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Wikipedia co-founder slams the ‘appalling’ internet

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

#101

Post by y4mi »

bilbo0s wrote: post #47
rabidrat wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatekeeping is the only way communities can keep themselves healthy. There is no such thing as a universal 'community'. From day one, life has been about letting in certain elements, and keeping out others. Without this selection, development and differentiation are impossible. Similarly we don't (and shouldn't) let every person into our homes, or our countries, or our servers. Why is it seen as an obvious truth that…

> Why is it seen as an obvious truth that we should allow every single person onto the Internet, without ever being able to remove them?... Because it is obvious. Everyone should be able to access the internet. Now, do the various internet communities have a right to ban people they don't want around? Yes. Absolutely. However, that's not "gate keeping", it's more accurately called Freedom of Association and the gover…

Uuh, that kind of content is legal in the USA? Are you sure? I mean it's a pretty common theme in your movies and shows for people to be incarcerated for owning that kind of content.

But I'm not American... So I guess I'm just surprised. It's thankfully illegal where I'm at.

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

#102

Post by agoodthrowaway »

polskibus wrote: post #73
decasteve wrote: post #50

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?

I am into motorcycles and so there are plenty of forums for that. In the Bay Area we have 2 active forums. A problem is that Facebook has eroded it a bit. I also mountain bike and there are also forums for that. One of my favorites is a garage forum for people who deck out their garages. Cool to see concepts people come up with for garage workshops. All those sites seem supported through ads related to the specific topic.

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

#103

Post by rolha-capoeira »

gmfawcett wrote: post #69
rolha-capoeira wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gatekeeping is the only way communities can keep themselves healthy. There is no such thing as a universal 'community'. [That's not the kind of gatekeeping I meant, but to your statement...] According to whom? That's one social philosophy, I suppose, but I'd call it more anti-social. From day one, [human] life has been about sticking together to accomplish more than the sum of our parts. Outcasts aside, the idea th…

If the Vandals were at the gates, would you invite them into your community? Or would you rather live until tomorrow? From day-one, humans have had to deal with the very real threat of other humans trying to kill them. Unless you subscribe to a social-Darwinist belief that the strongest tribe can rightfully wipe out or absorb every one of its enemies -- and the weaker tribes deserve to go -- your morality must reckon…

Feels like we've jumped the shark a bit, from talking about a free and open global Internet to talking about Vandals wanting to conquer our tribe?

Obviously, we should keep people out that want to end our way of life, but that isn't where this conversation should be going. The original comment was talking about the privilege of early internet usage and escapism. And so to bring it back around, I can understand the nostalgia but I think wishing that the "rest" of the world would stop messing up "our" internet is a terrible thing to wish.

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

#104

Post by anon1m0us »

hirundo wrote: post #20
iamsb wrote: 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.

> I also strongly encourage him to look at state of wikipedia moderations. I think that the solution is similar to what he's proposing for the social networks: decentralization. One example would be to take hint from github, and allow articles to be forked when they reach some threshold of editing warfare. Embrace and aggregate partisan takes rather pursuing the noble but chimeric goal of neutrality.

They say the winner writes the history. That must mean their is a loser's perspective too. Wikipedia could have both.

I remember watching a BBC documentary about the history of the American Revolution -- it was very different than what I was taught in the USA.

Read Ishmael as well. Similar take on, according to some, all of history.

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

#105

Post by hombre_fatal »

AlexandrB wrote: post #21
throwaway8879 wrote: post #7

I'm going to take a cynical stand and claim that the internet as the greybeards envisioned decades ago is just not going to happen. Or perhaps happened for a short window in the early 2000s. I don't see how we can just turn things around. Something new will pop up in a few years, limited within hacker circles, perhaps in a medium beyond computers/phones. It'll have all the nice qualities that we seek such as privacy,…

This kind of repetition is inevitable because there's no technological solution to systemic social problems. An internet like the greybeards envisioned would require changes to our political and economic systems to remove (or at least lessen) the incentives to muck it all up in service of money or power.

There’s also just human nature in general, like our penchant for outrage and world-view confirmation.

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

#106

Post by arthurcolle »

merpnderp wrote: post #63
decasteve wrote: post #50

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.

This! The internet outside of the big tech/media sites is mostly the same - maybe even a bit smaller and more communal. Although there’s no escaping modern advertising without using aggressive ad blocking.

Especially now that you are actually barred from some venues unless you allow them on the whitelist... Hope ad blocking manages to catch up soon.

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

#107

Post by SkyBelow »

rolha-capoeira wrote: post #16
everdrive wrote: post #12

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…

I hear you. But this teeters dangerously close to gatekeeping, elitism, or something along those lines. I'm sure you didn't mean it that way, but I think how others feel after reading our comments does matter. Better put, because everyone is on the internet now, the real world's problems are now the internet's problems. It used to serve as an escape, true. It has made the world a smaller place, where problems from a…

>But this teeters dangerously close to gatekeeping

Why is gatekeeping something that one can be dangerously close to?

I gatekeep who my friends are. We gatekeep who our employers are. We gatekeep what actions we find acceptable from our children.

Gatekeeping is a form of discrimination, and while that has become a four letter word due to specific forms of discrimination that have caused massive amounts of harm, every day we engage in extremely reasonable forms of discriminating. Every day we make value judgments based on the information provided. Every day we use stereotypes that were built off of incomplete data but work well enough.

When I'm picking up cookies at the cookie store, I don't judge the individual cookie on its own merits. I stereotype it based on who produced it. Yes, this current batch could be horrendous, but without the ability to sample that batch directly there isn't any better information than judging it based on past experiences of similarly branded cookies from the same bakery.

Yes, sometimes our stereotypes and judgments we make based on incomplete information hurt others. We need to be guarded against it to ensure we don't cause others undue harm. But if I and others want to form a small community where only people who understand the joke "There is no place like 127.0.0.1." can join, is there really a problem with that?

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

#108

Post by ticmasta »

polskibus wrote: post #73
decasteve wrote: post #50

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?

HA! - I don't think you intended to make this joke but if you did, Kudos!

If we give the HN hug to enough niche sites, maybe they'll pick up their SEO game, improve the ranking and start optimizing for the big ad dollars :)

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

#109

Post by nsajko »

iamsb wrote: 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.

Larry Sanger left Wikipedia more than ten years ago, and has been critical of its accuracy for longer than that.

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

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

#110

Post by skybrian »

krapp wrote: post #59
braythwayt wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a fundamental difference between "Everyone should be allowed on the Internet," and, "Everyone should be allowed onto every social media site." Or, "Everyone on a social media site should be encouraged to interact with everyone else." For example, maybe everybody should be able to read the President's tweets. But should Twitter necessarily be such that everybody can reply to the President's tweets? At this po…

>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…

I'm not sure this counts as meaningful communication? It's similar to how everyone can send a letter to their representative, but staffers mostly just classify them as pro or con on whatever issue you're writing about.

Regardless of medium, many-to-one communication using freeform text doesn't scale. If you structure it, it's basically a poll.

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