We're going to have to go in the opposite direction and rely on directories or lists of verified human-made/accurate content. It will be like the old days of yahoo and web-indexes all over again.
Local news coverage has really suffered these past several years. Wouldn't it be great to see relevant local news emerge again, written by humans for humans?
That approach might be a good start. Use a cloud service that forbids AI bot scraping to protect copyright?
That sounds a lot like Nextdoor. With all the horrors that come with it.
No, we want real news! With some editorial oversight.
Local reddits were good for a while, but the bots and human moderators make their own rules. It's not consistent.
A nice place to start could be with old-school weather reports, where we can learn something again. It's all so superficial these days.
Local events, local political issues with objectivity, history and future outlook, the list goes on and on. Maybe muzzle the negative talk with strict categories and guard rails to avoid another Nextdoor?
Unless you mean a platform only for vetted local journalists...
Perhaps a site could kick off where people proposed sites for Web Rings, edited them. The sites in question could somehow adopt them — perhaps by directly pulling from the Web Ring site.
And while we're at it, no reason for the Web "Ring" not to occasionally branch, bifurcate, and even rejoin threads from time to time. It need not be a simple linked list who's tail points back to it's head.
Happy to mock something up if someone smarter than me can fill in the details.
Pick a topic: Risograph printers? 6502 Assembly? What are some sites that would be in the loop? Would a 6502 Assembly ring have "orthogonal branches" to the KIM-1 computer (ring)? How about a "roulette" button that jumps you to somewhere at random in the ring? (So not linear.) Is it a tree or a ring? If a tree, can you traverse in reverse?
There's still the buy-in problem though. Convincing the owners of the sites you want in the ring to modify their HTML to dynamically fetch and display the ring links.