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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

#201

Post by OfSanguineFire »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #174
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…

My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture. I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and…

The early internet had both people interested in Communism in its myriad splinter groups (Marxists.org was one of the first big websites) and people advocating libertarianism in its myriad strands. Compare Mastodon where there was discussion that sites failing to mod out libertarianism might be considered beyond the pale, and ineligible for federation. (I'm not defending libertarian rhetoric, which I find tiresome, but it has been present in internet nerd culture since forever).

The early internet had a huge Buddhist scene (which produced a massive boom in IRL communities). Plus every other "alternative religion" in a Western context, from Hare Krishna to Eckankar. It was where New Atheism started, and at the same time, you could see the occasional figure advocating for American evangelicalism of precisely the sort that most riled New Atheists. People post-internet who know anything about the religions of the world outside the ones in their own area, almost certainly gained that knowledge from the internet.

The rather limited nationalities and races then using the internet did not mean little diversity of views, because you had just enough curious people around that, in aggregate, they could be curious about everything.

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

#202

Post by afavour »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #163
afavour wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the…

I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed.

> they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse

I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.

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

#203

Post by vladms »

VancouverMan wrote: post #115
jwestbury wrote: post #36

Earlier 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.

While it was already obvious to some people before then, after everything that happened from early 2020 through most of 2022, it should be completely clear to everyone now that "expert consensus" has absolutely nothing to do with being factually correct. Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert co…

These are some strong statements without any reference.

Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?)

There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so not sure how you imagine "someone" would have selected "the right ones".

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

#204

Post by ekianjo »

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…

> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.

Nerdy = Educated, because most people joining at that time were academics or people who really wanted to use the internet despite the difficulty to get there at the time.

As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. There were a lot of people from different continents even in the early days, while of course the majority was from the US. And as far as I know, diversity of thought is not tied to the type of melanin you have in your skin.

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

#205

Post by fesoliveira »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #150
kingofthehill98 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> There is no such thing as neutrality or unbiased views, we are humans, everything we do or say is filled with bias. Meh, there is a scale. > Claiming for Wikipedia to "stay neutral" is a bias itself. Yeah, everything is relative, truth doesn’t exist, yadda-yadda. > They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral. They don’t.

I can also play this game of stating things without giving an argument:

They do.

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

#206

Post by jampekka »

aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #82
2mol wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview. As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole…

thanks. there's plenty pro-constructivism in my humanist-marxist circles. They are either openly hypocrites or too young still (like utilitarianism, it is a good thing if possible after all) But yeah, if you don't still agree it is fringe, and still think so after reading the only link on my comment, then you might as well downvote me. But that is one i'd take gladly. it is just an intro though. my point is that they…

Do you in general assume that to be a pro-constructivist or humanist-marxist, one has to be a hypocrite or too young still?

What in constructivism is bugging you? The basic idea is that concepts get their meaning through their relations to other concepts. I find that a very reasonable perspective.

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

#207

Post by kalleboo »

serial_dev wrote: post #118
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.

Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is). My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard ab…

I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp)

But I disagree with some of your other comments

> The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter

The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon.

> it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices

For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting.

> It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.

The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site.

> will not make a community

If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.

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

#208

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#209

Post by ekianjo »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #174
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…

My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture. I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and…

> I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse

Of course it was more diverse because no-one was kicking anyone off any platform when there was no social media and content policy in application in the first place. I don't even know how you can seriously think that this was not the case.

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

#210

Post by marginalia_nu »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #167
marginalia_nu wrote: post #100

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…

> Isn't individual action the only action? Yes, in an important sense. But, you know, architectural layers something something. At the end of the day maybe everything is logic gates, but there's a difference between `cat`ing /dev/urandom and computing a trajectory for a plane, say. Organizations and corporations basically exist (if you squint hard enough) to achieve this sure of layering. And to your point, a lot of…

I find this mindset debilitating. Every person on earth, the very people who might accomplish real change, they are all individuals. Yet every one of them can deflect responsibility onto collectives, collectives that in turn consiting of individuals who can do the same, resulting in inaction and indifference.

Someone else is always to blame, someone else is always more responsible, and that someone else isn't even a human being, it's a corporation, a political faction, an ideological movement. None of those entities are of course ever going to seize that responsibility, because there is no agency in any of them to do so.

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