I wish google had a feature where you could up/down vote websites based on the following criteria for example:
- Ease of navigation on the website
- Content is factual and not misleading/fake
- Balanced ratio of content vs advertisements
- Helpfulness of content
So if you are looking up a recipe, a news article, an entertainment hub, etc... and it's filled with excessive advertisements, pop-ups or untrustworthy content, fake or misleading and incorrect news/journalism (if it's not clearly advertised as satire), extremely difficult navigation where you're redirected to 234234970 pages before you get to where you want to be. As well as things like clothing stores and retailers who are trustworthy and reliable when it comes to providing their products, being honest with money etc...
So this would be an optional feature because not everyone probably cares or wants to fill out a survey/questionairre about their experience on a website through their web browser or search engine.
However, it would be really awesome because the internet community can upvote trustworthy, reliable, factual, helpful, and extremely well designed and popular websites while downvoting malicious websites and websites that make stupid people share their fake information + making more stupid people exist.
All it would show is a green up triangle or a red down triangle for the most popular % of votes. You can individually only vote once and you can remove your vote and switch it etc... You can completely ignore the voting process, but if you value a good website or want to steer people away from harmful websites, then this feature would be perfect in my eyes.
Yes, of course you could potentially enable the opportunity for defamation and SJW's putting people on blast, but I feel like Google could easily track or monitor the amount of traffic of "votes" a site is getting and decipher if it is organic voting or manipulated voting etc...
Likewise, websites can opt out of wanting their site to be voted on through a specific search engine, but the catch is that all websites who opt into the feature will have first priority on search results, therefore, forcing all of those click-baity sites to follow suit despite being well aware that we will just downvote the hell out of their sites.
I'm sick and tired of fake news stories being shared. I'm tired of people getting viruses because they wanted to know the 17 most crazy divorce stories ever. I don't want to have to click through 15 pages just to find out what those dumb pictures say and I don't want to buy clothes from a website that scams people.
I think it's an individual's responsibility to really check and research what they see online because so many things can be fabricated or changed in context etc... so even the most reliable sources still make mistakes with fake content or incorrect content. I think people should be responsible and be more intuitive when they see the appearance of certain sites that look questionable or stereotypically malicious. But I also think it's our duty as an internet community to guide each other to good resources and to shout out what is bad and I think having this kind of feature would educate and spread awareness on websites that people should really not be going to.
Obviously we cannot stop those websites from existing, but we can try to reduce their effectiveness in a constructive way. Fake news stories are okay to exist, but websites need to clearly advertise that their articles, images, headlines, videos, etc... are 100% fake. Sites who use embedded viruses and untrustworthy advertisements should not be sites people frequently go to.
And you might say that this idea is essentially a process of defaming certain kinds of content but in a "pc" kind of format. And perhaps you're right but think of it like a product review on Amazon or Youtube where customers describe the product, what they like, what they don't like, comparisons to other brands, and what the value is.
Are we not allowed to have the same rights in terms of websites?
If a website is shitty or is going to harm your computer, let alone your brain cells, I think it's important that we tape red flags saying DON'T GO HERE UNLESS YOU ARE STUPID. And if those websites get pissed off because the internet community is cockblocking them, well maybe they should consider running a credible business with a professional website that isn't cancerous to our online presence.
I kind of wish there were more hacker vigilantes who could take down sites like this. I mean plenty of people DDoS video games and online communities, why not go after the pieces of shit who want the fill the world with lies and bullshit.
What are your thoughts?