reversible will collapse

As it currently works “reversible.org”:http://reversible.org will fail. It will “collapse”:http://reversible.org/sucks. It will be filled with “worthless spam”:http://reversible.org/spam and posts by people desperate for hits (like myself). Without a mechanism to determine the quality of a referrer this problem will continue. It depends too much on the individual (the content producing individual) to determine the quality of the content. It does not allow for intelligent refactoring that a Wiki would allow.

And adding content is much easier than with a Wiki… Wiki’s work because newbies generally cannot figure out how to add content (they have to read a manual). With “reversible”:http://reversible.org any chump with a web site can post a link… hmmm… maybe that is the solution. Use the count from each referrer to determine quality and cull the weaklings.

But the problem remains of URL permanence remains. An existing link to reversible will not change simply because the “powers that be”:http://reversible.org/people/ want to refactor the hierarchy. The best solution will likely involve a complex set of referrer rules… if this process could be automated or at least assisted by a nice UI that would be pretty cool…

In summary:

Any system like this (a content aggregator) without editorial control (distributed or centralized) will soon become worthless. The same thing will happen to “the topic exchange”:http://www.topicexchange.com.

That said, I really like experiments like this and I am glad that there are folks out there innovating. Keep up the good work.

Update: Looks like they have added filtering and sorting by referrer count. This should help things.