Live data from Hacker News

How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

cambridge.org

1–10 of 669 posts

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#2
People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it.

* Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit.

* Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net.

* If you can, host your own instances and federate.

* Look into alternative search engines like marginalia to find "small-web" content

* Talk to your friends to also make the move or at least look at alternatives to the large sites.

We can't just wait for the problem to fix itself, this is something where internet users have to become active. It won't solve itself.

EDIT: Commenters here are rightly saying that discoverability is a problem. Again, relying on search engines is required for productivity, but when we consider browsing for research or leisure, don't underestimate manually curated link pages. Webrings were a thing we might wanna consider again.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#4
I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#6

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#7

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact.

(I have zero idea about the actual numbers)

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#9
post #4

I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics whic…

Didn't that backfire anyway?

Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

Post reply on HN