How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:03 PM UTC

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…

We had per-use systems. I remember when people would pay multiple £ for one (1) phone ringtone. I think Minitel may have been per-use metered as well? Either way, both were obliterated by the massive benefit of not paying per use.

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

#92

Post by derelicta » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #50

derelicta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well you can selfhost if you feel like it in such situation, otherwise you can rely on the good will of good folks to do the tough job for you :)

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

#93

Post by aCoreyJ » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

tvieron wrote: post #40

aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #12

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Would you like Wikipedia to claim something that is objectively false like your doctor or parents or "society" tell you what gender you are and your thoughts on it don't matter?

Maybe if you give an example of what issue you have seen?

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

#94

Post by tvieron » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

tentacleuno wrote: post #74

tvieron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> So as a result of this we get, for example, articles like this one on Dana Rivers, who murdered in cold blood a lesbian couple and their son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rivers . He is described as "she" and "her" throughout the article, despite this actually being the crime of a man. In this case, isn't the crime more important than what she chooses to identify as? I'm all for prosecuting a murder, but brin…

Wikipedia policy mandating that this man be described as a woman is bringing gender identity politics into it.

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

#95

Post by abetusk » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

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…

In my opinion, a big part of the success of Wikipedia is that it offers its content under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA). This specifically allows for commercial re-use and re-sale.

The license provides a wide umbrella so that many different people and entities can use the content without worry. Contributions provide a fly-wheel of improvement.

A lot of the current batch of internet companies provide walled gardens and eventually succumb to the trappings of monopolies. In some sense, I think it's survivorship bias. The only entities that stand the test of time are the ones that provide content under libre/free licensing.

While I don't disagree with your list, I think a missing component is access to the commons. Without a rich commons, our society suffers as content sinks into a copyright quagmire.

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

#96

Post by derelicta » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

Grumbledour wrote: post #51

derelicta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.

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

#97

Post by Zak » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

Grumbledour wrote: post #51

derelicta wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's been some recent progress on that front.

Lemmy's surge in popularity over the summer is a big help. People share a lot of links to smaller websites and Fediverse accounts to Lemmy communities. If you're sharing things on a more blog-like system that uses ActivityPub, you can tag an appropriate Lemmy community in your post for increased exposure.

Mastodon has reversed its stance on full-text search, making it generally available in recent releases (though I think it still requires ElasticSearch, which smaller servers and self-hosters may not want to fuss with).

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

#98

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

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.

Discovery is the adversarial point which breaks so many idealistic systems. The ability to get discovered is worth real money, from outside the system. So as soon as there's a discovery mechanism with a substantial real audience, effort will be devoted to "hacking" it.

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

#99

Post by WhyOhWhyQ » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:05 PM UTC

What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minutes. It's truly amazing.

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

#100

Post by marginalia_nu » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

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…

Isn't individual action the only action? The only ones with hands and thoughts are individuals, whether they imagine themselves part of a collective or imagine themselves to be alone.

Yeah sure you may not be able to fix the world yourself, but you can undeniably make it better. Waiting for some grand wave of collective action to arrive and fix the problem seems like it would above all stand in the way of even making an effort and trying.