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The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

christianheilmann.com

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Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#121

Post by 6510 »

hobs wrote: post #78
_Algernon_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of videos on youtube that have been removed. Every few years when I look through my list of liked videos, a couple more are gone forever. Granted, this is likely by the creator themselves, but that doesn't matter when the purpose is archival.

On a playlist of about 27 thousand videos (me and my cohorts links to each other over ~8 years) I observe about 10% missing, its a lot! Most of these are not information but amusing, random, short videos, and of course some of it is account deletions/disabling - copyright strikes - and people taking down their own stuff, but still, a lot!

here 2000+ subs 1900+ channels gone

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#123

Post by 6510 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #118
ricardobeat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

> you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared Isn't most of it on the wayback machine?

if you are researching something you need 100%, what I wrote 10 years ago with access to 80% has now turned into bullshit with < 20% available.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#124

Post by makeitdouble »

mudrockbestgirl wrote: post #27
Tenoke wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People also used to be confidently wrong all the time before the internet was ubiquitous, except then it was hard to quickly verify they were.

True, but a difference is that they could not spread their confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally, and that opinions were tied to their identity. Take my mom for example. She's 80 years old and doesn't use the internet that much. She is confidently wrong about a lot of things she sees on TV or hears on the radio. A recent example is COVID misinformation. The difference is that my mom can't easily influence…

> True, but a difference is that they could not spread their confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally, and that opinions were tied to their identity.

The content producer - audience ratio was just different, a dumb line from a journalist would definitely have an outsized reach that go well beyond what the writer might have expected.

As you note, even today people with a global reach aren’t that many: I could be shouting a lot of thing on top of my soap box, I’d probably not be actually reaching more than a few dozen people, and we have enough content for the effect of a single person to be vastly diluted.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#125

Post by molasses »

I was reading some tech article the other day. Something like 10 best Foos or something. And there was no date on it. A commenter said, great article but no date, and the author replied that the page was refreshed with evergreen content. You'd have had to be a mind reader to know that. But I guess at least I got my answer via a little Q and A on the page.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#126

Post by this2shallPass »

denton-scratch wrote: post #70
morpheos137 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever is the conventions of the day.

I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of politics and history, and really any field where facts aren't settled and feelings are strong. Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g. read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon learn that some topic has been taken over by P…

> Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose.

Is there good evidence for this claim? Evidence is useful, especially for these claims of general bias.

On the contrary, in general Wikipedia's content is likely biased against Israel when considering its general overall political preferences / bias.

> 5 Studies Find Wikipedia Bias

> Five studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia:

> * A Harvard study found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica.

> * Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site.

> * A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing.

> * Another analysis using AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets.

> * American academics found conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement.

From: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#128

Post by legrande »

masa331 wrote: post #43

I don't get how the author can value all the things in the article and yet work at Microsoft on a bloatware like Edge which is not possible to remove, is pushed hard by Windows against other browsers and used as a part of a giant ads engine in itself

I don't see the unique selling point of Edge. It's just a re-skin of Chromium with Microsoft tracking added. It's largely a data grab by M$.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#129

Post by fny »

ricardobeat wrote: post #11
nicbou wrote: post #5

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great . But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few…

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

You absolutely can read news from 10 even 20 even 100 years ago.

One example: https://news.google.com/newspapers

I think you forget or may not have grown up with the microfiche.

The reality of the internet is that everyone has a voice and things will only be archived if someone gives a damn to archive them. And that's fine. Some information deserves to be transient. Hell, we've survived millennia without this level of information storage. Does every single YouTube video, Reddit post, and Flickr photo really need to live forever? No. Would it be nice? Sure.

Re: The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web

#130

Post by yamtaddle »

VHRanger wrote: post #90
grumbel wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have to worry abo…

> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are still alive and well. They're not, though. Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years, with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each time the videos get successively worse. Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it did in 2008 because of all the lossy compress…

I know the norm when I read an article more than a year or two old that has tons of YouTube embeds is for most or all of them to show a "video gone" error. Sometimes even ones that are weeks old are like that.

It seems to be at least as bad as the rest of the web as far as data/link rot goes.

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