Live data from Hacker News

Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

shkspr.mobi

51–60 of 282 posts

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#52
post #18
post #14

Completely tangential, I never understand why people use URI instead of URL. He obviously means URL and goes an abstraction lower. You could also say without the corresponding internet uniquely scheme or whatever. Sorry for the rant. But I am missing something?

The difference between URI and URL is practically meaningless except to a very small circle of specialists. Noone uses the name "URI", even when they are talking about one. Except if they explicitly want to signal their membership in that circle of experts.

Am I wrong to suppose that L is locator and I is indicator, thus I being a more broadly term and a somewhat nerdy term for Source?

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#53
post #48
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure where you got the impression that I wanted people to clean up misinformation from the web. That certainly wasn't my intent. Perhaps you and I move in different social circles - but I get a lot of forwarded "claims" on WhatsApp and Twitter. Well-meaning people who see an image with some text on it and send it to their friends & family. My blog post is mostly aimed at them - showing how easy it can be to c…

I find much of that sort of instant messaging communication is less about informing others and is more about social signalling. The sender is asking for emotional support and social solidarity.

What are you basing that on?

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#54

Judge me all you want, but I would have clicked on "dirty hippy vibes"... Honestly, I don't really believe in ubiquitous misinformation being as a large problem as it is made out to be. Everyone arguing for more content regulation had their own motivations or was in some kind of panic. There will always be people misinformed on the net. Doesn't mean I want a babysitter cleaning everything up, even if I thought they w…

That would make sense for anyone who doesn’t think democracy is worth preserving, or doesn’t know the dependency it has on the degree to which citizens are informed. Brandolini’s Law implies that there is a latency between disinformation and its disinfection via sunlight that can be exploited to tip elections. Some of us aren’t so eager to see the whole world turn into a collection of authoritarian mafia states.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#55
Any claim with a URI should also be treated with suspicion.

There is plenty of reliable information locked away in offline books and government documents and all kinds of other non Google-able locations. This is true even for brand new information (which is why we continue to have “leaks”). Meanwhile there is plenty of misinformation with URIs.

I would go so far as to say online status is almost orthogonal to accuracy, except that in theory at least online information is more readily disproven.

(Never mind that the whole core example of the article is off. The sketchy unsourced image also has a URI.)

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#57
post #14

Completely tangential, I never understand why people use URI instead of URL. He obviously means URL and goes an abstraction lower. You could also say without the corresponding internet uniquely scheme or whatever. Sorry for the rant. But I am missing something?

All URLs are URIs (as other people have noted), but the distinction is less important as time goes on. I think W3C's "URIs, URLs, and URNs: Clarifications and Recommendations 1.0"[0] does a good job explaining the reasons why. Additionally, it mentions the proposed, but never accepted, Universal Resource Citation (URC). Sounds like just what social media needs these days!

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/#classical

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#58
post #22
post #14

Completely tangential, I never understand why people use URI instead of URL. He obviously means URL and goes an abstraction lower. You could also say without the corresponding internet uniquely scheme or whatever. Sorry for the rant. But I am missing something?

I'm the author of the blog post. It's a good question but, yes, you are missing something. Mostly me being an idiot. https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/it-is-spelled-url/ I usually spell it upper-u upper-r lower-L specifically to annoy both sides of the argument. (I'm not sure why the submitter substituted the l for I.)

LOL! That's hilarious, love the URl, you could take it a step further with UR1.

Anyway, digged your article, hope I didn't come off as pedantic, thanks for taking it with humor :)

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#59
I hate URL fights.

I give little extra value to people providing links with their clams.

I largely given up providing links to information when called out as well. It's not worth the time.

Discussion on the internet is broken in most places (HN is less broken than most). I find little value providing URLs. Much of the time I provide them, few folks seem to read it, fewer actually want to read it in an intellectually honest way and usually they respond with some bonkers links of their own that don't say what they think they're saying.

Much (not all) of the time I've given up providing links to basic information it doesn't change the conversation in any meaningful way. It's usually just an argument where folks who feel like URLs are some sort of scoring device.

I get the idea put forward here, but I don't know if it makes sense in an age where you can find an URL that says anything and discussion on the internet is so bad that nobody is really reading them anyway.

Re: Any claim without a URI should be treated as suspicious

#60

Judge me all you want, but I would have clicked on "dirty hippy vibes"... Honestly, I don't really believe in ubiquitous misinformation being as a large problem as it is made out to be. Everyone arguing for more content regulation had their own motivations or was in some kind of panic. There will always be people misinformed on the net. Doesn't mean I want a babysitter cleaning everything up, even if I thought they w…

The majority of “misinformation” I’ve seen (entirely on reddit) isn’t straight up lies. It’s more like reposting an old article on a current topic or leaving out information.

When Harvard announced remote class plans, Reddit had a front page article on r/all about it - but it was an article that was a month old about their old plan.

It would be so easy for people to read that title (old info), have their friend ask if they saw the news about Harvard, and then have basically been manipulated by misinformation.

Post reply on HN