The friction point is not so much presenting/hosting content as "discovery" - finding interesting new people and new content. And that's much more complicated because it's full of perverse incentives.
Very true but with a few notable exceptions - successes such geek_at says he's had, others have pointed out that self-funded, self-hosted sites don't get the large visitor coverage of the big conglomerate/commercial sites. This stands to reason and it's a damn shame.
It seems to me a way around this would be to have a common universally-wide index type site where all the free, no-ads, no spying sites would be listed.
Similarity, this index site would be spy-free, no ads and free for visitors to use but those listed would pay a small listing fee to cover site running costs. To keep listing costs to a minimum the site would be non profit, revenue-neutral and run as a cooperative society or similar non profit structure.
To stop cohersive pressures from commercial interests, commercial, for profit sites/businesses would not be allowed to list.
The site itself would be indexed and cross referenced along topic lines using the Dewey Decimal Classification system or similar schemes that libraries use to classify books.
This would have the advantage of grouping likemined/likekind websites together in ways that were easy for visitors to browse from one to another. The listing for each site could also include a short description.
This index site would cover just about every topic imaginable and thus attract many sites for listing which would provide economies of scale. For example:
- Trades/Woodworking/Cabinetmaking
- Science/Physics/QM/Quantum Field Theory/Yang-Mills
- Philosophy/Utilitarianism/Jeremy Bentham
Right, the site could easily contain interests as diverse as any book library, and it could even have its own internal search engine.
It seems to me that we desperately need such an independant nonprofit site on the web. It's our only reasonable hope of escaping the centralization created by Facebook, Google, etc.
(these are popular with library nerds, but in practice the public wants a constant feed of links + discussion in some form, whether that's slashdot, digg, reddit, or twitter)
What I will say is that taxonomy and classification systems in general are problematic and have always been so. Anyone who has ever tried to sort and classify stuff knows this! I'm forever sorting the myriad of stuff on my PCs, smartphones, etc. into various classifications and then into appropriately named directories and it's an ongoing struggle.
If I dream up too few classifications then I end up with directories that don't have sufficiently specific names to find things, too many and I'll lose items in directories whose names that are a near match but not sufficiently so. If I ignore the obvious catalog/directory naming system and use a program such as Everything that finds stuff anywhere based on name then I'll lose the ability to browse (grouped) like subjects as their names won't necessarily be sufficiently alike. It's all a damn nuisance really.
Then there's the problem of what you classify by: subject, or author's name or physical object (a major problem in a general purpose catalog).
I could write an essay about nomenclature and how it's a significant problem for the web and IT generally. For instance, if people were a little more knowledgeable about taxonomy and classification in general - and that includes both general web users and website owners - then Google could be spared millions in electricity costs due to much more accurate search results first time around.
That said, existing classification systems have their uses even in days where electronic sorting has come into its own. Take a physical book library for instance, I'll check out some subject in the catalog index then go to the book in question - and, as more often than not, I'll browse many of the nearby books on the same subject. The fact that they're grouped together by subject is very useful. If they were grouped alphabetically then this would not be possible.
I take your point that in practice the public's constant need for links, discussion etc. However, I don't see this as inconsistent with what I've suggested, especially so if one doesn't take a one-system-fits-all approach as is so often the case not only on the web but with software in general.
For instance, with Windows 8 when Microsoft moved away from the traditional IBM/CUA-like GUI to its new Metro GUI, it didn't allow users a choice to retain the old GUI. This programmer-know-best arrogrance permeates both software and the web like a bad smell and it does nobody any good.
I see no reason why the site I'm suggesting can't have multiple methods of access. The Dewey-type, search a la Everything, and also those along the lines you've suggested. Moreover, there's no reason it cannot have user comments in the same way Hacker News does.
The key to its success would be in having wide appeal - by providing both casual and sophisticated users a service suitable for each. As the saying goes, to each according to his/her needs.
