Raising the bar

Manuel Moreale, creator of blogroll.org, said he deleted about 95% of recent submissions to the blogroll, attributing the increase in low-quality submissions to AI-generated content and marketing spam. He is considering raising the barrier to entry for the site, questioning the value of large lists in an age of abundant content.

I just went through the queue of submissions to blogroll.org https://blogroll.org and probably deleted 95% of what was in there. This is not unusual, and has become more and more common lately. A big reason for this is clearly AI. The amount of slop submissions I’m getting is trending upwards, unfortunately. The other big reason is people attempting to use the blogroll as a way to get traffic for their shitty marketing sites, which is obviously annoying and a waste of my time. There’s people who have submitted their stupid marketing sites multiple times, and I’m starting to contemplate the possibility of blacklisting domains because some people out there clearly don’t know how to behave. But all this is making me question the value of big lists in an age where content is becoming more and more abundant. There are people out there—idiots, if you ask me—who think that coding has become a commodity, that everyone can make a site with just a few prompts, and that producing content worth consuming has become so incredibly cheap and easy. If you believe in all that, what even is the point of having a big list of sites worth consuming since content worth consuming should just flood every corner of the web and be easily accessible? I do not believe that to be the case. I believe, in fact, the opposite to be true. Good content, content worth consuming, is becoming harder to find, and it’s getting buried under a sea of low-quality crap, which makes me wonder if it’s time to start rethinking how blogroll.org works. I have ideas for how to tweak both the site itself as well as the submission process and no, that doesn’t involve the exchange of money , but it’s obvious to me that the only way out is to raise the barrier to entry, which is pretty much the opposite of what the web has been all about for the past 20 years. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email mailto:hello@manuelmoreale.com :: Sign my guestbook https://manuelmoreale.com/guestbook :: Support for 1$/month https://ko-fi.com/manuelmoreale