When one searches what the DataTransfer object spec is in, the IANA article pops up and pretty much everything you need is there—or close.<p>As soon as you look for React related or for certain trendy Pythonic Data Science things, you are going to do a lot more filtering to find what you need. To the point that empirical analysis or source code understanding may have a better return of investment for your time.<p>Has this been the same for all of you? It certainly has for me.<p>This probably has a name, but I like to call it the quality-redundancy paradox: if there is information abundance to the point of over-redundancy, the harder it becomes to find what you need[1].<p>I thought about this because of the Django Auth post and how the web has gone to JWTs instead of good ol’ sessions; or how people use React in ways that are embarrassingly similar to how PHP or Rails (used to?) work.<p>I wonder if being aware of this phenomenon is something that experienced engineers take into account when choosing tools for the job.<p>[1]: David Perell wrote something about this as well at <a href="https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/" rel="nofollow">https://perell.com/note/the-paradox-of-abundance/</a>
SEO has ruined search in my experience. The web is hyper commercialized in certain sectors, when there is money to be made there is an abundance of shallow articles and sales pitches to wade through for your information. This includes React and other pop technology because people are trying to make money off commercializing advice for it.<p>Search for good mountain bike routes and you will be served not by guides or enthusiasts, but by stores SEO writers and product reviewers affiliate laden posts.<p>Everything with a fanbase has something to sell now too, searching your favourite TV show doesn't net you fan groups or genuine discussion, it's just going to be merch and products.<p>I usually blame social media for hoovering up all the people and squashing blogs and forums and other communities, but perhaps people were also fleeing the cesspit of thinly veiled sales articles that the web has become.
Interesting. Makes me think about science vulgarization or good online courses/explanation in general : I absolutely love the new solutions to learn quickly and efficiently new knowledge. But at the same time I remember all the good knowledge I acquired was the result of me spending hours trying to figure out and writing on a notebook tons of stuff (for example solving maths equations on my own). And not the result of me finding someone's else amazing explanation.<p>The better / easier the explanation, the less efforts the learner has to produce to get to his / her ends. The path to his / her ends is the process of learning and is more important than the end goal, and being better at learning is more important than one little piece of knowledge you just acquired.<p>Another learning / creating paradox famous here is The Telescope Rule : "It is faster to make a four-inch mirror then a six-inch mirror than to make a six-inch mirror"<p><a href="https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.c2.com/?TelescopeRule</a>
Could we reverse the trend by integrating concepts like the web of trust into our search results?<p>Alice recommends niche but highly valuable content from sites A, B, C.<p>Bob recommends site D and trusts Alice, so his search results heavily favor results from A, B, C, and D.<p>Jane recommends site E and trusts Bob, so her results heavily favor A, B, C, D, and E.<p>And so on, this would have the power to bring those valuable, niche, but low ranking websites into the forefront.<p>Some of the new search engines like Kagi have a partial implementation of this idea where users can uprank or downrank certain websites, but I think the true power of these rankings would come from a crowdsourced list that doesn't rely on very slow word of mouth distribution.
This is actually the point of SEO.<p>The problem that SEO solves is not "How do I make sure that the end-user searching for information sees the best information?"<p>The problem that SEO solves is "How do I make sure that the end-user searching for information sees my page?"<p>SEO is an attempt to subvert search engines for ad revenue. Once you have the ad impression recorded, the actual page content isn't so important.
[Edit]<p>When I mentioned the IANA article, I actually meant to talk about the “text/uri-list” MIME-type; not about the DataTransfer object that most web browsers implement.<p>The reason I got confused was that the other day I found—and successfully—reproduced a bug in Chromium that had to do with DataTransfer objects and “text/uri-list” formatted messages.<p>That led me to accidentally write “DataTransfer object spec” instead of “uri-list spec”.