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:
- asking in !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml, and !ask@piefed.social
- sharing resources in !internetisawesome@sh.itjust.works, !coolwebsites@lemmy.ca, !youshouldknow@lemmy.world, !til@lemmy.world
Long term it would be nice to have a blacklist of these on UBO.
Curated directories should make a comeback.
They quickly become deluged by spam entries. That’s why they disappeared/stopped being updated in the 90s.
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.