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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

#231

Post by pastage »

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…

> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people

Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know.

There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.

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

#232

Post by nickelpro »

bko wrote: post #192
nickelpro wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

None of those articles argue that men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.

If I might summarize, they mostly argue that hormonal arguments towards unfair advantages in certain sports understate the already existing disparities in hormonal distribution in a given sex. That a given trans athlete might be less hormonally advantaged than a cis woman who competes uncontroversially.

The latter articles are even less supportive of your point, and mostly discuss the uncontroversial point that binary biological sex is an incomplete model of humanity as a whole.

These are reasonable and evidence-based discussions to have.

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

#233

Post by ixwt »

hliyan wrote: post #189
red_admiral wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can't a Medium-like model work -- where a third party aggregates all the credits and bills monthly?

I've wondered about that. Patreon used to group all of your subscriptions into one payment, but they've recently been going away from that. I can't understand why, the small $0.20 + % adds up for multiple transactions. But if you only have to pay the $0.20 once, it effectively gets distributed across all of your subscriptions. It baffles me why Patreon went away from the single subscription model.

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

#234

Post by wavemode »

bnralt wrote: post #162
Ygg2 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes e…

Even assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)

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

#235

Post by wiseowise »

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

#236

Post by carlosjobim »

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.

> Right, so how do we fix it?

By paying for content you consume, so that there will be no money in SEO, content farms and click mills.

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

#237

Post by yard2010 »

marak830 wrote: post #165
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 do not discount anything you posted. At all. * I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. Just wish I knew a way to actually help.

Vivaldi on mobile with builtin tracker and ads blocker. I'm not affiliated just a big fan.

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

#238

Post by throw555chip »

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.

Many of us in the world chatted and conversed (VoIP was a thing already) with people around the world in the mid-1990's.

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

#239

Post by nkozyra »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #225
nkozyra wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to. Well there were obviously good and bad things about it. Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations. We can have an inclusive internet -…

Can we though? That comment demonstrates very clearly that it wasn't as democratic as people are remembering. You had a chance to make an inclusive internet, and you made an encyclopedia that was blind to the largest most significant art & cultural movement in generations. What are you going to do differently this time?

I find "we didn't, therefore we can't" a kind of defeatist and unrealistic reaction. The internet has been shaped and reshaped a few times, in a lot of ways for the better, I don't see why it couldn't continue to be refined.

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

#240

Post by Mountain_Skies »

altcognito wrote: post #49
bko wrote: post #15

> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar wor…

> A big problem is homogeniety in media. Lack of viewpoints is the least of the problems with "traditional media". Fox news and MSNBC have the same, debilitating problems as NBC, CBS and ABC. 1. They cover things poorly, little depth 2. They are beholden to their sponsorship (a great non-political example is their unwavering support of particular CFB conferences) 3. They offer opinions first instead of facts 4. They…

The current Fox vs Disney/ESPN war going on in college football is pretty amazing if you don't have a dog in the fight. Seems inevitable it would eventually happen given the money involved but they are quite shameless about what and how they're reporting right now.
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