Searching the web these days is a bit hazardous. There were always problems in the past with fake websites and bad information, but in recent years this problem has been turned up to 11. If you're searching for basic factual information about some topic then you're increasingly running a gauntlet of disinformation and slop, SEO wrangled or just straight up bribed to be on the first page of results. The information superhighway used to be an expanding network, but now the once and smooth and efficient roads are getting filled with potholes and trash, burned-out vehicles, paywall checkpoints and earthquake faults. The supposedly self-correcting recommendation algorithms, like PageRank, are just not fit to handle the problems of the current web dystopia.

This means that the question of who and what to trust online is becoming increasingly important. Since trust can only be established socially, this puts social networks on the front line of the battle. So I think there are going to need to be ways within social networks to recommend websites, and to warn about fake ones, and I expect that this will become the primary method via which information is discovered. Reputations may be built or foundered depending upon what information gets recommended.

I see the FEP for "starter packs" in ActivityPub, and it occurs to me that this could be a more general mechanism for implementing recommendations in the social space. Not just recommending who to follow but also which sites to trust.