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Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

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Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#191
post #66

Silly question but on facebook/twitter, most of the fake news I'm getting isn't from ads but from random people I've added over the years that are sharing a bunch of crap. The fact that they'd be paying to access that social network wouldn't change what they're sharing on it.. or would it?

Is being exposed to fake news hurting you, or is being tracked?

Yes.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really any different than most cases. Think Elon Musk started Tesla or SpaceX? Nope, he bought in just like Jimmy.

Musk didn't found Tesla and is (somewhat inappropriately) labeled as a cofounder, but joined in Series A as an investor. But he very much did build SpaceX from nothing (well, his Paypal money), and his unconventional approach is responsible for their success.

It's also questionable whether Tesla Motors would have had the same impact (or even survived) without Musk's efforts and leadership. They were making a very niche sports car at the time that was basically hand built. Musk is the one that got them to a mainstream commercial product.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#194
This article is all over the place. It can't possibly be that everyone is expected to pay around $10 a month because:

1. Obviously almost nobody is going to be prepared to pay that, and

2. He wouldn't be talking about it not making a profit and having bare-bones staff if every one of a predicted 50-500 million users was going to paying that amount, just to run a social network, because he'd need an army of staff just shoveling money of the window to avoid making a profit on those figures.

So it must be that it's donation based, but then again how does a monthly donation to jump a waiting list work? Do you go outside and rejoin the queue if you stop donating?

The article is all very confused, and obviously the site itself doesn't help matters.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#195

I always shake my head when Jimmy Wales is given so much credit for founding Wikipedia, while what he did was supply the money for it from the profit he made off his soft-core porn business, while Larry Sanger (who deserves most of the credit, including coming up with the name Wikipedia, with Wikipedia's most distinctive feature -- the so-called Neutral Point of View, and with managing the site itself) is virtually f…

These arguments about who's more important than who are usually pretty pointless. You should begin with a measure of importance and then use it in an unbiased way to evaluate people. It should give results you agree with no matter who you apply it to. Is funding something more important than founding it? Is doing unpaid work more important than paying for work? Who knows without any criteria, but coming up with a name surely ranks pretty low by anyone's standard.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#196

And build with.. oh donated money. Now we can donate more again :) Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ? Oh, please. I would rather use good ol' VK before these CIA books

> Is anybody worrying how much Wikipedia pages are hiding researchers results ?

Got an example you'd like to cite? Tried searching on my own, couldn't find anything off hand.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't really any different than most cases. Think Elon Musk started Tesla or SpaceX? Nope, he bought in just like Jimmy.

Musk didn't found Tesla and is (somewhat inappropriately) labeled as a cofounder, but joined in Series A as an investor. But he very much did build SpaceX from nothing (well, his Paypal money), and his unconventional approach is responsible for their success.

Musk absolutely should take credit for Tesla as it exists today.

The Tesla he bought into was just a research project. It was nowhere near the global brand it is today nor were they on a trajectory that would have put them anywhere close to where they are today. It was his vision that made it possible at all.

Similar to the founding story of McDonald's. Ray Croc bought the idea and made McDonald's what it is today. He didn't actually start the original 6 burger restaurants named McDonald's.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#198
post #177

I usually donate to Wikimedia every year, and I was a donator for WikiTribune and followed it closely as it rolled out. I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet. Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventua…

> I personally think that Wikipedia is one of the most valuable resources on the internet.

I would say it's the most important resource on the internet, beyond actual infrastructure like DNS.

> Watching WikiTribune flounder in its early days left me feeling disillusioned. It quickly began to seem like a project lacking clear product vision (or else a team that could execute on such a vision). I eventually gave up waiting for the service to become useful as a daily news source and wrote it off.

Me too - I donated in total about £200 since WikiTribune launched, and hoped with Jimmy Wales behind it that it could really take off. I like this pivot though, and believe the whole community-sourced content idea is better suited to a social media type site rather than a heavily hacked WordPress blog.

Re: Jimmy Wales has quietly launched a Facebook rival

#200
post #194

This article is all over the place. It can't possibly be that everyone is expected to pay around $10 a month because: 1. Obviously almost nobody is going to be prepared to pay that, and 2. He wouldn't be talking about it not making a profit and having bare-bones staff if every one of a predicted 50-500 million users was going to paying that amount, just to run a social network, because he'd need an army of staff just…

I got an early invite because I donated to WikiTribune; I'm not sure if that meant I skipped some payment sign-up page, but I wasn't required to pay anything to obtain access wt.social.
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