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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

#281

Post by 1over137 »

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…

>representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing... Just look at mastodon.social/explore

Wow, I've never used Twitter or Mastodon, but I just visited that link, and it's all American politics, abortion, trans, and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.

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

#282

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy »

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…

diversity doesn't imply race and anyone who thinks so is a racist.

Just as minorities are not defined by their skin color, neither are whites.

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

#283

Post by shadowgovt »

2devnull wrote: post #228
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…

It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which…

I'd be interested to learn more. What is the bad kind of diversity, and what is the good kind of diversity?

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

#284

Post by anononaut »

js8 wrote: post #123

Yanis Varoufakis had some interesting talks about techno-feudalism. He argues that if the big cloud and platform companies control the platform, it's not really a free market capitalism anymore. I used to be skeptical, because I believe for such transformation to take hold completely, a supporting ideology has to be developed, but maybe it's just too early for that yet and some ideology will appear. Varoufakis is als…

I want to discuss online my burnin disdain for governments. I'm certain likeminded people would not be allowed to on a platform operated as a public service. For true freedom of expression, it's a nonstarter.

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

#285

Post by RationalDino »

ekianjo wrote: post #204
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…

> 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 for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say.

I'm sorry, but you're taking offence at reality here.

When I got to Usenet in the early 1990s, it was clear that most users were from North America and involved with college. This group was overwhelmingly white. Furthermore at many institutions, access required learning enough Unix to run rn. A barrier to entry that favored people who were nerdy relative to the general population. Email had similar demographics at the time, for similar reasons.

Therefore it is historically accurate to say that more than 50% of users were white and nerdy, even relative to other educated people. You're right that the other users included a lot of diversity. But afavour is absolutely right about the majority.

On diversity of thought. It is absolutely true that we had diverse thinking on Usenet at that point. However it is like clustering in some high dimensional space. The existence of diversity along some dimensions of thought within some dimensions doesn't change the fact that along some other dimensions there is more diversity of thought when you include people from different backgrounds and cultures.

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

#286

Post by shadowgovt »

soundnote wrote: post #264
t-3 wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

An alternative federation with different core tenets could exist, but it would have to do the legwork to find people interested in supporting it, build out nodes that want to be in that federation, and publicize its existence.

It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.

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

#287

Post by kraftman »

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...

You seem to have missed these sections:

"It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. "

"The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify."

etc.

If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?

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

#288

Post by mavhc »

cbozeman wrote: post #269
giraffe_lady wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 a…

[flagged]

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

#289

Post by yuppiepuppie »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #240
altcognito wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Any links to articles covering the media on that topic? I have not heard about this one.

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

#290

Post by oceanplexian »

yuck39 wrote: post #218
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…

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.…

“Fediverse” tools are a bait and Switch. I don’t need a glorified Wordpress blog that has elaborate censorship tools built into it. Networks like Mastodon also won’t implement E2E encryption because it would throw a wrench into their ideological crusade. Sounds like exactly the kinds of people I don’t want to associate with.

I can run my own web server, serve millions of users, and provide an RSS feed with technology from 10+ years ago. The Internet is Federated by design and it works fine for me.

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