I was commenting on a post just now, and I needed to find a source for it where I had to pick through websites I didn't recognize. Eventually I found something affiliated with BBC science, which may have its own issues but it's a whole lot more reputable than the slop. However, if I was a younger user or new to a topic, I wouldn't have known to use that source.

At first I was thinking of making a community for this, but I don't think we will have enough content to sustain a single purpose community like this.

Instead, I'm making this post to encourage people to post those questions to existing communities.

Please suggest where someone should make such posts. So far I'm thinking:

• asking in !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@lemmy.world, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml, and !ask@piefed.social
• sharing resources in !internetisawesome@sh.itjust.works, !coolwebsites@lemmy.ca, !youshouldknow@lemmy.world, !til@lemmy.world

Long term it would be nice to have a blacklist of these on UBO.

Curated directories should make a comeback.

Reputation markets, where a circle of people I trust can maintain a whitelist of people and sites they trust

We could call it GeoTowns! …wait, no. GeoBurghs! Yes, that’s it: Welcome to GeoBurghs!

i remember a time of webrings - homebrewn websites had a list of links to other homebrewn or at least reputable websites. This was before search engines were a thing. Also books with recommended addresses. ,

nowadays i often check 'awesome lists'. They are usually quite useful. (inclined reader may look up by themselves. Am lazy)

I can feel the web rings rising from the shea of history. Their time has come one again!

They quickly become deluged by spam entries. That's why they disappeared/stopped being updated in the 90s.

You're looking for https://bubbles.town/

There's other curated directories popping up, too.

How about https://neocities.org/

That TLD doesn't inspire confidence.

.org isn't it what it used to be, so are .ac/.edu a better bet when you don't know much about a topic?

There was always that battle with useless commercial listings, but that's not how I remember the end of dmoz. I remember Google (and other search engines to a lesser extent) just getting way too good at the time. There was also a content explosion around that era making directories just get too large, too slow to update, and difficult to use and manage.

But I still wonder if some (maybe niche) directories could work these days with the degeneration of search engines and AI slop. Actual humans curating links to useful information created or compiled by other humans sounds oddly refreshing.

The corrupt ICANN made judging a website by its TLD completely irrelevant these days.

Awesome Awesomes?