In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
@SLaSZT
I'm a bit late, but since no one seems to have given you an answer yet: Account deletion is currently manual and the instance's owner has been inactive since the year started. He came here every few weeks to remind us he's not dead yet, but otherwise it's been silence. Since account deletion is manual, that means there simply is no one there who could fulfill your deletion request currently.
I want to stop having my votes public and just make a new account on another site
Make sure not to switch to another fediverse site like a Lemmy instance. Lemmy hides the votes to its users, pretending they're private, but still happily gives them out to other sites like kbin to display or harvest.
Are there any add ons for Kbin or any existing features within it that would let me filter out posts based on selected keywords? So if I didn't ever want to read any posts that mentioned bitcoin or covid for example, does anyone know of a way to achieve that on kbin? Sort of how RES could do that on reddit.
Who can see my posts? I am super curious as to how far this #activitypub can travel? Learning the #fediverse is interesting but a tad confusing for the laypeople like me. If anyone has an analogy do share. Visualizations help. #mastodon#server#instances
I just tried posting the series of parts to my /mag, they showed up in reverse order in the microblog? WTF?
Please, if there is some advantage to this microblog thing, I'd love to know what is, and also how to make a post in my own magazine that does not feature a link.
'Threads/Microblog/People/Magazines' is where simplicity goes sideways in this webapp. It is not obvious what those things are; the couple of guides I've found don't discuss this focal point of confusion.
I found something in a recent FAQ that says I should add an article instead of a post, but the option to add an article is not on the menu on my instance
Looks like what you found was just outdated. It used to be "article" because of the whole magazine themeing, but people found that confusing so they changed it to "thread". Because, you know, it'll show up in the "threads" tab. So the correct option is "Add new thread".
The short story is, the microblog here is essentially a right pain in my ass.
If you get yourself a userstyle extension/addon for your browser (like Stylus for chromium ones), you can hide the tab if you don't want to see it.
Assuming your browser and version supports the :has() selector, as it's relatively new. You can check support here.
This will remove the "Microblog" tab from the list, though other links to it will still get you there. So if you do want to see the tab for some reason, you can still just add /microblog to your url manually.
Ich habe noch nie #Minecraft gespielt. Ich wusste auch gar nicht was das für ein Spiel ist. Ich wusste nur, dass es sehr beliebt ist. Ich wollte dieses Video nur kurz testen um zu sehen, was daran entspannend sein soll. Ich kann jetzt kaum aufhören dabei zuzusehen, wie hauptsächlich irgendwelche Blöcke herausgeschlagen werden. Ist das auch so toll wenn man es selbst spielt? Theoretisch müsste das ja sogar noch entspannender sein als nur dabei zuzusehen? #gaming
@Carex
Minecraft bietet den Überlebens- und den Kreativmodus an. Survival und Creative im Englischen.
Im Kreativmodus spielt man einfach gesagt einen Gott. Man kann fliegen, hat unendlich Blöcke aller Art zur Verfügung, zerstört jeden Block mit einem Klick, und Monster ignorieren einen. Es geht rein darum zu bauen.
Im Überlebensmodus muss man sich die Blöcke selber zusammensuchen. Um Schienen zu legen, muss man zuerst nach Eisen graben (wozu man eine Spitzhacke braucht), dieses schmelzen und dann zu den Schienen verarbeiten. Das ist alles nicht notwendig im Kreativmodus, wo man die Schienen einfach herbei zaubern kann. Im Überlebensmodus wird man auch von Monstern angegriffen und hat mit Hunger zu kämpfen.
Peaceful (Friedlich) ist eine Schwierigkeitsstufe, neben dem klassischen Trio von Einfach-Normal-Schwer. Auf Peaceful wird man nicht hungrig und Monster erscheinen nicht. Die Schwierigkeit ist unabhängig vom Modus und beide können geändert werden.
Peaceful hört sich gut an, aber komplett keine Monster schliesst dich aus einigen Teilen des Spiels aus. Statt die Schwierigkeit auf Peaceful zu ändern, können auch beim Erstellen der Welt einige Regeln geändert werden um das Spiel entspannender zu machen:
Ob Feuer sich ausbreiten / Blöcke verbrennen kann
Ob Monster natürlich erscheinen können. Wenn ausgeschalten, können sie immernoch von Spawner-Blöcken erschaffen werden, welche in Dungeons zu finden sind. Das gibt immernoch Zugriff zu ihnen, aber verhindert sie davon in deiner Basis zu spawnen.
Ob der Spieler Fall-/Feuer- oder Ertrinkungsschaden nehmen soll, als einzelne Regeln. Damit würde, zum Beispiel, ein Fall in Lava kein Problem mehr sein.
Ob beim Sterben das Inventar behalten werden soll, was natürlich den Tod um einiges weniger problematisch macht.
Ob Monster Blöcke beschädigen können (wie zum Beispiel Creeper Explosionen, die können harmlos gemacht werden)
Natürlich kann man auch mit Peaceful starten und dann später auf Einfach wechseln wenn man besser ausgerüstet ist. Aber ich denke einige Regeln wie das Beschädigen von Blöcken durch Monster-Explosionen sollte auch bei solch einem Plan berücksichtigt werden. Diese Regeln können in einer existierenden Welt geändert werden, aber es ist ein bischen technischer als beim erstellen der Welt.
Edit: Hatte Peaceful statt Survival beim englischen Begriff für den Überlebensmodus.
How are Lemmy instances able to even see microblog posts ? Afaik Lemmy doesn't have microblogging feature , interaction between Lemmy and more microblog oriented parts of the fediverse should be more limited right ? Unless it was something they recently added , or a 3rd party app that adds it ig ?
Both kbin and lemmy inherently support microblog posts because that's what threads are behind the scenes. Kbin and Lemmy just choose to display things in a more reddit-like manner. The microblog tab on kbin is for communication with the wider fediverse, but lemmy.world asking kbin.social for new threads made by its users will result in microblog posts made from kbin.social showing up as normal threads on lemmy.world. Because threads and posts are pretty much the same behind the scenes.
What lemmy shouldn't be able to see is mastodon posts. I'm not sure though if kbin replies to mastodon posts make those appear on lemmy, that's a possibility but I don't know the answer there.
Is it just me or does the Lemmy community actively ignoring the existence of kbin? I see a lot of posts explicitly mentioning Lemmy users but only posts from kbinners mention both platforms.
Then again, I’m also not entirely clear on why I need both a Lemmy account and a mastodon account.
That one is probably the biggest difference between lemmy and kbin. The latter combines the lemmy and mastodon experience, so you only really need one account to interact with both.
When I visit the #mastodon page of a #kbin or #lemmy user/community through a direct link or entering the url (as opposed to navigating to it manually on mastodon), I get taken to the kbin/lemmy instance instead. How can I prevent that?
This happens with any kbin/lemmy community/user. Mastodon seems to automatically redirect, I'm asking if I can turn that off somehow. If I go to a mastodon.social url, I expect to arrive at mastodon.social not kbin.social or lemmy.world.
As I understand it, that addon you're referring to would just redirect a lemmy.world link to kbin.social (aka my home instance) instead. Which isn't really what I'm looking for at all.
@moohamin12
There are such plans, but the website itself works perfectly for me on my phone too.
Until apps release, if you don't want to have to open the website every time you want to access kbin, you can install it as a PWA (progressive web app) iirc. Not sure how that is done though, just relaying what I've seen mentioned by others.
why do threads that reference articles on outside sites redirect to kbin and not the outside site? (for example, worldnews often shows the external news site, but clicking the link takes you to a kbin.social post showing all the threads referencing that news site, not the actual site and story itself)
@Cherbal
If you mean the link next to the title, that's just a link to the page for the domain on kbin. It's the exact same way old reddit worked (and still does if you use old.reddit.com).
If you want to actually visit the article itself, click on the title while viewing the comments. In the magazine feed the title links to the comments, but when viewing the comments, it links to the actual article.
I'm new to the fediverse so I only have a kbin.social account for now. But I'm planning to, in the future, get a mastodon one for following people.
Not sure about the others yet, I'll have a look at other stuff than those two sometime in the future.
That's true, but I don't really get where I can see posts and comments (and boosts) made by followed accounts without having to check their profile manually. Not really sure what following users does currently.
Hey all, is there any way to collapse comment chains in kbin? As much as I appreciate being able to view everyone’s comments, as kbin (hopefully) grows the comments will continue to diverge into tangents and esoterica and it would be helpful to be able to collapse them to see the next top-level comment. Can’t see anything to tap on to do it.
@RemembertheApollo
Not yet, but I saw there's efforts to implement it. The test instance doesn't seem to have it yet though, so I assume they haven't fully implemented it yet. But it's coming from what I've seen.
Until it's officially here, I personally use a userscript that works perfectly for me. I think Firefox supports plugins? If so, you can get one of the greasemonkey tampermonkey violentmonkey etc plugins and this script: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/468923-kbin-improved-collapsible-comments
Not sure how well it works on mobile though.