9 months ago
This weekend: Curlie is back; ignorance must be bliss
Happily, Curlie is back in action: I was able to log in without issue yesterday, and everything is back to normal. We definitely need human-curated indices on the web, sorting the human from the machine-written.
Curlie (and its forerunner, the Open Directory Project) had forbidden content mills early on: sites that churned out only content that was already elsewhere. This is unlike publications that may have syndicated articles as well as exclusives: these were sites with a lot of the ‘six things you need to impress your date’, ‘10 best gizmos for your wotsit’, and ‘12 signs you’re bored of reading the same junk’ and there was a style of writing that made it very obvious. Oftentimes they weren’t even right for the site. By extension, spun sites (which were even more obvious) wouldn’t make it past the editors, and, these days, “AI” junk would similarly be stopped. (I didn’t wish to be so good at identifying the last lot, but thanks to Semrush, I am.)
We need to get Curlie (and anything like it) back into mainstream consideration. The ODP’s decline happened because people believed that search engines would be able to handle all the site-finding we would ever do—link-exchanging and maintaining links’ pages vanished from basic web practice even earlier—but now that trust in Google and Bing (in particular) is low, then it seems right that human-curated directories made a comeback.
I remember in the letter that my college headmaster wrote about me as I finished up seventh form were the words ‘Jack does not suffer fools gladly.’ Thirty-five years later, nothing has changed.
One Tumblr user took his time out to write to us at _Font Police_ , the humour blog that I started many years ago, being all smug, saying we had spelled _centring_ wrong and that it should be _centering_.
It does take a special kind of ignorance to believe the entire world bends to a single country’s exception (is this what is meant by exceptionalism?!).
His second message said we had misspelled _tittle_ in a post about the dot on the letter _i_ , and that it should be _title_. That little dot has never been called a title.
Why do people bother showcasing ignorance or, even worse, presume they are right as their first position instead of accepting some humility and decide to learn something?
This isn’t like the Australian designer or a public commenter that I noted last week, or a Semrush user, but someone who chose to demonstrate his ignorance privately. A parking enforcement company in Auckland sent an email where they made a point about how contracts work (wrongly), again showing their ignorance. Both reminded me, as I type, of a law student who did not know the difference between assurance and insurance a few years back and thought she had me over a barrel, but it served to highlight either her ignorance or a poor memory. God help us, she might be practising now.
Then there was a lawyer who was in a dispute with a married couple I knew (and advised), and as she took her client’s side, she also made some outrageous lies about how the law worked. Help your client, of course, but why show off a lack of professionalism? Is this all you have in your ammo? I suppose so, as the law was not on her side, but what if I showed that to her local law society?
You don’t lie about the law. Any idiot can do this. Most idiots do. Your job is, while knowing the law, and knowing your client might come unstuck because of it, getting the best outcome for them in the circumstances.
I don’t know what this serves. and I certainly do not understand it. My father once said that the smarter you are, the more you question, as the more you realize there’s a lot you don’t know. And no matter how clever you are, there’s always someone either cleverer than you, or better than you at something else, so celebrate the strengths where you find them. There’s no point to being smug, holier-than-thou, or arrogant, because that not only separates you from others, it makes you less empathetic, and less likely to seek out more knowledge. And there’s less point to lying as this reveals a weak hand remarkably clearly.
There are a few essential truths that one can be certain about: natural things in the known universe, for instance, and that Big Tech, SEO and online advertising are dodgy, murky worlds that those seeking honest endeavour best steer clear from.
On Mastodon, I wrote: ‘A colleague asked me today if there was another bandwagon to hop on to. I did well with tech—even made money off it—when its trajectory was helping people. My fonts, my web publications, even my political runs, were in line with those original ideals. But for some time now, the money seems to be in cheating people with overblown promises of oneʼs tech, such as “AI”, or participating in the surveillance economy. The press loves those but thatʼs not where I want to waste my brain cells.’
I think about the things I did, and what areas I did pioneering work in, but a lot of the 2010s were about warning people about the dark side. No one wants to hear about this, less so the press. While I managed to get press attention on some serious things, such as alleged Facebook surveillance through its alleged malware scanner in _Wired_, these weren’t about things _we_ were doing as a company. But there just weren’t that many positive, new things happening. Tech was no longer about creating some sort of utopia, as the big players _stifled_ innovation and extracted time, and eventually money, from users—the process of enshittification. The bandwagons—surveillance capitalism, audience manipulation, theft of copyrighted material to train “AI”—aren’t draws to anyone with ethics. And to what end? A fragmented world where people get poorer and I consequently do myself out of customers? A world where climate change is deprioritized and I consequently do myself out of customers? You don’t have to be a socialist to want people to be comfortable and get the things they need. Capitalists actually do rather well, too, when everyone’s fed.
It was very apparent by the mid-2010s that acceding to the whims of tech bros would result in a net negative for society. I ended the 2000s calling Big Tech out with _Techdirt_ giving me some press in December 2009; and many of their misdeeds are a matter of record on this blog and in the mainstream media (such as this and this).
It is only recently that the general public finds Elon Musk (eight years after the ‘pedo guy’ Tweet), Jeff Bezos (14 years after Amazon warehouse employees collapsed due to heat and the company refused to open the doors for ventilation), Mark Zuckerberg (21 years after calling his users ‘dumb f***s’, as cited in the press 15 years ago) et al. distasteful. How slowly the penny drops.
Header image by Martin Cooper/Creative Commons Attribution 2·0 Generic (CC BY 2·0) licence
**You may also like**
* After warnings were ignored, we now arrive in the new tech mainstream
* Forty-eight hours without new disinformation—dare we hope for seventy-two?
* It’s finally mainstream to report what Big Tech has been about for over a decade
* History of the 2010s: a look back at the decade that was
* The rise of the city brand
* “AI”? Facebook’s bot city has already been around for a decade
* Weekend thoughts: farewell, Ian Crawford; online disinformation; Alibaba and Amazon scrapers
* Facebook: Kiwi lives don’t matter
In my #blog
This weekend: #Curlie is back; ignorance must be bliss
jackyan.com/blog/2025/07/this-weeken...
0
0
0
0
