It struck me recently that as the quality of content on the internet has arguably gone to shit, in the form of increasingly frequent ads plastered everywhere, paywalls or superficial/dumb blog posts or mainstream media articles, the basic idea of a link aggregator platform can naturally lose its quality, or struggle to maintain a level of quality, and so lose its appeal.

I think I can see this on lemmy (which is my favourite fediverse platform) to some extent and have probably noticed it on somewhere like hackernews to an extent too. I see a link that has an interesting/important sounding title on an interesting/important topic, then click the link and see an article or web page that maybe is just not worth my time.

I’d be curious how many people upvote a link here without reading the cited article/page?

All of which is sad and speaks to general problems with media today, with AI garbage, of course, probably about to make it worse. But regarding the fediverse and lemmy, I think it maybe raises interesting questions.

Obviously the idea of a link aggregator is to seek out and share “the good stuff”. But maybe talking about where that generally comes from needs to be a more prominent and open question? Or maybe I need to subscribe to fewer news communities? More ambitiously though, maybe, at least over time, it will get more important or valuable to lean into the forum-like or even blog-like aspect of lemmy where it’s increasingly all about the “OC” here, especially as engaging with actual humans with actual personal thoughts gets more and more valuable over time? Could private, maybe even invite-only communities even be of value here?

Thoughts?

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    1 year ago

    I have lots of thoughts on this one. I totally agree that the amount of junk out there is on the increase. One of the reason I like Reddit/Lemmy is to crowd source the findings for worthwhile content. I think the secret is being selective of what you subscribe to. I also use reeder by Readwise and let it summarize using AI anything I throw its way. I then use the summary to decide if I even want to read the full content. I’m staring to pay more attention to platforms like Substack and paying for content. In general the problem you highlight is one that I think AI can’t help greatly in fixing. Maybe an AI that knows you and can pre read something and tell you if you should even bother.