We are losing trust
Fake companies, fake websites, fake products… and that’s before AI slop started poisoning our sense of reality. It's getting worse every day. There's no profit in fixing this false reality.
The Internet is in crisis.
From AI slop to scam sites,
how do you know what is real?
Is the Internet dead?
Look up "dead internet theory" on YouTube — the web and social media are being flooded with bots that pretend to be real, but aren't. How can we know what is real? What if people verified what we see online?
Search sucks now
We've all been there, searching for something online and you get a bunch of sponsored links or AI nonsense. How did we screw this up? What if actual humans validated these results?
What if...?
Instead of throwing GPUs at our problems, we ran the web on "potato mode"? The Good Potato Project was inspired by the web indexes of 30 years ago. Those servers didn't destroy the planet.
How do we fix this?
People
A CATEGORICAL INDEX OF LINKS CURATED BY HUMANS, VALIDATING REALITY
We're putting together a team of people who will build an index of the web and validate that every link we put into the index is, in fact, a real person, place, thing, service, or product. A Yellow Pages for the 21st Century. The Whole Earth Catalog reborn. Yahoo from 1998. The twist, for 2026 and beyond, is that each link has been verified by humans and has extensive metadata to help people find what they are looking for.
In this way, we can not only verify "yes this thing exists and is made by people," but enhance trust, rebuild what was good about the web, and provide a backstop to the oncoming storm of unreality spawned by the rampant use of AI tools to flood the zone with a fake reality. One that sadly many have already fallen victim to believing.
The Good Potato project will operate as a non-profit entity, and contract humans to do this work (yes, we even have a validation system for onboarding contractors that establishes a web of trust within the org). Many will be information scientists, librarians, journalists, and those who are trained in parsing information systems and properly categorizing the information they find. Some may be subject matter experts. And of course, we'll need some DevOps and full stack developers.