To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.
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
#22People 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…
SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results.
What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#23Not that I don't agree. I would however rank Sci-Hub, Library Genesis and Anna's Archive higher than Wikipedia. And don't forget about Internet Archive and Arxiv.
This vast amount of high quality human knowledge was not available in the good old internet 20 years ago.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#24All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years.
Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with services designed for masses, to be used by the masses. This will drown all the interesting bits that used to be visible earlier.
The direction of development suggests that these 'good places' will be more and more scarce in the future. Further, (curiously both) privacy and surveillance laws are slowly creeping in and making it harder to freely offer services similar to those that have already died once. This further levels the playground for bigger players.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#25People 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.
This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time.
But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#26[flagged]
I suspect if you comment receives downvotes, it will be because it is verging on the incomprehensible. Seriously - I read it 3 times and I only have the haziest of ideas as to what you are trying to get at.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#27"good" is a point of view anakin.
that place is absolutely one sided and toxic
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#28[flagged]
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#29[flagged]
Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview.
As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole culture war topics and politics can really lead you down a crappy path, and it doesn't really reflect most of reality.
I hope this comes across as compassionate.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#30[flagged]
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