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Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

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Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#91

Avoid the mainstream media, advertising-centric sites, social media, et al, and the Internet is mostly fine. Stick to the niche sites and services that have always been there and it’s a much more pleasant place.

Any particular niche sites that you have in mind and could recommend to others?

My friends host a RocketChat instance with maybe 20 or 30 active users. It's invite-only though, so I can't really recommend it in particular online. But these places exist, and you could consider spawning one and growing it to your preferred size. Our "treehouse" has been pretty great for hanging out and reminds me of the days when IRC was more of a thing.

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#92
post #57
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked Twitter before it was popular. Being liberal with blocks works but eventually you realise you are spending more time curating your experience than actually enjoying the website.

Hardly. I only follow ~50ish people, of which I only interact regularly with ~9ish. I only block a few people a day max.

I liked Twitter before Twitter decided that advertisers and "trending topics" and virality were more important than personal curation. The out-of-order timeline with forced ads and both Likes and Replies becoming less deterministic retweets were some of the last straws for me.

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#93

Avoid the mainstream media, advertising-centric sites, social media, et al, and the Internet is mostly fine. Stick to the niche sites and services that have always been there and it’s a much more pleasant place.

Any particular niche sites that you have in mind and could recommend to others?

Ravelry is a lovely social network for knitters, crotchers, and spinners.

It's a relatively small site, but it's a model for how social networks should work. Because it's built around a shared interest that people spend money on, the site can sell ad slots instead of relying on real-time bidding based ad networks.

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#94

The internet was much nicer before most people were using it. We usually focus on the technology problems here at HN: filter bubbles, skinner box addictive UIs and content feeds, algorithmic and centralized control. Has anyone simply wondered if the problem with the internet is fundamentally that everyone's on it? It used to be an escape from the problems of the real world. Now it's just a new way for the problems of…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that can't happen to Facebook now the way it happened to MySpace. Facebook has too much money. At this point Facebook and Google essentially own the advertising business on the Internet. With that kind of money, they can just buy competitors.

That is true. Which is why the alternative needs to be grass-roots, good enough, and not for profit. It has to be a mission, rather than a corporation. I am curious to see if this can happen....

It will also have to be something cool and exclusive for a while, and not something your dad is allowed to use. That's the thing these "new social networking platforms" are missing: the original cachet of Facebook was that you could only get on it if you had a .edu email address like you would if you were in college. It was cool because college students were on it, sharing their very similar college experiences with each other and basically using it to hook up.

Tinder worked very well for 20-somethings as well because they had figured out that 20-somethings are usually not looking for a deep, meaningful relationship right out of the gate. So they required you to tell your story in pictures, and they eliminated the 3000-word deep and meaningful profiles that people still dating in their 30s and 40s are using. So it almost immediately excluded your dad from using it. And it had a lot of cachet because of that exclusivity.

The thing that made Google+ not cool was that its major enthusiasts were the kind of insufferable tech dweebs that would take pictures of themselves wearing Google Glass in the shower with their Pixel phone. That's very much a dad thing to do, and it's the wrong kind of exclusivity.

So if we want a really good social network to replace Facebook, it has to A) not be full of insufferable tech dweebs, and B) be exclusive by way of not being full of parents on day 1. I'm certainly too old to start something meeting those requirements.

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#96
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But should Twitter necessarily be such that everybody can reply to the President's tweets? The ability to directly and freely communicate with leaders (and for them to communicate with one another) is incredibly revolutionary. It is unfortunate that Twitter, of all places, a site whose entire purpose is top-of-mind contextless microblogging, is where this revolution is taking place, and that the President in questio…

Hilarious thing is, this inanity is preserved for eternity. A century from now, kids will be able to look back at perfectly preserved absurdity of this age.

Or they'll be too busy coming up with inanity of their own to pay attention to "100 year old memes".

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#97
post #9
post #4

I agree with Larry about abuse by Facebook and Twitter. I also strongly encourage him to look at state of wikipedia moderations. Specially in a country like India. Lot of pages related to political content is moderated by people who are deeply partisan and have no respect for facts.

> state of wikipedia moderations I'm glad others are keeping an eye on this issue. It is incredibly ironic to me that anyone in a leadership role at Wikipedia would criticize Zuckerberg or Dorsey. It's not even just political content, it's getting to the point where history is being actively re-written and re-interpreted to match a radical narrative. In some sort of temporal example of humour, I've gone back to recom…

It's not even just political content or history. Take for example economics:

There is an article about economics, obviously. And in its "criticism" section there is a long paragraph about criticism of economics from a feminist point of view.

However wikipedia also has an article about feminist economics. Which is almost equal in length to the article about economics in general. And if you go to the feminist economics page - there is no criticism section. But you can open the talk page, and there is a discussion, where editors argue that criticism hurts the neutrality of the article and should not be added there.

It just doesn't seem impartial to me.

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#98
I have really, really soured on Wikipedia over time. I find the site has gotten worse and less compelling, and contributing to it is a massive slough that nobody sane would undertake at this point.

This is a decent writeup of some of the issues:

https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#99

The internet was much nicer before most people were using it. We usually focus on the technology problems here at HN: filter bubbles, skinner box addictive UIs and content feeds, algorithmic and centralized control. Has anyone simply wondered if the problem with the internet is fundamentally that everyone's on it? It used to be an escape from the problems of the real world. Now it's just a new way for the problems of…

Yes it’s been considered. And it was a very different place indeed.

But you are confusing nostalgia with genuine concerns Such as privacy and addiction fed and perfected by ml and massive amounts of personal data.

Re: Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

#100

The internet was much nicer before most people were using it. We usually focus on the technology problems here at HN: filter bubbles, skinner box addictive UIs and content feeds, algorithmic and centralized control. Has anyone simply wondered if the problem with the internet is fundamentally that everyone's on it? It used to be an escape from the problems of the real world. Now it's just a new way for the problems of…

The internet is the way it is right now for the same reason that you don't just let anyone and everyone into a club. When you destroy the barrier to entry, you get a bunch of totally uncool people who kill the mood, talk about really lame shit, start fights, get blackout/piss-pants drunk, and vandalize property. Indeed, the internet once was a lot more like a club; even in the late 90's and early 2000s when I began u…

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