WRwruza·Nov 11, 2021
Community-run blacklists for plugins like uBlock Origin are comprehensive and well-maintained
I think that blacklists are opposite to search in a sense. Naive search is an easy target for those who try to game its results in an endless arms war. Ads and annoyance listings are not, because those who want to game it would a) delete the specific rules and get catched by feedback, b) add rules to downplay the opponents and also get reported. In a search, there is hard to say who played low, because everyone will do that.
I think “we” should resurrect directories instead of a search, which already presented itself as nonsense in a long run for too many times.
A directory is a categorized collection of links with a meaningful description (opposed to in-site bs marketing claims which these sites have to do no matter what) and few curated comment
Read the rest
s. E.g. awesome lists out there:
https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python
https://github.com/quozd/awesome-dotnet
https://github.com/avelino/awesome-go
https://github.com/awesome-selfhosted/awesome-selfhosted
… think awesome cars, awesome appliances, awesome socks, awesome instruments, awesome food etc. Every area has some interned knowledge which waits for a platform to post it on. There will be ads push force just like with search, but at least it would be controlled by community, not by faceless moremoney entity. The difference with search is that search is automated and thus is much more vulnerable to ranking tricks. You can then run very naive search over this curated data and get good results.
Also it would shift trust from sites (which you want to find out to trust or not in the first place) to people who pull-request links into a directory. You never know which of SERP results made by whom. In a directory, you can see who posted what and what their rating or age of participation is. This is inevitable because in a modern world trust can only be built with time to a person, and there is no good will except of someone real who got tired of the shit so much that they are ready to go to lengths to explain/advise/help others and get it back eventually (that’s the core of the foss idea). No corp can align with what we want anymore, because their competition is always better at money, and at SERP. There is simply no other way, in my view.