alt Hacker NewsWe need Jerry and David's Guide to Youtube Videos! Bring back yellow pages, web directories, and other listing services. The "algorithm" is an anti consumer pattern scheming to maximize the publisher experience at the cost of the user experience. I wish I could just easily search for videos and filter by date ranges, length, views. That would let me avoid all the terrible AI slop!
Google already ripped off curators once to build PageRank, the first of the modern AI unpaid content thefts. They’ll just do it again if you bring back listing services. Either you paywall these new indexes like Consumer Reports, or you get insta-sherlocked by AI agents — and now that Google is scanning print books for training data, you can’t even escape them by releasing it as a print catalog. If I were trying to do this, I’d circulate a list of good channels indexed by call numbers to librarians and politely ask them to keep it behind their counters when they share it around to other librarians, so that they have an advantage over the bots.