Does the internet have any discovery mechanisms except social media curation and search engines?
If videos can be timestamped for links, why not webpages? Linking to automatic content-indexed excerpts shows respect for the time spent by recipient and saves markup effort for the author.
I mean you can arbitrarily type domain names with common TLDs in and see what happens. I hear the white house may not be a good start to roll the dice on. Yahoo, Altavista, and others used to have a curated index of quality websites. Links are inherently a discovery feature. Services like StumbleUpon used to exist but could arguably be seen as "social."
The problem with "social media curation" as a qualifier could be interpreted as "a human is involved." Pretty much all forms of discovery, internet or not, requires either search or a human involved. Some services of course have broadcast mechanisms for curating an index but that's about the only exception I can think of for discovery that breaks away from these two qualifiers. To some degree, DNS is a broadcast system for discovery.
In the absence of a universal recommender system that acts on clustering effects, social networks and link aggregators like HN can really be the next best thing.
It looks like at one point, mozilla attempted to solve this with their context graph project as well as their acquisition of pocket. However, it does look like it has all the hallmarks of a technological solution to a societal problem. Solving the adverserial aspects as well as ethical concerns would require nothing short of a rethinking of how we use the web.
> I mean you can arbitrarily type domain names with common TLDs in and see what happens.
I've always been curious whether any search engine tries to index the "disconnected web" by just war-dialing domains/IPs like this.
> To some degree, DNS is a broadcast system for discovery.
Sadly, there's no real way to build a "DNS spider." You could if you could send DNS AXFR queries for arbitrary zones; but DNS servers mostly don't respond to these without authentication.
If videos can be timestamped for links, why not webpages? Linking to automatic content-indexed excerpts shows respect for the time spent by recipient and saves markup effort for the author.