The old internet shows signs of quietly coming back

On the Internet, you have Google, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter. Much of the good content is hidden in their secret gardens (Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly Reddit).

Discovery needs to be reimagined. Google search directs traffic but now everyone has a SEO manager to get their site to the top. If we want to see the Internet like before, original content needs to be prioritized over content like Pinterest, without needing to do anything special.

Discoverability is a big part of why the independent web is struggling. And it's not just big tech's fault, people are really bad at linking to each other. I've been trying to raise awareness about this[1] and it has made a bit of a difference and a couple of dozen sites have taken me up on my call to action, but people are still really shy about linking to pages they like even though I'm sure nobody minds getting linked to.

Overall I feel classic search as well as community aggregation (like reddit) suffers from being too manipulable. You just can't find good content produced by humans over there anymore.

I've been experimenting with various alternative paradigms. I think there probably is a better way, but I honestly don't quite know what the answer is just yet. You've got to contend with link rot as well, which is the bane of manual curation.

[1] https://memex.marginalia.nu/log/19-website-discoverability-c...

I have a feeling the "answer" is "all of the above" options; the ability to choose what discovery/recommendation mechanisms to use. Being intentional about which lens your viewing your recommendations through. Being able to easily swap between lens. Allowing for corporation owned lens and community owned lens. Allowing yourself to look at an issue through the lens of an individual or institution that you trust.

> people are really bad at linking to each other I wonder if the underlying point here is that the initial set of recommendations comes from small "communities". The readers of a certain blog suggest similar content to others in a non-spammy way. An independent music label links to artists that they enjoy listening to. I think there's missing infrastructure that makes it hard to form these communities though; any barrier to entry makes it less useful. I could see the "web3 ownership economy" thing helping here if it ever becomes a thing; creating this infrastructure as a side effect of the other stuff they want to accomplish. It'd be like if a subreddit was automatically created for every content creator, which could then be used to find recommendations of similar content.