> Google etc... can obviously not keep up filtering out that bullshit. We drown in bullshit.

It's worse than that. They are shoveling bullshit. They turned on the bullshit magnet and lit up the bullshit bat signal. They created a bullshit attention economy and sold bullshit tickets to bullshit artists. Literally everthing about Google and Facebook is creating one opportunity after another to jab you in the eyeballs with ads and/or trap you in a never-ending cycle of "engagement" that has few paths out. It's a trap to monetize every aspect of your interactions with the digital world, to monetize your very attention span. Once you are in, you are at the mercy of a metric assload of computation designed to trap your little rat ass so your eyeballs can be strapped open and ads sold to the highest bidder piped right into your brain. And there are basically zero financial incentives for them to stop or slow down.

The bullshit asymmetry therom predicted this. Filtering bullshit is so hard it's easier making money selling it yourself.

But this also means there is a need to filter bs that can be addressed.

Hence the problem. Spam for example has ruined email to the point that only a few large providers control the majority of email flows, if you make them mad, you cant send email. Same thing happening with content.

Sheesh, and I thought I was jaded :)

You're right, it's just not that apocalyptic. I think we should be worried, yes, but this can be mitigated with stricter regulation and better public education. And of course engineers choosing to work for respectable companies instead of following the digits on their paychecks.

Yeah, bullshitting was always the easiest way to get people's attention. Specifically if the bullshitters believe their own bullshit, I mean, they're sooooo confident in what they're saying, the gotta be right, right?

Just seems like a human weakness, always believe the person that appears the most confident, no matter what they say. And a bullshitter will say anything that people like because they need positive feedback because they're so convinced that what they have to say is pure greatness, and they don't even realize that they just always say whatever gets the most applause. And man, these people are good in that specific respect (and literally nothing else). They perfected their bullshit to a degree that its really really hard to see through it, at least it will take time. And then the next bullshitter comes along and one's fooled again because fuck they're good.

And yeah now we got a system called social media putting those people on steroids. Its not like that didn't happen every time we invented a new way of communicating. But every fucking time we believe this time it's different and people are better now and all that shit won't happen.

And of course then you get in a competition between those bullshitters, so they have to turn the heat up more and more to beat their fellow bullshitters. And what gets the most heat? Well, hate and fear and division and polarization of course. And now we are where we are and have to deal with fucking QAnon bullshit.

well put...

I have been playing with the idea of making good old internet portal. A curated list of links to the good stuff. No FB, medium, Instagram or anything like that.

There's https://curlie.org , it even links to some old-style websites in its collection. I think there are some other sites with similar ideas too, where you can create groups and share bookmarks ( like https://groups.diigo.com )

I had the same idea, I think this is the ultimate solution. Would need to be easy to add links and allow moderators to approve submitted websites and provide a good search capability. Would only include quirky websites.

Wiby.me and oldinter.net are both good starting points

Portals are still sometimes made to make it easier to discover independent content, you aren't the only one concerned about this. However, the problem is that independent creators often stop paying for hosting or domain registration at some point, so any manually created directory eventually abounds with 404s.

What about a curated directory of archive links to decrease the rate of link rot?

I would suspect that even fans of independent content would be turned off by browsing through a large amount of Wayback Machine links, because Archive.org insert their own markup, and often the images in posts don't get archived.

People like using the Wayback Machine when they know that certain content used to exist, but not necessarily to discover new things unfamiliar to them.

IPFS mirroring would probably be ideal for simple websites like this.

So who takes on the full-time job of curation? Could probably get donations eventually, but the portal would have to sufficiently succeed first.

Yeah, that would be the hard part. But in the spirit of the old internet, make it first and then, if it becomes popular, deal with it.

Just have to read up on the history of Yahoo and watch that last season of Halt & Catch Fire. ;-)

Wiki? With a double approval before the edit happens?

Just bring back DMOZ, it was by no means perfect but was a great curated directory of the old internet despite SEOs always trying to spam it. Apparently Curlie is trying this but I haven't really looked much into it: https://curlie.org/en

Additional properties it should have:

* Basic HTML only, no Javascript

* No user interaction (comments, etc.)

* Gets updated occasionally but not all the time, perhaps a few times a year

Yeah, I was thinking static html pages generated once per day or once per week from a database, depending on how often the backend is updated.

The beauty of the old internet was that there was no need for filtering, because it was done by the users by choosing which platforms to participate. Instead of many fragmented, special interest platforms we now have a few generic mega-platforms like Facebook and Reddit, which naturally get filled with garbage. In the old web, a place for discussion would have been a small special interest discussion forum with perhaps around a hundred active participants and a few hundred less active ones. The outsiders (i.e. the people who would post garbage) did not participate in the discussion because there was some threshold of participation (finding the website, registering, etc.). Instead they would have their own forum somewhere else with similar dynamics.

I think it's very natural for people to divide into communities of tens or, at most, hundreds of people. The modern web platforms don't respect this at all.