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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

#41

Post by js8 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #16
bad_alloc wrote: post #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 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 mechani…

I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership.

I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)

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

#42

Post by Zambyte »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #6
bad_alloc wrote: post #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 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.

You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse. If you don't want to see those posts, stop looking for them.

Join a moderated instance. Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore.

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

#43

Post by hliyan »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22
bad_alloc wrote: post #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 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 h…

Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not.

Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.

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

#44

Post by jampekka »

aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #12

[flagged]

What's the problem with constructivism? Should wikipedia be somehow restricted to e.g. positivist or objectivist or perhaps platonian views of knowledge?

There's plenty of criticism of identity politics in wikipedia (and from the left as well). Wikipedia's philosophical origins are objectivistic if something, but I don't think this shows either.

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

#45

Post by LastTrain »

Namari wrote: post #8

It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.

Every bit of content has a POV, there is no getting around that. Neutral POV is the Wikipedia ideal - one they work towards but will never reach. They do as good a job as anybody at it.

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

#46

Post by api »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22
bad_alloc wrote: post #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 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 h…

I think professional trolls, bad faith argument, toxic influencers, lynch mobs, rage bait, and all the other moving parts that make up the Internet’s profoundly toxic political and social activism sphere also did their part. That stuff really exploded in the mid 20-teens.

Of course you could consider some of that a special case of content mills and spam. It certainly can’t be separated from the ad based business model and the attention maximizing algorithms that drive it, since most of that stuff rides on the fact that being crazy or toxic maximizes engagement.

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

#47

Post by z7 »

>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories.

Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth.

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

#48

Post by linuxdeveloper »

bad_alloc wrote: post #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 a…

My pitch to the public: “Join the Fediverse and help build the weird new Internet.”

The Epsilon galaxy is a friendly outpost of services in the brave new decentralized digital universe, now known as the Fediverse. (I coined the term Fediverse “galaxy” to refer to a cluster of federated services/nodes run by a single entity, and it’s gained some traction on Mastodon).

My galaxy is completely bootstrapped, no VC investment: https://epsilon.lol

We even have our first paying customer (8 euro/ year)!

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

#49

Post by altcognito »

bko wrote: post #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 wor…

> A big problem is homogeniety in media.

Lack of viewpoints is the least of the problems with "traditional media". Fox news and MSNBC have the same, debilitating problems as NBC, CBS and ABC.

1. They cover things poorly, little depth 2. They are beholden to their sponsorship (a great non-political example is their unwavering support of particular CFB conferences) 3. They offer opinions first instead of facts 4. They are highly selective of only certain topics (Wikipedia is really broad despite having moderation) 5. Wikipedia has 120k active editors. Networks are lucky to break 1000 employees.

I think that US traditional media could do a better job, they've just catered to the LCD. There are examples of non-US media that do a solid job of maintaining NPOV and cover topics in reasonable detail without injecting overt opinions.

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

#50

Post by toyg »

derelicta wrote: post #31
bad_alloc wrote: post #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 a…

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

We had that, when feeds and pingbacks were a thing. But the masses don't want to self-host, nor do they want to learn about web stuff. Hence Facebook.
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