A couple of weeks ago I found myself driving to San José to support my wife in her entrepreneurship efforts. Since dinner was just around the corner we decided to visit one of the restaurants around the area. Our date went very well, we found sitting outdoors, shared a couple of laughs, regrouped, and returned home.

We had such a good time that we decided we would try this in every town she visited for work. Thinking ahead, as soon as I knew of her next trip, I used DuckDuckGo to find the best restaurants worth visiting. Here's a list of the websites I got back:

50% of the results page belongs to Trip Advisor, 20% belongs to Yelp, and the rest are other websites. What caught my attention was that a single website takes half of the results from my search. This certainly reflects the effort Trip Advisor invested in Search Engine Optimization, but this effort does not correlate to the quality of the results I got. Is this a problem for most people? How many actually notice?

One of the reasons why I fell in love with computers and the Internet was the diversity of information I could find about topics I cared about. The top three results on Yahoo / Altavista / Google were independent websites, curated by humans like you and me, trying to share with everyone the little or much they knew about things they cared about. And I miss that, I really do.

Now, something really obvious I can't ignore is that as of 2021 we have dozens of websites, platforms and applications built specifically with the intention to create communities (Discord, Twitch, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc). The way I see it, the basis of a community is communication, personal expression, a shared goal. You can definitely find communities with these characteristics in these places, but you will also experience its downsides.

Perfection is not a quality you can attribute to technology. Search engines are vulnerable to ranking manipulation, and social networks are prone to misinformation proliferation, which in the long run increases polarization among its users. We are experiencing real life challenges exposed by growing communities at an unprecedented scale. Are these downsides solvable with engineering? Creating yet another social network? Yet another search engine? It's definitely possible.

But what if we tackled this problem from an entirely different perspective? What if we honor the original nature of the Internet by sharing information out in the open instead of relying on private platforms and applications? What if more people took their chances and shared their thoughts for anyone to read?

The open web impacted my life at a very early age: It was amazing to feel that you could take your passions to unknown depths as long as you had the curiosity and a genuine desire to learn. If I had the privilege to improve my life because of it, why not give back now that I have the chance? This is the Internet that I miss, and the internet I want to keep alive for everyone, for decades to come. Writing about the things that matter to me is my way to keep it alive.

I am hopeful we can take the technological improvements of the last 20 years and combine it with truly open information so we get to inspire generations of amazing people, no matter when, no matter where. It might sound silly, but maybe next time I try to find the best restaurants in your town, I will have the pleasure of living through your words, and then experiencing it for myself.

Alan