Esprit d'escalier: "In my day (usenet), we didn't have links--and we liked it." (old SNL joke for those who don't get it).
This conversation has 2 angles I find very interesting. The first is the whole question of quality of the content. Google is a huge AI trying to give you the same quality of information that you'd select if you looked at the same (millions of) sources. At first, I liked netcan's answer[1], which says essentially, nofollow them all or none, Google will sort out its own. But the more I think about it, the more context that sites can provide automatically, the better. If a site can say "this content provided by untrusted source" (because we're a community-driven site, and we can't police everything), that's a help to Google's Algorithm. Google is free to still follow the link and perhaps, using it's other knowledge of the target, assign a trustworthiness score to the nofollow quality on the original site. If a good community is providing good links, but the website owner still marks them nofollow, that might become a badge of honor in Google eyes (all-crawling robot tentacles?).
As a side note, I love how everybody, from slimy SEO to internet ethicist, is trying to guess Google's secret formula (it used to be Coca-Cola that had a secret formula that was releveant). Google is essentially the unknowable proto-God of this new information universe.
The other interesting topic is getting paid for content. My first reaction to the OP was "wah, wah, OP doesn't want to pay for his little corner of the internet." Let's face it, the internet doesn't run for free (hardware and electricity), and the content that attracts people doesn't write itself. StackOverflow provides a community for people to deliver their content into and receive socaial rewards. If SO can't do that because of some quirk of SEO, then it's likely it wouldn't be able to host the community anymore. The internet has still not figured out a way to pay for that other than advertizing (the forcing of unwanted content on readers). But advertizing only works if you can keep track of views and stay on top of the SEO game. I totally agree they're hypocrites for hoarding the follows (must follow to us be we nofollow to everyone), but how's that different from a corporate board's fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize the profit of the company? I also think cheald[2] makes a very good point about why the dynamics must be towards nofollow. The question is then how involved or committed are you to the community, and how do you feel rewarded for the time you contribute to it.
This conversation has 2 angles I find very interesting. The first is the whole question of quality of the content. Google is a huge AI trying to give you the same quality of information that you'd select if you looked at the same (millions of) sources. At first, I liked netcan's answer[1], which says essentially, nofollow them all or none, Google will sort out its own. But the more I think about it, the more context that sites can provide automatically, the better. If a site can say "this content provided by untrusted source" (because we're a community-driven site, and we can't police everything), that's a help to Google's Algorithm. Google is free to still follow the link and perhaps, using it's other knowledge of the target, assign a trustworthiness score to the nofollow quality on the original site. If a good community is providing good links, but the website owner still marks them nofollow, that might become a badge of honor in Google eyes (all-crawling robot tentacles?).
As a side note, I love how everybody, from slimy SEO to internet ethicist, is trying to guess Google's secret formula (it used to be Coca-Cola that had a secret formula that was releveant). Google is essentially the unknowable proto-God of this new information universe.
The other interesting topic is getting paid for content. My first reaction to the OP was "wah, wah, OP doesn't want to pay for his little corner of the internet." Let's face it, the internet doesn't run for free (hardware and electricity), and the content that attracts people doesn't write itself. StackOverflow provides a community for people to deliver their content into and receive socaial rewards. If SO can't do that because of some quirk of SEO, then it's likely it wouldn't be able to host the community anymore. The internet has still not figured out a way to pay for that other than advertizing (the forcing of unwanted content on readers). But advertizing only works if you can keep track of views and stay on top of the SEO game. I totally agree they're hypocrites for hoarding the follows (must follow to us be we nofollow to everyone), but how's that different from a corporate board's fiduciary duty to shareholders to maximize the profit of the company? I also think cheald[2] makes a very good point about why the dynamics must be towards nofollow. The question is then how involved or committed are you to the community, and how do you feel rewarded for the time you contribute to it.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4777260 [2] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4774888