> the Last Good Place on the Internet
Wait, I thought Hacker News was "the Last Good Place on the Internet"
(Thanks Deng!)
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
191–200 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. Science faces a similar problem with homogeniety, specifically in regards to funding usually coming from the state and in general state influence in research. To take an obvious example, the debate on the impact of sex and physical ability. It's obvious that males have an advantage over women on most physical tasks. I can't find a single event with an objective comparable scoring (e.g. how fast you finish…
The problems of homogeneity among hard sciences is in no way bettered or solved by introducing quackery and conspiracy theories to the mix. The rest of your post is insane, "War on Christmas"-style. No one reputable is claiming men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.
Is scientific American not reputabl? Here are a number of articles suggesting various arguments that there is no physical advantage of males in sports
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trans-girls-belon...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hormone-levels-ar...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the...
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#193People 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 we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations.
There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down.
Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors.
And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm).
...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect).
But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got.
The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#194[deleted]
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#195It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.
I wish people would use their brains rather than seek out charlatans promising unbiased information.
To elaborate, I think that this obsession creates a few interesting scenarios. If people are flatly told/believe how a given media is biased then they don't have to read critically themselves. It can also be used to shut down discussion, your source is biased- I can ignore it.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if it had asked for $0.25 The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.
I can't reply to the child directly due to nesting, so I'll do it here: As far as I know, for in-person transactions ("contactless" in Europe) the economics work differently - for example SumUp quotes a flat fee of 1.69% plus a small one-time cost to buy and register the reader devices. That gets you parking meters, public toilets and the like. However, for online credit card transactions (which are a very different…
NYT could easily setup such a system by asking you to top up your account by a bigger amount (say, the price of a monthly sub), but only charge you cents per read article
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.
The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy. We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the c…
I think this misunderstands what "ownership of means of production" really means in Marxism. The point is NOT that the capitalist owns the factory, which they then rent to workers, who can choose to do whatever they want with it. The ownership of means of production instead refers to full control over the production process, including the social structure of work that makes production possible. Marx's point is that it is this social structure, primarily, that should be collectively owned (that's why all the discussion about alienation).
It's kinda like "owning a home" doesn't imply just owning the walls, but implicitly also a place with privacy.
So in today's SW world, means of production is not a computer, but rather the datacenters of the cloud, proprietary APIs and control over browser standards. And control over habits of the users, who also participate in production, by generating "content". These things cannot be simply replicated by the workers.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team wh…
I've literally read several articles today (mostly via HN) from which I have garnered enough value to pay at least $1 to each author. And I'd gladly pay it, as long as it's not a subscription and I don't have to enter my card details all over the place, or have my money charged as a large number of individual transactions.
Especially for micropayments. If I google and find a minor 1-liner that taught me something I'd deposit $0.10 or $0.25. If it was something I was struggling with for a long time - like some arcane tar or mt command to use my tape backup drive, I'd give at least a few $. These amounts add up quickly, and encourage a much more wholesome form of publishing.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#199It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.
There is no such thing as neutrality or unbiased views, we are humans, everything we do or say is filled with bias. Claiming for Wikipedia to "stay neutral" is a bias itself. They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral.
> They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral.
Not even close. Anything even close to political has a clear slant to it, from actual article wordings to allowed sources to build the articles off of.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.
I disagree. Science faces a similar problem with homogeniety, specifically in regards to funding usually coming from the state and in general state influence in research. To take an obvious example, the debate on the impact of sex and physical ability. It's obvious that males have an advantage over women on most physical tasks. I can't find a single event with an objective comparable scoring (e.g. how fast you finish…
I feel like we're just getting more precise. It's not actually true that all men are physically stronger than all women. Some men are physically stronger than some women, and some women are physically stronger than some men.
In the past, we were generalizing and that created falsehoods. Now we're able to be much more precise to the actual true reality.
It's also true that social factors play a role. We've never properly accounted for that, so it's much more true today to caveat with the fact that we don't know how much social factors play a role. It's probably not the most influential factor, but it's probably a part of the equation.