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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

#51

Post by Grumbledour »

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.

But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services.

How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?

I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.

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

#52

Post by veltas »

Angostura wrote: post #34
Namari wrote: post #8

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

This is a common complaint against many publications or resources that attempt unbiased coverage - they are are attacked by people on all sides as being biased against their side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

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

#53

Post by throwawaaarrgh »

This isn't really controversial. People create institutions, so people leaving or joining can create institutional change. What's weird is that they frame leaving as a force for good, when this is the exception, not the rule. Usually when people are running away from an institution it doesn't get better.

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

#54

Post by dschep »

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.

You can kinda get that from microblog.pub. It federates via ActivityPub and is a single-user customizable micro&macro blog. https://docs.microblog.pub/user_guide.html#customization

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

#55

Post by vasco »

z7 wrote: post #47

>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. Bein…

Wikipedia's articles can be updated along with scientific progress. Wikipedia would only be in trouble if they held articles back compared to contemporaneous scientific knowledge. Not sure what your point is other than that scientific progress is a thing and consensus on how things work evolves over time as we figure things out.

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

#56

Post by sanex »

hliyan wrote: post #43
CuriouslyC wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 othe…

I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.

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

#57

Post by altcognito »

z7 wrote: post #47

>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. Bein…

> Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience.

So just throw all theory/hypothesis in the same bucket because one might be true? You can't cherry pick one thing that happened to be true and say "it is wrong to label that pseudoscience" There are a lot of bad theories and hypothesis out there.

Clathrate gun hypothesis is just that, and should be labeled as such.

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

#59

Post by jlund-molfese »

pcf wrote: post #28

[flagged]

Don’t do this! AI-generated responses increase the noise:signal ratio and are banned on HN [1]

They tend to take up a massive amount of space in the discussion, obscuring more insightful human-generated comments.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747

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

#60

Post by unpopularopp »

Zambyte wrote: post #42
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse

>Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore

But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.

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