Seriously, it's so hard to discover things in the ways we used to. I can't really find e-books from my public library in the same way as I could just perusing the stacks at the physical library itself. There's been reams written on human curation and its absence in the algorithmic age, but I think there are things missing even on a more basic level.
People just don't share their knowledge like they used to do, I think. At best, people chasing clout or money share the promise of knowledge, but that's gated and not public by definition, if it's anything at all. I'm talking about public sharing of knowledge for the sake of knowledge being out there. A lot of it is that I think people feel that everything is 'obvious' and have succumbed to the 'just fucking Google it' mentality — though even that's kind of disappeared in favour of 'idk just ask ChatGPT???' In short, people have outsourced retaining knowledge to information siloes. Now, in a utopian scenario, this would be okay. All the world's knowledge would exist in a free and easily obtainable way in a large repository, and we could all just trust it to give us exactly what we needed and in a form that could be trusted. In a manner of speaking, that's exactly what Wikipedia set out to be in its mission. Unfortunately, that's not how things work because we don't live in a utopian world.
To contrast, consider a scenario like this: We have Alice. Alice lives in the world of greater than ten-to-fifteen years ago. Alice has a personal website where she shares her experience of the world. She maintains pages about her hobbies or other things that are important to her. She semi-regularly posts things about what's going on in her life. It isn't even necessarily in the form of a blog, either. In between all of that, there are sections of her website where she writes up little guides to things she knows how to do. For example, it could be something as simple as how to fold a paper crane. It could be tips and tricks for a game she's played. It could be impressions of a city she's visited. She also shares links to other websites like hers that she either thinks are interesting or have information she finds helpful.
Now, it could be counter-argued that people do some degree of this within the siloes of 'platforms' that exist online. After all, don't people post Youtube videos or TikToks or whatever else talking about inane things? That is true to an extent, but I feel the character of it is different. In Alice's case, the personal website is simply a personal space, something akin to a small garden of information, tended to and pruned according to her own tastes. Meanwhile, platforms in general are driven by algorithmic hands shoving what they believe to be our interests at us — or, more sinisterly, what someone may have decided we ought to see. A well-attended personal website has all of its information tucked in personally-decided pockets for others to pick through as they see fit. Sometimes, much of it won't be of interest to the potential visitor. That's okay, because there's not a geyser of information to drown in, and they can easily sort through what's there to find what is of interest. On the other hand, the algorithmic approach often only allows a limited presentation of information, tailored in a specific way as to match what is perceived to be the viewer's interest. The once-handy search function now just shoves a slightly different pile of algorithmically selected tat at us, not even giving us much chance to come across things that might not normally interest us. Yes, there is the serendipitous 'recommendation', but that can't be counted on for any sort of regular discovery.
Another dimension to the shift is that the emphasis has gone from text to images to video. Images were already somewhat poor for communicating some kinds of topics. There was certainly no end of things like 'infographics' for some years, which tried to boil down information 'helpfully' into gross oversimplifications and categorisations. For the most part, though, even when the internet became more image heavy, images were often more of a supplement to text than a substitute. Nowadays, it feels as if video is supplanting everything. People attempt to communicate on topics that are far too complex for ten-to-fifteen second clips and only end up giving terribly wrong impressions and little actual information. Even a few years ago, when videos could be longer for average audiences, the proliferation of things like 'video essays' led a lot of people to be falsely secure in the idea that they 'knew' things based on someone's ability to paint a picture of a given topic. On a similar timeline, audio in the form of things like podcasts has also attempted to communicate a lot that would be better committed to text. Personally, I can barely commit anything I hear to memory. The information density of audio and video is limited by human speech and the element of time; it takes a certain amount of time to produce the actual elements, and then the end result is a linear time investment to take in. What drives this issue? Well, monetisation, first and foremost. The chief argument will perpetually be that people will only create things if they feel it's worth their while, and there is some truth to that, considering the difficulty in consistently producing anything whilst lost in the typical capitalist rut of precarious wage labour.
More than that, the shift of capitalist rot from a competition for physical presence, in the form of branded goods, to a competition for attention has seeped into the broader human culture. Algorithms have trained the average person to more quickly and vehemently reject things that are not tailored to their exact interests, and there is an excessive focus on quick, short-lasting dopamine hits, essentially turning your average consumer into something akin to a crack fiend, begging for that next dose within minutes, if not seconds. Aspiring creators have been trained to seek attention first and foremost, leading to an overwhelming sea of self-promoting noise that drowns out anything approaching productive discussion on wider platforms. A lot of these sorts of ills are just symptoms of late-stage capitalism, but they feed into the greater crisis of discoverability. We're bombarded with so much information at once that we have no hope of sorting it out ourselves, so we turn to automated means, which restrict us in opaque ways to things that are considered 'appropriate', regardless of our volition. This is convenient, but it also ends with us being typecast in a way; we are judged to be of a specific demographic or other such label, which leaves us being served the same types of things over and over, because why would we ever want to stray outside our particular interests? The argument could be made that these sorts of invisible boxes we end up trapped in help some communities by making them less accessible to 'the wrong people'. However, we've seen many cases where that hasn't exactly helped; vulnerable communities online can still be terrorised by bad actors who are determined enough, meaning that obscurity isn't true security, a matter demonstrated time and again in computer software. What value, then, is there in such atomisation? I don't see any, frankly.
I do feel that a lot of the problems started with the whole 'Web 2.0' trend of moving towards user-submitted content. That said, I'm not totally against the idea. I think user-submitted reviews and opinions of things can be helpful to some extent, though I also think that things like gamification and other sorts of underhand patterns meant to drum up 'engagement' are poisonous on the whole. I just believe that there's no replacing degrees of top-down curation when it comes to communities online; that is, communities can't be built strictly as a matter of becoming 'content' factories, where its members are 'consumers' who only exist to act as if what is right in front of them is the only thing extant. To better illustrate what I think should happen, let's take a site like Goodreads as an example. My ideal for something like that would be to still have user-submitted reviews — but have them carefully pruned and/or highlighted by human staff. An actual person would decide that, hey, this review is very insightful, and place it further up in the path of the potential viewer, maybe even giving it a little 'editor's choice' glow or somesuch. Low-effort reviews that are clearly either ragebait or someone herp-derping because something didn't align to their exact biases would probably be removed outright, or perhaps shoved to a section that has to be manually triggered to view. And that's just reviews. Books themselves would be hand-categorised by editors and put into wide-but-relevant pools for people to peruse. You could still have things like tags and other things that aid in searchability, but the point would be to simply have a simple listing of what's available. That way, someone strolling the virtual 'aisles' can decide for themselves what's of interest. If they want to see something in particular, they can always search for it, and hopefully only what they've searched for will come up; if there's nothing relevant, then they'll just see that there's nothing that matches, rather than having things picked up by an algorithm thrown at them to keep them on the site.
The objection to such a scheme might be that human editors only have so much capacity, and that's true. However, I feel that that's also the point: stretching beyond the ability of humans to pay attention only worsens things on the whole. In short, it's exactly that limitation that creates the individual human character of any online space. I mean, I also don't think that things like Goodreads should in and of themselves be 'communities' either, but that's a whole separate post. What matters is that spaces like that should dedicate themselves to letting individuals decide what's most pertinent to them and simply offer what's there, not what could be there or what someone believes they should see. Is it a bit of an absurdly utopian hope? Maybe. Ultimately, a lot of these sorts of efforts are for profit, but I could see small efforts dedicated to particular purposes pop up and be run as collective efforts. How would they be in and of themselves discoverable? I've talked about human-driven indexes before, and I believe those could, with enough effort, help matters. The rest is, honestly, just people being willing to communicate what they themselves like and are interested in personally. That is, good old word-of-mouth, a concept that seems to generally be dying out. Even on large platforms, it's still possible for people to share things like that. They just have to, you know, find it in themselves to share. Otherwise, I think that ultimately we just need more Alices in this world.
I can try, but I'm really no Alice, myself. Unfortunately.