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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

#61

Post by StevePerkins »

tusqasi wrote: post #7
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 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)

I don't think "the majority" matter, in the context of what parent commenter is talking about. I generally subscribe to the idea of Eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where "the majority" is the root cause of the problems.

The early web was not great because capitalism didn't exist and corporations were nicer back then, etc. The early web was great because it was a subculture, driven by a niche population that was more technically savvy and prone to create rather than just consume. Today's web is poor because it is now the mainstream culture, it is driven by a wide population of casual, unsophisticated users that are prone to consume content only and are therefore best served by walled gardens.

As the casual consumer web grew, the early maker web's signal got increasingly lost in the noise. There are still interesting blogs out there, but they are harder to find and attract less engagement because even those of us from the spirit of that original web now spend so much time on platforms like Reddit (and even HN) instead.

Even if you want to produce novel content, you really HAVE to engage with the entrenched closed platforms in order to reach any audience at all now. And therefore there's little way to discriminate, if you want to attract a community of early-web minded people while avoiding the mass normies. Most attempts that try this either fizzle out altogether, or inadvertently take a wrong turn into culture wars, instead attracting alt-right trolls who think the problem with the web is too many political progressives now.

I think it is a pointless goal to try to change the entire mainstream Internet. To somehow change 2020's normies into 1990's geeks. I think the only feasible goal, and only necessary goal, is to carve out space for that geek community to thrive as a subculture once again. Honestly, "the web" itself may be an inappropriate platform for this. It may only be possible with something new that requires some technical savvy and friction in order to access, to discourage all the phone users from venturing in.

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

#62

Post by endisneigh »

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 find it very ironic that this is the top post given the centralized nature of this site.

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

#63

Post by rvbissell »

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…

> What we need is a social-first internet

* blood pressure intensifies *

> where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph

I do think that latter part is an interesting idea, modulo performance questions and echo-chamber concerns. Also, what about providing anonymity to oppressed peoples?

Perhaps for my last point above, we could have bifurcated services, where the user explicitly knows if they are operating in verified space or anon space.

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

#64

Post by bigger_inside »

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…

and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives.

I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in.

But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.

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

#65

Post by chrsw »

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 don't know if it can be fixed. Maybe we can slow the deterioration but we might be beyond the tipping point. The internet I joined 25 years ago is long gone and it's never coming back. It's partly a technological problem and a resource problem but it's also larger scale problem with our values.

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

#67

Post by jrd259 »

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…

Ted Nelson's vision (in "Dream Machines") was strongly focused on micro-transactions for this reason.

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

#68

Post by HPsquared »

yason wrote: post #24

All 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 s…

Maybe a blockchain-based chat protocol, where there is a cost to posting? That's a pretty steep barrier to entry.

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

#69

Post by marginalia_nu »

api wrote: post #46
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…

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 mode…

I wonder if all the toxicity is just a reflection of people's state of mind. Just seems to be a lot more anger and sadness online in the late 2010s early 2020s than there ever was before.

There just seems to be a lot of lonely and depressed people out there, and unfortunately they often time they seem to congregate to wallow in each other's depressive thought loops. It's hard enough to escape from the gravity well of depression when you're alone in reinforcing the darkness. Can't even imagine what getting stuck into one of those quagmires might be like.

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

#70

Post by vasco »

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…

Taking a much higher level of perspective on the issue, I don't know if people complain in the way that it matters. I mean sure they complain, but internet usage globally is up by a lot and it keeps going up, even as we discover some issues with over-use on our health. So yeah people complain but the internet, even as it is today, is I think by any metric the most loved technology available worldwide.

If the internet was getting way worse in practice wouldn't a bunch of people start using somethng else and new user rates decreasing? By all metrics the internet is the best it ever was and keeps being super useful for everyone.

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