"If the value proposition is signal over noise, how do you scale the signal?"

The author also assumes must scale signal instead of reduce noise. She plays the futurism card and tries to attack the Yellow Pages. Why. The Yellow Pages has zero noise. Google has infinite noise. Gee, I wonder why. For starters, the telephone companies did not keep rearranging the alphabetical listings to some sui generis order based on some secret algorithm and create a competition to see who can be listed first, then auction off ads to be placed above the first listing.

"How many New York Times accounts did you create before finally giving in to the paywall?"

None. I do not use cookies or Javascript to read the NYT. I only use HTTP and HTML because that is all that is needed.^1 NYT chooses to share information publicly, no password is required. Why. Because if they don't someone else will. The internet allows its users to share data and information. They do not need a printing press. User publishers have already paid for that privilege when they paid for internet access.

Given that we already pay for our computers and our internet subscriptions, why do we need further intermediaries telling us what to consume, for a monthly fee. I say we don't. The time has come to stop trying to exploit people as they access public information, be it through surveillance and advertising, or "subscriptions".

The idea of asking for a subscription fee to search what is available for free over the internet is nothing more than needless "gatekeeping". In 1993, I sat down at a university computer to use gopher, ftp and the www for the first time. Nevermind not knowing what to search for, search was slow. Getting access to the internet was neither free nor easy then. It still isn't free today, but it's certainly easier. Search is much faster. The problem of not knowing what to search for is a good thing. It forces one to explore. Intellectual curiosity instead of marketing.

From what I have seen, the number of new www users is growing faster than the size of the www, but Google is unlikely to let anyone know that. Like the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain, it is better for business to keep up the illusion that the web is too large for any mere mortal to investigate without Google's help. But today we can scan the entire IPv4 address space in a matter of hours. That time will keep getting shorter. Exploring obscure corners of the www is not something only Google can do. They have no motivation to do it because unpopular websites with low traffic are not suitable for Google's programmatic advertising.

Now we have Silicon Valley VC telling that us charging a fee to conduct searches is the "future". The reason the www is filled with noise is because of VC funded "tech" companies, like Google, that only focus on the www on condition that it serve as an advertising medium and/or a means to collect user data and generate metadata about users. VC and their "tech" company spawn want monopolies, millions of people all using the same websites, so-called "scale". The possibilities for millions of small businesses, not beholden to a "tech" company providing a "platform", even just people using the internet to exchange text, images, audio and video for non-commercial purposes, without the need for an all-knowing, all-seeing intermediary spying on their every move, is not something VC are interested in. The www has suffered the consequences of VC "thinking", including endless noise as a result of their sponsorship of hype, a race to the bottom competition for lion share traffic at any cost. The future of the internet is one without the corrupting influence Silicon Valley VC. Enough of the noise. We can do better.

1. Visiting https://www.nytimes.com gives the public JSON file

https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/$1/index.jsonp

where $1 is a section, World, Business, Travel, Arts and Leisure, etc.

Alternatively we can use sitemaps, e.g,

https://www.nytimes.com/sitemaps/new/news-$1.xml.gz

where $1 is 1, 2, 3 or 4.

For example,

curl -A"" -4o 1.jsonp https://static01.nyt.com/services/json/sectionfronts/world/index.jsonp
exec sed '/\"guid\" :/!d;s/\",//;s/.*\"//' 1.jsonp

or

exec yy059 < 1.jsonp # yy059 is a quick and dirty JSON reformatter I wrote

curl -A"" https://www.nytimes.com/sitemaps/new/news-world.xml.gz