I agree. Its hard though, SEO people are malicious, persistent and with modern tech, have incredible tools.
And with hand curation, its hard to feel like its 'worth it' when instead of being able to build a community, your results are scraped and shown out of context.
If you have any thoughts on how to get that sort of culture back I'm open to it
tbh I have dreamt about what could be possible if we were making some sort of "closed doors" internet branch. You can access with a single account bound to you, invite only, something like PGP with a web of trust. Good "legacy" internet websites can be chained and indexed through some sort of thematical webring, with a good search and comment functionality added on top, as a global HN. Any external content is opt-in and vetted. Internal content with user rating system (not googles SEO algorithm ranked), i.e. allowing users to downvote nonsense bullshit into hell. robots on internal content are allowed through strictly controlled API that also pays original authors. Browsing automatically costs some "tokens" that are being paid towards owners of sites you visit so at least semi useful sites can sustain themselves and good ones make money, without spamming everything with ad banners or being incentivized to do ragebait-clickbait content. But thats all nonsense dreams, nobody will be willing to pay for browsing internet, even if high quality.
In the same vein, I feel like the 'fair source' movement makes sense - pay a fixed percent of profit and get access to a massive collection of licenced software.
Just like with yours though, allocating it fairly is centralized and very hard to make everyone happy. And nobody wants to pay for something that used to be free.
And with hand curation, its hard to feel like its 'worth it' when instead of being able to build a community, your results are scraped and shown out of context.
If you have any thoughts on how to get that sort of culture back I'm open to it