121–130 of 669 posts
It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.
They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral.
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.
I'd be willing to say this is causation. Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night to make 0.006 cents on ad revenue. So the content can actually be useful instead of drowned out in SEO and ads.
And yet so successful at it :)
I used to be skeptical, because I believe for such transformation to take hold completely, a supporting ideology has to be developed, but maybe it's just too early for that yet and some ideology will appear.
Varoufakis is also talking about this geopolitical context, where only US and China control these companies, and EU for instance has total dependency on them.
Anyway, one way to counteract it would be to start conceptualizing cyberspace as a public space. Many countries developed public radio and TV broadcasts as a way to counteract private mass media. Maybe we should have cloud (and communication, payment, digital goods) platforms that are operated as a public service.
Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals t…
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…
The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It was there on Usenet, it's been there since people were scratching messages on bathroom stalls and subway walls.
But yes, now we have effectively created cult generators and not only does no one want to turn them off, really smart people (even many with good intentions) keep making them more efficient.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone. This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.
I think this discounts the fact that people are not mindless automatons following the path of least resistance. Individuals are capable of difficult things that fly in the face of collective theory, and time and time again such individual actions have changed history.
> This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.
This is ultimately a false dichotomy, blind to a third option, which is to act as an indiviual, act according to what you think is good, in spite of what anyone else is doing or thinking.
If you try to do something yourself in such a way, people will flock to tell you to stop trying to change the world, because it is not pointless and cannot be done. If it is indeed pointless, I ask, why must the attempt be aborted?
I haven't had anyone rushing to tell me I must stop watching a 4 hour video essay on youtube, which is surely even more pointless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 mo…
Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter). Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify…
I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.
There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.