from Hacker News

Ask HN: On info discovery, AI/Turtles all the way down vs. human curation

by ricardo81 on 4/15/25, 7:51 PM with 2 comments

Is there time for a comeback of human curated content vs the avalanche of AI stuff? Like DMOZ but maybe with some verification of who vouches for what and an algorithm based on those individuals and the groups they choose to vouch for?

We had directories, Google leveraged DMOZ and pagerank of those pages, dumped them, then leverages wikipedia and now AI subsumes wikipedia.

I'd rather have real individuals, real groups and some kind of algo that every individual/group can tweak that goes beyond a black box algo, and maybe all the organic non-AI content can prevail.

Wiki solved that problem to a certain extent over a number of years (note Google ranked pretty much any informational search with wiki at the top of results), now AI (and the realisation that wiki was trusted and subsequently spammed and maybe some editor issues) means that it's pushed away from the normal information discovery channels of social media and search.

And so we're left with big tech, their black box algos and people not generally knowing where to find anything beyond them.

There is the general searcher, but I'm thinking of the average HN/tech savvy person in mind to lead the way.

Thoughts?

  • by nialse on 4/15/25, 8:13 PM

    Curated content has the built in problem of ”by whom” and ”with what incentive”. A large part of the problem with ”the algorithm” (whether manual by a human or an AI) is that someone is doing it for money. Unless the curation creates some exceptional and immense value, there is really no current viable business model.