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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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simonw·

Dmoz was trying to replicate the Yahoo! style of directory, which requires being comprehensive.

Today we don't need comprehensive, we need maximum signal and minimum noise.

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If you're not trying to be comprehensive it's not a real directory, it's just an ordinary "awesome-list".

would you call HN just "an awesome list"?

Yes. With comments.

Not really. Awesome lists are mostly curated by an individual, the bar for making it on that list isn’t the same as HN where the community decides the popularity of the entries

I'd like to argue that Wikipedia also tries to be comprehensive within the limits of relevant topics. And overall, Wikipedia still seems to be going strong.

I'd argue that Wikipedia and its 'sister' projects have accidentally cannibalized a sizeable fraction of the former 'non-commercial, non-business focused' Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s. If you're providing information in a way that's not intended to further some sort of profit motive, it makes sense to work within that large established project because that maximizes the resulting exposure. The rise of LLMs only makes this starker, every LLM is trained from Wikipedia.

> Wikipedia [..] have [..] cannibalized a sizeable fraction of the former 'non-commercial, non-business focused' Internet of the 1990s and early 2000s

Interesting take. Do you mean Wikipedia has cannibalized the traffic to these web sites or do you mean that Wikipedia lead to these web sites going offline altogether?

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