Inifinite Aggregation Aggravation

Everywhere, every moment of our lives people all over the planet are creating internet content. Whether it's videos of stupid animal tricks, news stories, opinion pieces, or personal diaries, there's a lot of creativity going on.

The problem is: most of it is crap.

What's the saying? Never have so many had so much to say to so few. It seems like 99.99% of newly created internet content is just worthless. Or rather, it's worthless to me. You may like it, or an editor or community of voters somewhere may like it, but that don't mean much to me.

You could look at this like a problem. Why is there so much useless junk being created? What a waste! Or you could look at it like an opportunity. If only .01% of new content is stuff I like, that's still probably 50 hours of reading/viewing material for me. Stuff I'd love to consume.

Why can't I log into the internet and see material that will have the greatest emotional impact on me? Things that will make me laugh, cry, think, revise my opinions, and become fascinated? How do I find, sort, and rank all of that new material into something where each person finds the maximum value?

This question has been bugging a lot of other people too. A lot of people have made billions trying to solve it, and it mostly remains unsolved.

First there were just pages with links. Like the first Lycos or Excite. Then there were search engines and ranking systems built on hyperlinks put into your articles, like Google. Several years ago came the up/down voting system, like Digg. Slashdot has a points and meta-moderation system.

Some interesting things happened. Plain link sites quickly became search sites -- there's simply too much stuff. Search sites became monopolized by Google, the site that had sub-second response time and the hugest cross-indexed database and most cost-effective technology. "Voting" sites became echo chambers, full of people with similar political opinions all down-voting articles that threaten their world-view.

So what's the answer? There's been a lot of work lately, but I still don't think we've figured it out yet.

So the next time you consume something on the internet that seems like a waste of time, like watching a video of a dancing chicken, you're not alone: tens of millions of folks are wasting billions of hours each year consuming material that was a total waste of their time.

It's just something that keeps being a pain.