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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

#131

Post by pjc50 »

js8 wrote: post #41
ants_everywhere wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

I feel the non-profit/co-operative model has been really under-explored, other than the huge successes of Open Source and Wikipedia itself.

On the other hand, even that's vulnerable. The UK used to have customer-owned banks until shareholder banks offered to buy them out. https://www.thenews.coop/85589/sector/big-bang-demutualisati...

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

#132

Post by sigilis »

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.

You're commenting on a discovery engine right now. HN surfaces stuff you never searched for but find interesting all the time. Still, you can't expect for there to be the kind of traffic we see on the big sites today for all the little blogs and whatnot, but that means there would be different motivations behind these more personal spaces. It wouldn't be about driving more clicks, but about expressing oneself to, sharing with, or informing people. Not sure what the economic model for sharing your passion is, but maybe it doesn't always need one.

The constant drive to draw up all of human attention so that those people can be sold something or the other is probably still going to win out in terms of volume, but maybe there can be some more nice things in the world.

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

#133

Post by gosub100 »

One band-aid that would help (but not fix) the internet is a revolt or at least a separation between web2.0 and web1.0. There should be organized, easy ways to consume and switch between 2.0 and 1.0, and while I know this already exists to some extent, I am referring to a social movement on top of the technical differences. Publishers should be pressured to offer web 1.0 (or at least know that a sizeable subset of viewers only consumes 1.0).

Next, there should be a market for re-publishing web2.0 into 1.0. For instance, if a news article is posted on a major outlet, services (people, bots, whatever) should crawl it and strip the content and pictures and re-serve it as web 1.0 content. Then, a browser add-on or internet service should allow you to enter the URL to the main article, but then switch to the 1.0 version (thanks to someone who already translated it).

This is NOT the same as "disable javascript in your browser". If you do that, many sites will turn you away. I'm proposing a translation layer of a rendered webpage back to 1999 style, then sharing that document in p2p network.

This would take the edge off one major form of enshittification of the web, make your mobile page load faster, eliminate tracking, and so forth. Although it wouldn't solve the deeper issues of click-bait infotainment and misinformation.

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

#134

Post by giraffe_lady »

afavour wrote: post #116
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able t…

I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole…

[flagged]

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

#135

Post by datadeft »

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…

Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind.

Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these.

The solution is decentralisation.

The question is how to get there?

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

#136

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

sasaf5 wrote: post #111
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #99

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 minute…

> What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites... I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?

I like the AskHistorians subreddit, but I haven't found much else. I think AskHistorians and Stack Exchange have a somewhat high "barrier to entry" for actually answering questions, which might be part of it. (I mean this in the sense that you're going to get down-voted to hell if you don't really know what you're doing on Stack Exchange, and I think you actually have to be a historian to answer on AskHistorians.)

HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.

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

#137

Post by suoduandao3 »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #69
api wrote: post #46

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…

When the internet was young, i thought the comments sections were going to leave us confronted with our own shadow selves. I pictured a utopia where we saw that raw honesty and all became a bit more accepting of our own inner critics, shadows, golden shadows and the like.

In retrospect, I was naive. Just because we see something our shadow wrote next to our handle doesn't mean we recognize that as ourselves. If anything, we're shadow projecting much harder than ever.

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

#138

Post by raisedbyninjas »

tentacleuno wrote: post #89
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…

> SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. Right, so how do we fix it? I'm wondering if uBlacklist has a place here (a tool to block domains from search results) -- it would be interesting to see if we could all come together and contribute to a database of SEO farm / junk websites to improve search results.

Doesn't this just assume that ad domains are some scarce resource? Ada can be served from a GUID domain just as effectively.

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

#140

Post by nonrandomstring »

I'd totally settle for the Internet circa 2000-2005 in a box, with a 1990's Google search interface.

Gimme a VM, with maybe 20 or 50 TB compressed image of Wikipedia, all of the early Stack Exchange and a few mailing lists or forum archives for Tex, Lisp and whatnot... and I'd be happy on my porch, in my rocking chair with a bottle of whiskey and a pipe to smoke.

Why do you kids have to keep meddlin' with things!

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