Posted by hisamafahri 9 hours ago
I'm thinking more like just taking all the text files from 80-90s and making a separate static, frozen in time internet.
Today we don't need comprehensive, we need maximum signal and minimum noise.
Interesting take. Do you mean Wikipedia has cannibalized the traffic to these web sites or do you mean that Wikipedia lead to these web sites going offline altogether?
But hand curated human directories should in theory have a very high signal to noise ratio. Every link should take you to a quality site.
Just try searching your favorite bloggers in ooh.directory. 9 out of 10 times they'll be missing from the directory.
I'd prefer a more transparent directory where we can can tell why something is or isn't added.
Another problem is that I like to add a variety of sites so that people following what’s recently added don’t get swamped by loads of blogs on one topic. And last time the site got on HN the suggestions (not “submissions”) were swamped with mostly men with rarely-updated blogs about computers. I’m expecting more now :)
I also enjoy searching for blogs that I find interesting and adding those, rather than relying solely on the suggestions. Honestly, I’ve been thinking of removing the suggestions form entirely, because it results in exactly this level of expectation and uncertainty about what gets “approved”.
And, yes, of course lots of blogs are missing! Look how many blogs are in there and try to guess how many blogs there might still be out there!
But that shouldn't stop me from sharing my experience as a user. That it feels frustrating when I spend time making a bunch of submissions and I never hear anything back. But yeah, it's their website and their rules. Yes, it's one person making the decision. Yes, it's personal. I understand all that.
I was more interested in finding something less personal and more community-ish. where the power to add or reject submissions does not lie with one individual. Wouldn't that be nice?
So, Hacker News?
Otherwise, be the change you want to see. if you haven't hit critical mass, the "community" will likely be 1-2 people getting he community off the ground anyway. How and if you want to scale from there will vary based on the ones managing the site.
This would be overwhelmed with AI slop within days.
Why so? What's the logic? With ooh.directory, one person is curating it. With a community project, 10 people may curate it. What makes 10 people curating the list more susceptible to slop?
And to prevent commercial and political interests from joining the community, and later overwhelming the original core team.
I think you're asking the author to organize a structure like Wikipedia, with talk pages and topic experts, which would be a significant undertaking.
I think the expectation is less about the suggestions form and more because of the tagline "a place to find good blogs that interest you". If the tagline was clearer that these were hand curated, then I think no one would care about the process you currently have.
Essentially my trouble with every "share your blog" type thing that appears on HN. Some of the blogs do show some interest outside computers, but those posts are quickly swamped by more computer touching.
I appreciate the curation in favor of diversity of interest here.
edit: You can see it in a lot of the suggested alternatives elsewhere. I think it's hard for someone to really get it if computer touching is their life. Curation like this is vital to avoid regression to the mean.
Oh, hang on, what’s that I see on the home page?
It is weird how entitled people can get when it comes to things others create and distribute for free. The same seems to happen with open source software in general too. Somehow the ones who pay nothing, ask for the most.
Unnecessarily aggressive response from you given that you are addressing positions I never actually took. Of course the maintainer is entitled to exercise personal judgement about what gets included. When did I say anything othrwise?
What I am saying is that, as a user, it is frustrating to spend time putting together submissions and then hear absolutely nothing back. I am not demanding special treatment, just a basic acknowledgement or a brief explanation when something is rejected. Expecting that level of courtesy when you interact with a project does not strike me as unreasonable. If that is considered entitlement, then yes, I suppose I do expect basic courtesy from people I engage with.
All I am asking is whether anyone might be interested in building something more community-ish, where decisions do not rest entirely with one individual. If someone creates that, I am happy to support it with my time and contributions. That is the only point I am making.
That's no different than the old DMOZ.
I don't get the point of these sites, because it I want a curated list, I visit the front page of hackernews or reddit -- and trust the system.
Ohh.directory I'd the same thing, except for a different selection process.
You either trust it or you don't.
don't see why it has to be this way. It doesn't take much to tell us what the review process is like and what gets added and what does not. If I know in advance that the blogs I submit are outside their scope, then I won't waste time submitting them.
I also don't see why there can't be an open directory of websites where the community makes decisions about what to add instead of leaving it to a single individual.
As you can tell from the site, there are many, many suggestions and I’m not finding time to add many new blogs https://ooh.directory/about/charts/
There is no guarantee any blog you suggest, even if it’s in “scope”, will get added before either of us die. If that’s a problem save yourself all this angst and don’t suggest anything.
Sorry for being a pain in this thread. Wishing you all the best with the project going forward.
Because no one who wants one has made it. Why not be the change if it's something you want?
If your response is anything other than enthusiasm to get started, you understand why it hasn't happened.
It also helps with the dread of not having to add my personal site to yet another blog curation site which I don't know will:
1. Be maintained in the longer term.
2. Would be willing to add my site to the curation site.
https://alexsci.com/blog/rss-categories/
Syndic8, DMOZ, NewsIsFree, and TX (lost to history?) used the same taxonomy approach seen on ooh.directory. All are defunct now, but DMOZ appears to live on as curlie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories
Technically, we could tag our RSS feeds with the taxonomy defined by ooh.dir, which would allow us to automatically sort blogs into topic groups, but I haven't found a single feed that uses the approach. We end up with ad-hoc category labels that are challenging to deduplicate, or more often, uncategorized blogs.
A collection of 2,299 blogs about every topic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40693787 - June 2024 (18 comments)
Remember to submit your blog to ooh.directory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36458877 - June 2023 (6 comments)
Ooh.directory - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33719983 - Nov 2022 (167 comments)
You can submit a blog here: https://minifeed.net/suggest
Criteria is pretty simple:
- Must be written by a human.
- Must be in English (for now).
- Must have a valid RSS feed.
- Must not be purely a "micro-blog", i.e. must have some content other than tweet-sized status updates or links.
How does one ascertain this?
This did give it a new dimension.
Each has its own RSS feed too as well.
The only way to maintain long term interest in such sites would be to have it as a github site/or a long term commitment, community contributions with some kind of community filtering/voting to maintain the quality of submissions.
Some suggestions: I know none of us like "the algorithms choosing", but I think we can do better than alphabetical order. Number of clicks you see (popularity), or number of inbound links google tells you about would be good.
I also think you've gone to great effort, but it's still very light in some categories. I hope you keep going - what's your data source? Are you tracking outbound links from the ones you have indexed to find new blogs?
I do sort of track outbound links, so that I can show which domains a blog links to most, which can sometimes give a sense of what the blog is about.
But, while I haven’t analysed the data, I suspect the links from one blog to another would be a very tiny percentage of the overall outbound links. It’s the kind of thing that might have been more interesting/useful in the olden days of blogging when more people linked to each other, and replied to each other, via blogs rather than social media.
I think equally important is algorithmic transparency, that is, that the algorithm be publicly disclosed (although I think simplicity is a component of transparency: if you just dump a huge incomprehensible algorithmic mess somewhere that's not very helpful), so that you at least know what you are getting into, and better yet have some ability to choose and make educated critique of the current state of things (i.e. does the algorithm just maximize engagement like a slot machine? or does it optimize for some kind of helpfulness?).