Jason Calacanis replies to (one) of my concerns with Mahalo

I reviewed the launch of the new human directory called Mahalo yesterday. In it, I discuss four of my concerns with this new directory. I posted my review on the Wikia search mailing list and (much to my shock) Jason replied. I thought ya'all might be interested in what he had to say.

In response to my review, he replied with the following (my emphasis):

only critical review?!?! you're kidding right? the SEO slimebuckets are going crazy saying this will never work (I wonder why... :-)

if you want to do a real review I suggest taking our search pages and compare them to Google, Yahoo, and Ask. Your review doesn't really do that.

That being said we only have 4,000 pages and it's like Wikipedia in year one... we've got a long way to go. In a year when there are 10,000+ it will make more sense. also, you have nothing to lose if you use mahalo: we show google if we dont have a response--so nothing
lost, and a huge gain if we have a hit!

j

Since he did not address any of my concerns, I submitted the following to the mailing list:

Jason,

It would be great for you to provide responses to the 4 points I mention in my review. And you should know that calling people names behind their backs would never be allowed on the handball court in bay ridge. Especially since your site could become the next "experts-exchange" and since you appear to want to own the seo space, the same space you claim is dead.

I understand how your service works and whether you have 4k or 10k, it will work the same. Perhaps you can provide this mailing list with the RTB and other benefits that you sold the investors for Mahalo.

-- Allen

Jason promptly replied with the following (my emphasis):

My point about seo is that it is gaming the system and done by weak people who have sites that shouldn't rank high. We are not trying to seo--we are trying to help people avoid bad sites and find good ones.

We hope seo dies--quickly. I'm afraid it will be slow however.

Seo means making your sites better for search engines. Mahalo fights against that--we reward people who optimize their sites for humans.  :)

Seo will be a footnote in the history of searxh in five years. Jimmy wales and his team, and the team at mahalo.com will end this nonsense in short order.

Mahalo and wikia FTW!!!

J

Unfortunately he did not answer three of my concerns nor share the information that he shared with his investors on why this is such a great play. Jason has a pattern of calling SEO people names and while there are a ton of horribly unethical SEO people out there, there are an equally good amount of people who are doing good things in the space. He claims that SEO is not for Mahalo but won't directly answer my question. And I have no idea what he means by "optimize by humans".