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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

#211

Post by marginalia_nu »

robertlagrant wrote: post #154
marginalia_nu wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Two causes spring to mind: Covid lockdowns - people actually were lonely for a long period. The decline of traditional news media - more extreme headlines are essential for more money to appear.

This has been going on far longer than Covid though, but it sure didn't do anyone's mental health any favors.

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

#212

Post by elpocko »

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.

What did you expect? It was invented and operated by "white nerds".

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

#213

Post by akudha »

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…

I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$

When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent

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

#214

Post by soundnote »

Angostura wrote: post #26
aakjsdfajsdfh wrote: post #12

[flagged]

I suspect if you comment receives downvotes, it will be because it is verging on the incomprehensible. Seriously - I read it 3 times and I only have the haziest of ideas as to what you are trying to get at.

Concur. I'm likely sympathetic to whatever aakj is trying to get at, but the post could really, really use edits or a more coherently formatted repost.

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

#215

Post by red_admiral »

red_admiral wrote: post #164
toyg wrote: post #125

Earlier 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…

Reply to hliyan, since HN is not giving me a reply link for their post:

As far as I'm aware, a "medium-like" model works when all content you're paying for is "on the platform", this includes not just medium, but also substack, and a lot of streaming sites like twitch. There's one company involved, and one jurisdiction for settling any disputes.

Once the enities you're paying are corporations themselves - potentially based in different states - the picture becomes a lot messier; I would imagine that a system where both a reader in Germany and one in India can micropay per article for a combination of the NY Times, the Toronto Star and the South China Morning Post is beyond what current market dynamics can offer.

After all, Patreon was supposed to be the next step up from medium etc. albeit with content creators as individuals rather than corporations, and that's already struggling.

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

#216

Post by dm319 »

yason wrote: post #24

All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years. Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with s…

Hackernews is another example.

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

#217

Post by rambambram »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #100
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…

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…

I completely agree. And then I saw your username and knew you've put in the work. Thanks for doing something and putting your money/time/energy where your mouth is! A lot of people approach these problems by waiting for the stars to align or waiting until everybody on this planet agrees with them and then take action. It has to be this, it has to be that, no choices, no priorities, no decisions. In their minds they take on all of the world's problems at once.

For a couple of years I have been working on my website software to make the internet more open again (or at least, keep some of the openness around). I'm by no means making any dent in the universe sofar, but I rolled up my sleeves, I bet on the open internet, and started to work. No need to wait for other people.

For me, it has all to do with RSS and the curation of content. Yeah, curation is more work than having someone else's algorithm decide what you eat for infodinner. The internet itself - and the web in particular - already take care of the sharing and distribution of this curated content. With my software, if I 'retweet' an RSS item from a website that I follow on my own 'timeline', it already spreads further than the initial target group of that item. Virality and connectedness is already baked in the internet. The techniques for a social internet are already there, for years.

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

#218

Post by yuck39 »

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107
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…

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…

Clearly you haven't seen the entire fediverse. There are tons of "free speech" instances along with a garden variety of other "alt" instances that are as active as the mastodon affiliated ones.

They tend to all be mutually blacklisted by each other, meaning that you won't see their posts appear in your federated timeline, however you can still individually follow and interact with accounts across the blacklist line.

What I personally do is host my own Pleroma instance where I can manually configure which instances I chose to associate with. Sure, I don't show up on anyone else's federated timeline but I mostly lurk anyways so I don't care and I get a large degree of control over what kind of content I see.

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

#219

Post by aroundtown »

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?

Every time I have posted a question on SE it is either flagged as already answered (when it's not) or people screaming "XY Problem!"

My approach to SE now is "Look, Don't Touch".

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

#220

Post by Ekaros »

silent_cal wrote: post #175
Namari wrote: post #8

It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.

There's certain "radioactive" topics on Wikipedia where it's almost impossible for contrarian views to get a fair hearing: evolution, vaccination, nationalism, etc.

Political movements not garnering support from mainstream or left wing media... When you get to pick which sources you use you get to pick which views you will present...
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