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Comment by prepend | Hacker News Reader

BusinessInsider is ruining the internet.

AI is just accelerating the race to spam cycle of the Internet.

The good news about the Internet is that it’s diverse and resilient so I can just ignore the parts I don’t like and focus on the parts that I like. I don’t need to connect to every server.

I just need a search service that overlays my filter and site weights so it ignores all the crap as well. I think the money for this is hard because the crappiest sites need to advertise the most, so a google-style model won’t want to apply my quality ranking filters (that I select or select from people I trust).

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Well said. The internet has been a cesspool of thin and spun content for a while. They are just angry that it is now a commodity.

I think the truth is search engine accessible internet has been garbage for a long time. Most content is SEO nonsense that doesn’t even answer the question you had. AI at least would provide an answer in the soup of garbage. The death of SEO content farms isn’t to be mourned when they’re automated, and it’s over blown to claim anything was ruined.

To me the internet was always blogs, forums, HN, and whatever other space you find with people you relate with and talk to. Search engines were clever for a while, but are a poor substitute for communities and always were.

Finally I think perhaps Yahoo and curated indexes might have a place in the new world.

I keep wondering how actually costly/difficult it would be to make a text-only index of the parts of the web I actually need to regularly search.

One of these days I'm gonna scratch this itch.

There are prepackaged crawlers that you can setup yourself, limit the locations, etc. Its really not a huge undertaking, probably a day or less

Kagi has the ability to customize site weights which I really like.

All sites need some revenue stream to survive.

Not all sites need to survive.

If I have a business that exists and makes money but is horrible, then I shouldn’t want to do that business.

“I have to shovel pop up ads and trash to people or I won’t be able to make my Tesla payments” is not a good reason.

Telemarketers have a revenue stream. Transatlantic slave trade had a revenue stream. Etc etc (yes, businessinsider is exactly the same as slave ships /s)

I wasn't justifying shitty sites or business practices. just saying it's paying the bills some how. May it's charity maybe it's from someone's salary.

If you want mostly unbiased opinions about products pay for consumer reports or something like that.

No, not all sites need some revenue stream to survive. There are excellent sites that have existed for decades without monetizing at all.

yep the exception that proves the rule.

Are you able to provide support for this claim?

entropy, eventually you need to pay for stuff some how. even if you run your own server it's going to break.

I'm not saying there aren't charity sites.

I guess I should have said "all sites have costs" and they need paid somehow.

And if all a sites users are doing is taking then eventually the owner of the site is going to tire of it.

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