So, with Horror Fiction, how do you decide how to rank things? PageRank clearly benefits all of the incumbents. I’m sure recency was important—people want to announce their new stories and articles and reviews. I’m sure people want to find lists of the most beloved stories. But I’m sure topic was important too: demonic possessions, monsters, mannequins. Although there might be spoilers in that kind of designation.

The ability to follow authors has got to be paramount in a community like that. So it would make sense for that kind of community to congregate in the Indieweb. Authors would post on blogs. (But don’t they usually post on wikis?) And then they ping the directory when they have new material.

Indieweb.xyz doesn’t have a crawler, but it does fetch the page and parse it and use its metadata. In a way, it works like a crawler where pages are submitted one by one. Even Reddit is a kind of crawler, performed by humans. So the crawler question is one of: how much do we need to go out and find random stuff unprompted?

Well, and the crawler would be useful for finding stuff outside the Indieweb. Unstructured, mostly undiscovered stuff. But the Indieweb’s insistence on structure has the benefit of weeding out spam. (For now.)

So, yes, I agree, directory + crawler. The next question is: have tags worked for discovery? (Good subreddits are just permanent, high-value hashtags.) Or can hierarchical directories still find a place?

Interestingly enough, I think two of the best hierarchical directories out there are eBay and Craigslist. And both are self-categorized! I wonder what they do to solve miscategorization.