Ok, not really, but close.
Making the headline less sensational, it's more of why spammers ruined Web2.0, and why Facebook has seen its meteoric rise in popularity.
If you use the Internet on a somewhat regular basis, then you're probably the kind of person that uses search engines as opposed to typing www.whateveritisimlookingfor.com. And if you use search engines, then you've definitely heard of Google.
Well, just a little bit of background, the way that Google works, and most other search engines now, is through something called PageRank. PageRank is an authority metric that states how important a particular site is. The metric is calculated based on the number of incoming links to a particular page/site. A-ha, very cool in theory, and precisely why Google has risen to the top of the search market, but what happens when you combine the OPEN knowledge of PageRank, to the OPEN nature of the Internet introduced with Web2.0?
SPAM.
Lots and lots of SPAM.
Now every Tom, Dick and Harry with some crap-ass website is going out and finding any comment box, any text field, ANYTHING that they can post their www address to and get some link juice. There's a whole multi-million dollar market out there for people who call themselves "Link Ninjas".
Here on ProductWiki we deal with it everyday. At least once or twice a day, some smart-ass jerk posts a ton of stupid crap with a bunch of links to their stupid sites. Why? Because it works! So of course people are going to do it.
Search engine placement = money, and links = high search engine placement, so each link is worth money. On this site most of the moderation is dealt with removing the spam, so things are pretty good around here. But if you ever go to a Web2.0 site that ISN'T well moderated, and you'll be sick with how much crap there is on it. I think that's precisely why people are being turned off by the whole content sharing thing in general.
So, what about Facebook? Well, Facebook is an extremely private site that doesn't let the search engines index its content. Meaning: most of the content inside of Facebook is completely invisible to the search engines, and that means links as well. And this is precisely why Facebook has not been inundated with spammers putting links on everybody's wall. Which in turn makes Facebook a nice and clean environment to stalk your friends on.
Now it's obvious that Google is taking measures to reduce the importance of links. They introduced a band-aid solution of NoFollow which just ended up making every single damn link on the Internet be a NoFollow link. Except for the sites that are all owned by the same company (Fox, etc) so of course they get a nice and high PR and thus search engine placement. But are they the most useful?
I think there was definitely a golden-age to the Internet, and to Google's search engine results in around 2004 or so. Spam was there, but it wasn't AS bad. And generally information was actually somewhat easier to find.
So what's the solution? Well if it was up to me, I'd make ProductWiki the top result of every search :) For better or worse, it's not up to me. Instead there's a team of hundreds of PhDs working on the problem, so we'll see what they come up with.
I just hope that the NEW search engines don't reward spamming community sites, and lets people talk and share information without fear of jerks spoiling the fun. Then the promise of Web2.0 and information sharing can really come about.
