[erhk]

Trusted curators is a dangerous dependency

[klankoo]

Trusted consumers are better. The original page-rank algo was organic and bottom-up. But now it's the person not the page. Businesses compete for interaction not inbound links. So if you can make a modern page-rank that follows interaction instead of links and isn't a walled garden then I'd invest.

[politician]

I could make that work, but what do you mean by "walled garden" in this context?

[dcow]

That’s why you don’t make it a hard dependency and let people curate their own list of taste makers. They can share and exchange info about who good taste makers are and good one might even charge for access to exclusive flavors.

[thoughtstheseus]

It is. The alternative is scooping everything and using algos to curate. That seems worse imo.

[sdfjkl]

Perhaps vote on results like on Reddit posts? Gets the junk sites down (and out of the index eventually).

[dragonwriter]

Plus, it scales less well than pure algorithmic search. This fight already happened, with a much smaller internet.

[shituonui]

It works really, really well for libraries. Research libraries (and research librarians) are phenomenally valuable. I've missed them any time I'm not at a university.

Both curators and algorithms are valuable. This goes for finding books, for finding facts and figures, for finding clothes, for finding dishwashers, and for pretty much everything else.

I love the fact that I have search engines and online shopping, but that shouldn't displace libraries and brick-and-mortar. Curation and the ability to talk to a person are complementary to the algorithmic approach.

[Zamicol]

How about just a meritocratic rating? Even here on HN I would appreciate some sort of weight on expert/experienced opinion. Although in theory I like the idea that every thought is judged on its own, the context of the author is more relevant the deeper the subject. That's one of the reasons I still read https://lobste.rs. It has a niche audience with industry experience.

[Karrot_Kream]

Lobsters is a great example of the benefits _and dangers_ of expert/experienced opinion. Lobsters is highly oriented around programming languages and security and leaves out large swaths of what's out there in computing. That's fine of course, but it creates a pretty big distortion bubble that's largely driven by the opinions of the gatekeepers on the site rather than a more wide computing audience.

[skinnymuch]

Nothing is meritocratic. I think the term came into our lexicons because of a sociologist satirizing society and writing about how awful a “true” meritocracy would be.

[marginalia_nu]

> meritocratic rating

That is literally PageRank.