Probably ignoring hacker news and neocities.
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
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Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#12[flagged]
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#13I 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?
in SO cases they became moderators and/or worked their way into the company in paid positions of authority
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#14[dead]
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#15> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change.
Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher
A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds. So you have every newspaper say something like X is a [y]ist, and Wikipedia states it as fact with a lot of sources [1][2][3]. But it's all the same people
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#16People 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…
These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone.
One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view).
Without some coordination mechanism, it seems a a bit too divided. It's unclear to me what the appropriate mechanism is, but I think that's the right sort of way to frame the problem.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#17Wikipedia is good? I find it a mix of good info and blatantly slanted. Not even just in political articles.
> cambridge.org
Ah, say no more
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#18I 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…
This sounds interesting please could you share a link if you find it?
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#19I 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?
Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms.
basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#20[flagged]