We need to work on our assumptions - why human content is supposed to be good and bot content is supposed to be misleading? We assume that people have good intentions - but, as you notice, this easily breaks if evil organizations can pay people to create the content.
In the past page rank was (partially) solving this content problem - but now http pages are not the important nodes any more.
I would welcome new developments in page rank like algos - but more localized, because smaller networks are easier to police and evolve.
>I would welcome new developments in page rank like algos
PageRank-like algorithms are not the solution, they are the problem. They reward popularity with more popularity, enabling viral content, encouraging stuff like link spam and outrage click-bait. Worst of all, they normalized the idea that what you see in search results (and later - timelines, feeds) shouldn't be based on your query and author's page content, but rather on what everyone else wants to see.
there are lots of current day Internet-scale problems where, in order to solve them, someone is going to have to figure out how to overcome people’s natural tendency to mistake popularity for quality. This falsehood compromises all kinds of rankings, from search results to Yelp and Amazon reviews to tweets. Even here on HN, “number of upvotes” (popularity) unsatisfactorily attempts to declare something about a comment’s quality.
I think part of the problem is that in many circumstances, such as Yelp and Amazon reviews, popularity is the best proxy for quality that is currently available. Perhaps if other ways for people to quickly distinguish quality were developed then people would start making better decisions.
I think that there may be a philosophical issue here: not everyone agrees on what ‘good’ is (maybe noöne agrees!): I may derive much joy from Y but you find it derivative and lame; you may love X but I hate it; he may enjoy passing around Russian agitprop memes. I don’t know what the answer is, but I think neither ‘the majority of people in this bubble in San Francisco like this’ nor ‘ the majority of people on earth like this’ is a terribly useful, not to mention correct, criterion.
In the past page rank was (partially) solving this content problem - but now http pages are not the important nodes any more.
I would welcome new developments in page rank like algos - but more localized, because smaller networks are easier to police and evolve.
Unfortunately it looks that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato is dead now.