Bill-Funded Wikipedia (Censoring Unfaltering Information About Powerful People and Institutions)
Microsoft tried - and failed - to game the narrative to the same extent Google does
Related: Google Fired Many Employees Working on Google News (Which Had Deteriorated and Became Gulag Noise, Littered and Gamed by Blogspam, Plagiarism, and Chatbot/Translator-Generated Spew), Now Comes the Likely 'Phase-out' | Google Does Not Have a Search Engine Anymore | What's Killing Search Engines Isn't Chatbots as a Search Replacement But Chatbots as Factories of Chaff (Leveraged for 'Content Farming' With SEO Prompts) | An LLM Inside a 'Search' Engine Means That Companies Tell You What They Want, Not What Web Pages to Visit | Search Engines Not a Software Freedom Issue (But a Potential Privacy Problem), According to Richard Stallman | Search Engines as Censorship Machines
Over the course of the past 20 years I wrote a lot about Wikipedia, but almost never in Wikipedia (when we used WordPress we had a whole category devoted to "Wikipedia", whose tragic fate boiled down to money). I occasionally fixed some errors and typos, going back more than 20 years! Around 2007 it already became apparently that Wikipedia had become a corporate propaganda tool; Microsoft got caught red-handed several times and even the cofounder of Wikipedia blasted Microsoft for it.
I still access Wikipedia sometimes, but never as primary or even secondary choice. I simply don't trust Wikipedia anymore. I lost the trust I once had in it. Wikipedia got subverted, mostly because it took many bribes from many rich people. Today's Wikipedia is worse than the traditional old encyclopedias, which were hard for many stakeholders to manipulate all at once. It was just logistically harder.
Then came the era of LLMs trained on Wikipedia and over time the "big" search engines attempted to become something that's not even search.
Juha-Matti Santala has just published a good long article that explains the importance of "careful curation over information dump" (he complains about what search has become).
An awful lot of sites became dependent on Google (for traffic/discovery) and then became "hooked" on social control media for "engagement" or "comments" (many of which rude, meaningless, short, and detached). They basically let some third parties control their destiny and that's a terrible, short-sighted plan.
I don't consider myself "old" (nor do I regard myself as "young"), but I'm "old enough to remember"TM the Web of the 1990s. I consider myself to be "old enough" to comment on this "nostalgia" as two weeks before the year 2000 I became an "adult" (18), which means that as an adult I saw bubbles imploding, not just this stupid "Hey Hi" bubble.
I still fondly remember DMOZ, bored.com, and news.com (or CNET, which is now an LLM slop farm run by a marketing company). A lot of those things disappeared or made so irrelevant that nobody would notice if they technically ceased to exist. Heck, a lot of the old sites and pages already vanished ages ago and the Wayback Machine's parent entity is still facing a serious litigation campaign/payout, so it might not survive either. The Wayback Machine would be lucky to survive another decade, even if Wikipedia heavily depends on the Wayback Machine (in the "References").
Published in April 2022 by John Hoare was something to the same effect. To quote: "I’ve written many times in the past about how I think people should keep their website archives online. In fact I’ve talked about it to the point of obnoxiousness, and then far beyond that. About how old stuff can suddenly become found and loved, about the history of the web disappearing, about what remains of the public record, about accidentally destroying a web community, about losing memories… or simply about letting things live."
Gemini Protocol (and the "sm0l [sic] Web") is a response to many lost pages and folks yearning for the old Web, including the likes of Geocities - a popular platform in the 90s. Back then not so many people used search engines (they were not so good either) and someone people still managed to find decent articles online. What we have these days is mostly the systematic defunding of news and therefore some people replace reputable sites with gossip. The old traditional newspapers (physical prints) are mostly gone and many consider their skinnerboxes ("phones") a news apparatus. This past week I noticed that the BillBC (BBC) published a lot of obvious clickbait. Moreover, over time the format becomes a lot more like social control media (optimised for skinnerboxes) and apparently the issue is a lot broader than this. "It's 2 Jan," someone told me, "and I am seeing several indicators that YLE's budget has been slashed. That includes a big turnover in radio staff and less original reporting and using translated pieces in the place of the missing original work."
I said "the odds are not against your corollary" because that's the global trend. It's considered cheaper to just spew out some misinformation (or gossip) in social control media curated by oligarchs (or China). "Meta" (Facebook) now shameless says that it intends to unleash bots to make up for the persistent exodus of actual humans. That would mean an avalanche of garbage, drowning out the signal (or facts).
Unless the Web gets some decent quality control (not browsers like Firefox, which now spew junk from LLMs because Mozilla hired managers from Facebook and Twitter), it's doomed to make a dumber and more intolerant society, inflaming conflict because it is financially beneficial.
Maybe it's time to go back to physical libraries (pretending LLM-generated e-books), but that's a subject for another day. █