I was commenting on a post just now, and I needed to find a source for it where I had to pick through websites I didn’t recognize. Eventually I found something affiliated with BBC science, which may have its own issues but it’s a whole lot more reputable than the slop. However, if I was a younger user or new to a topic, I wouldn’t have known to use that source.

At first I was thinking of making a community for this, but I don’t think we will have enough content to sustain a single purpose community like this.

Instead, I’m making this post to encourage people to post those questions to existing communities.

Please suggest where someone should make such posts. So far I’m thinking:

Long term it would be nice to have a blacklist of these on UBO.

    • Jack@lemmy.caEnglish
      21·
      9 hours ago

      That TLD doesn’t inspire confidence.

      .org isn’t it what it used to be, so are .ac/.edu a better bet when you don’t know much about a topic?

      • Wakko@hell.cloudEnglish
        36·
        8 hours ago

        What a weird way to announce that you stopped learning about how the internet works in the 1990s.

        ICANN’s gTLD program has been around since 2012. Maybe you should try to keep up with the times, boomer.

  • katzimir@lemmy.world
    30·
    13 hours ago

    i remember a time of webrings - homebrewn websites had a list of links to other homebrewn or at least reputable websites. This was before search engines were a thing. Also books with recommended addresses. ,

    nowadays i often check ‘awesome lists’. They are usually quite useful. (inclined reader may look up by themselves. Am lazy)

    • skribe@piefed.socialEnglish
      41·
      11 hours ago

      They quickly become deluged by spam entries. That’s why they disappeared/stopped being updated in the 90s.

      • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
        1·
        4 hours ago

        There was always that battle with useless commercial listings, but that’s not how I remember the end of dmoz. I remember Google (and other search engines to a lesser extent) just getting way too good at the time. There was also a content explosion around that era making directories just get too large, too slow to update, and difficult to use and manage.

        But I still wonder if some (maybe niche) directories could work these days with the degeneration of search engines and AI slop. Actual humans curating links to useful information created or compiled by other humans sounds oddly refreshing.

  • azimir@lemmy.ml
    18·
    13 hours ago

    I can feel the web rings rising from the shea of history. Their time has come one again!