I remember in the 90s a site with curated links was a common feature on "home pages". Remember home pages? They were cool geocities, Myspace and more. I wish they would make a comeback.
The closest we have to curated content is the relatively recent "awesome" lists.
I really wish a curated site existed with the intent of the author, but there is more to this than just putting up a database and letting everyone pile on.
StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love to have it back, particularly if the contents could be curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month")
This is a great idea. It's like a modern reboot of the old concept of curated "link lists", maintained by everyone from bloggers to Yahoo. Doing it at a meta level for search-engine domains is a really cool thought.
“curated link directories were a thing back when the Internet was in its infancy, but the task of maintaining such a directory is a full time job”
Here’s the economically viable answer. It could be a job in the same sense as a YouTuber. I imagine lists being distributed through releases, not an infinite, always-on feed. Releases would not consist of links only, but actual context. A well known curator could use his reach to leverage smaller projects, the political factor of course would be present. It’s not so different than what people already do on social networks, and that’s a good sign. The main difference would be that the linked content would be sourced from around the web, not only from within a particular network. Ad business could also flourish in this context. Ads can be really useful. For people with interest in a given topic, it is valuable to get access to offers regarding the activity. You could have people literally making a living just by thoughtfully wandering on the web and collecting media with a niche public in mind. The mere act of selection from the curator would be an expression of individuality, even more so if they enrich the published volume with their view. It would reach a point where you would simply submit your content to the curator network, bypassing search engines entirely. I would also add that a fully curated internet would feel extremely safe, since you’d always know what to expect from the sources you subscribe to, and also considering media would flow downstream in a parallel fashion, so no intersection of undesirable content. It would be beautiful if it all happened through a torrent or torrent-like protocol.
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.
Like your idea! Posted my blog and looking forward to discovering new blogs.
I too miss the days of curated links on personal sites. Occasionally, I'll find a gem consisting of a simple, yet captivating personal sites with links to additional interesting information. The sites almost always appear to have been up for a decade or two, showing they came from those golden days.
If your new subreddit takes off, which I hope it does, it would be cool to start building an organized and curated list of blogs and individual posts on the wiki.
Being on the internet since 1997, I can't remember anything liked that needed.
I wasn't having a homepage back then, but I was interested in having one, so I've read quite a few resources about that way back.
What I can remember, is something like website rings (or something like that) where people joined some group of homepage owners and kept a list of links to each other (and / or a "next" and "previous" link to someone else's homepage).
I've been building something similar to this with https://fantastic.link. Would love to get your feedback!
I think empowering individuals to curate the web would create stronger social and financial incentives to improve online indexing (I.e: Shopify vs Amazon). 20 years ago we could approximate quality from backlinks from credible sites, in the age of social media it seems this signal has shifted towards what creators, influencers, and online experts endorse.
One of the problems that I feel we face these days is the challenge of discovery. Sites like HN, Reddit, Pinterest help to some degree, but I can't help but feel that they're just scatter-shot.
I miss the days of web directories. I really appreciate that the programming community is creating more and more of these curated lists ("awesome" lists), but I'm disappointed that other categories aren't as popular.
Perhaps there's room for an AwesomeAwesome, someday... A Wikipedia-like curation of worthwhile resources. I doubt it's feasible once a certain critical mass is achieved, what with gaming the system or disagreements about what should or shouldn't be included. Wikipedia can at least limit conflict somewhat by saying that something is or is not factual or backed by a reputable resource. To determine what should or should not be on a curated list is a lot more difficult.
Maybe a voting system could help. Or maybe that's too easy to game.
Good stuff, but enough with curated already. Everything that has a specific person behind it has suddenly became curated now - be it a blog, a linkdump, another "Top 10" list and whatever else. It looks like at attempt to look stately and more grand than the reality permits, and that's just tacky.
I also recently started making some portal with curated links and feeds. I call it Discovery Portals. The very small beginning can be found at https://www.heyhomepage.com/discover/
Can't agree more. The thing I miss when going to the home page of a blog or QA site is finding well organized content by topic. Something manually curated by the owner(s). Content by tags does such a lousy job because it's the lowest level. Unless you only use 5-10 tags people aren't going to find interesting content on their own unless they come in off search for a specific query. Though, as someone mentioned, showing related articles would help this visitor.
I kinda want one of these directory websites you could find in the early 2000s that were just collections of websites the author liked. I want a page like that just filled with links to pushed like this. projectrho.com comes to mind as another page I would want to see liked there.
This is interesting. We are creating a curated directory of websites. We are inspired by the content curation technologies of Wikipedia and Quora. Here is the link - https://www.cybrhome.com
Please review it and share your feedback :)
The closest we have to curated content is the relatively recent "awesome" lists.
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