I miss human curation | Hacker News Reader

I miss human curation

blog.cassidoo.co

68 pointskirso14 comments

Yeah, I would be cool with people just posting pages of their favorite links again, maybe separated by topic, almost like the ancient web catalogs before Google.

It doesn't need to have every link under the sun, just whatever the author thinks is worth sharing.

I know I sometimes see that with text links in a basic github project with a readme file, and that's nice, but I wouldn't mind seeing it with a bit more visuals, like thumbnail previews at least.

I'm sure these things must exist out there somewhere, but I don't know how to find them anymore and haven't been recommended any in probably a decade or more at this point.

maybe firefox will figure out how to get an AI to link into your bookmarks and auto publish rss feeds or something.

This seems like what RSS feeds were supposed to be, but whatever happened with RSS, it never seemed to fundamentally gain "software" traction.

The list of text links is basically what https://pinboard.in is, basically - social bookmarking. I only use it privately, but it does have the exact function you're talking about as well. I don't think I would use it with thumbnail previews, since I like how lightweight it is, but it wouldn't be difficult to build something like that.

I've only taken a brief look at this so I could be mistaken, but this still looks a bit too automated. Might be based on people's bookmarks, but seems to be not much more than blog roll or twitter feed, but for bookmarks, or a popularity contest.

I'm thinking something more deliberate than that. Like an ordering the person chooses deliberately, because they want the links to be in a certain order.

I'm also thinking something a bit cleaner than this too. There seems to be too much extra on that site, lots of listed tags for every link, some links have multiple paragraphs of text with it and some don't, etc.

Like I might as well just use Reddit or Hacker News instead at that point.

I'm thinking something more like the following[1] as far as presentation (and not even really this, but I'm having a hard time finding a good example), maybe with some short blurbs by the curator, and with a chosen ordering.

I'd even be cool with something kind of like this[2] and text-based (maybe it could be a toggle that switches between a grid gallery view and text-view). But with a person being able to create multiple of these, and being able to follow a curator socially to see what other links they come up with, and maybe clicking a tag and seeing the most popular curated and deliberately ordered lists by individuals instead of just a list of links ordered by some algorithm.

I know people make their own blog articles and whatnot online, like in that second article, but it's just getting too difficult to hunt those down via Google searches since those searches have been SEO'd to death by garbage sites, and those articles that do exist have no consistent look or feel to them.

Like to take an example from something I enjoy a lot, board games. I can go on BoardGameGeek and look at the most popular and see what's currently the most enjoyed list of games. But it's a homgenized list.

But there's lots of people making videos on Youtube with their own top 10 lists, and on those lists they might include several of the same games, but they might also include some weird or off the wall games I've never heard of before, and explain why it's on their list, and I go, oh yeah, that sounds right up my alley, let's check that out. And then eventually I watch enough of these people to know someone I really like and respect their opinions on a lot of times, and then I check all their lists out, and get a bunch of ideas that I probably like but I'd never see if I just look at a list of 'the most popular games'.

BoardGameGeek also has a neat feature called a GeekList, that any user can create on any subject, that's just list of links to games on their site, and they can choose the order of the games they put on that list. So I can see what they think is most important, and why (I've created a couple of my own lists, including a list of released board games I was a playtester on).

Like here's a popular one that's a list of the top 200 people's choice solo games as voted by a specific scoring criteria that's not built in to BoardGameGeek. But since they allow whatever ordering, it doesn't matter, they just create a list in the order of the results of their scoring criteria[3].

Maybe that's more what I really want, but for general links to websites (or even products, whatever), and not necessarily a link gallery.

[1]: https://bestwebgallery.com/

[2]: https://www.labnol.org/internet/101-useful-websites/18078/

[3]: https://boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/324731/2023-peoples-choic...

I have a line in my 'ideas' file that's been there a while:

A curated library for the internet where people can submit links related to a topic and other users can rate them. e.g. shoe making. Organised according to the dewey system.

Basically an old school web directory. Its time has come (again).

I like it!

I actually did just that recently, minus the visuals. A lightly grouped collection of links to things I have found interesting for one reason or another, or that others might. Not much context given, just a humanly-curated collection of links.

I created this website partly inspired by other personal blogs I've seen mentioned here on HN, and decided that I wanted one for myself. This year, I finally got it to a state I'm happy with. The most interesting was learning how to self host everything, as an excuse to have a platform to publish stuff.

Here's the webpage https://www.pedrofz.com/more

I started one called share and have been collecting interesting links :)

https://gist.github.com/momentmaker/c87a627486a6beadc2780700...

isnt that reddit and 4chan?

i think the golden age of the early internet is never coming back again.

that time has past.

these days kids are making their skins in games like roblox and minecraft their "personal site".

Yep, reddit is probably pretty close and I use it more than google these days or just add "reddit" in the search.

Cassidy is the CTO of an AI company who's product is ostensibly to pump out this garbage.

Maybe, just a thought, instead of accelerating our decent into hell you can be the change you wanna see in the world?

Ya'll, this is just the Fediverse. Check it out.

What's happening in the fediverse nowadays? Any exciting projects to check out? It's something I feel I should be involved in, but never really got around to investing time in looking at properly.

Spam and seo ruins these things

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