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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

#261

Post by xacky »

robjan wrote: post #113
xacky wrote: post #35

Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals t…

What part do you find addictive? Is it the endless depth of links or the ability to search for anything you think of or something else?

It's basically like a endless library but with big gaps missing on the shelves, and you know that the books that are missing there were destroyed intentionally, and attempts to bring new books to the library are sabotaged. I hate parts of Wikipedia like articles for deletion, where endless debates around notability are held. The fact other sites monetize Wikipedia's rejected content infuriates me too.

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

#262

Post by droopyEyelids »

xacky wrote: post #35

Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals t…

Somehow, vandalism is associated with my account, even though it's only attributed to an IP address, not my logged-in user. They still let me edit though!

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

#263

Post by shadowgovt »

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…

There's nothing about the fediverse, as a protocol-backed set of services and nodes, that prevents a group of like-minded individuals from forming an LGBTQ hostile family of, for example, mastodon nodes. But there's also nothing about the fediverse, as a community, that compels anyone else who owns a node to host or share that content.

You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives).

The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that.

(I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).

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

#264

Post by soundnote »

t-3 wrote: post #254
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!

The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.

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

#265

Post by hotnfresh »

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.

Destroy spyvertising ads by making the business model illegal, so don't-care-where-my-ad-is-hosted ad networks die. Non-spying ads on sites that naturally draw lots of real eyeballs will still be a thing, which is fine. Actually-free sites, open source, and open protocols, would all see more interest and development in such a world, filling in most of the gaps people worry about from the death of shitty-ads.

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

#266

Post by ggpsv »

unpopularopp wrote: post #86
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…

>or Mastodon and post a bit. Yet when I open the explore page on Mastodon I still see the same shit: politics. https://mastodon.social/explore It's almost as if the whole point of Mastodon wasn't anything more than just to be another echo chamber. But hey no bad guys from "the other side" so guess we good. HN is still the best. We need more HN not Twitter or Mastodon.

The whole point of Mastodon/Fediverse is that mastodon.social is not your sole option.

Unlike other platforms, you have a choice. You're in control of who to follow or block, and what to mute. There is no algorithmic timeline that surfaces unwanted content to you. You can hide the boosts (i.e retweets) of any account. You can simply default to follow accounts you're interested and rely entirely on your local timeline.

There are many Mastodon servers that are more niche, or at least less akin to Twitter/Mastodon.social. I originally made my account in mastodon.social but I'm in the process of moving to another server where the server timeline aligns more with what I'm looking for (though I can migrate my followers/followings, yay!). This server is also run cooperatively, which further aligns the interests and motives of everyone involved.

I'd say we need HN AND more Mastodon servers.

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

#267

Post by soundnote »

afavour wrote: post #202
OfSanguineFire wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cen…

You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.

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

#268

Post by 6510 »

Bookmarks and history are still terribly primitive. (Mosaic had full text history search.)

Imagine something like automatic archiving everything one visits with tools to prune the data, some granular scoring based on number of visits with automatic [intelligent] organization in a folder tree/web directory. A slider that on the left only shows the tree of bookmarks somewhat to the right everything ever visited, further to the right the rest of the www starting with the largest websites. Have both a fixed tree and a dynamic one. Bookmarks visited often gradually migrate to the root. Less often is moved into appropriately named folders. Different bookmark buttons for different projects. (say, start with work/recreation/administration) Do paid listings, say 5 euro per year per domain. Have additional hosts to subscribe to that expand your index with free listings.

Just a rough idea, others can no doubt do better.

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

#269

Post by cbozeman »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #134
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…

[flagged]

No, although I understand why such a simplistic and easily-digestible idea would be appealing to a group of people who increasingly want simple answers.

We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned.

We want to go back to the Internet where you can say wild shit and people are smart / savvy enough to know you're just being edgy and not an actual hateful person.

We want to go back to the Internet that wasn't controlled by gigantic megacorporations who have incredibly outsized influence on what people do and do not see.

In short, a lot of older Netizens want 1999 back. And for good reason.

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

#270

Post by allturtles »

z7 wrote: post #47

>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Bein…

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, whose goal is to capture the consensus state of knowledge at a particular point in time. An encyclopedia that only captures "the truth" is an impossibility. No one has direct access to the truth. So I'm not sure what you're proposing as an alternative.
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