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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

#291

Post by ants_everywhere »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #210
ants_everywhere wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yes, I think we're actually talking about the same problem from different angles.

The problem you mention in the second paragraph is sometimes called "diffusion of responsibility" [0]. A related concept about the difficulties of individual and group action is "belling the cat" [1]. You may be familiar with these, I'm just throwing them out there in case anyone reading is also interested in this topic.

Framing in terms of agency, I guess I'd say I agree with you that each agent has a responsibility or an obligation to take action. But it's not clear to me how to ensure that the actions build on each other rather than canceling each other out in the aggregate. It may take a strong person with a sense of duty to get things started but eventually they will need help.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_responsibility [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat

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

#292

Post by t-3 »

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…

What's wrong with that, though? Forcing people who don't want to interact to interact in the name of diversity isn't likely to lead anywhere productive. Those who are so heavily invested in their political views that they don't want to speak with anyone who they don't fully agree with will be siloed, and those who want diversity can be federated more broadly.

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

#293

Post by wwweston »

EricE wrote: post #259
pastage wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [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 kno…

Ah yes, the noble bigotry argument. Historically that's never, ever lead to disaster.

[flagged]

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

#294

Post by carapace »

As an aside,

> This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse.

This isn't a good thing. Wikipedia is supposed to be a source of knowledge, not a arbiter of reality.

From Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Ergo, deleting unpredictable ("fringe") information makes you stupid.

Also, consider that we need to learn to deal with ambiguous and false information to be able to learn to discern true information in the first place. (E.g. just like a profanity filter needs to have a list of profanities to work, eh?)

Then there is the simple truth that things that are crazy "conspiracy" nonsense sometimes turn out to be true!

Cosby is a rapist.

Epstein ran a resort for pedos.

Crypto AG was a CIA front.

Something called MK Ultra really happened.

I could go on all day. E.g. over half of the regime changes in the Twentieth Century were the result of coups, aka conspiracies.

In re: pseudoscience, there are several healing modalities that I have personal experience with, that are outside the mainstream, and all of them are decried as pseudoscience. Just because something hasn't yet been systematized by mainstream science doesn't make it not exist. I know of a prominent author who had his article in WP deleted by deletionist activists calling themselves the "Guerrilla Skeptics"!

It's a kind of culture war: norm core skeptics vs. the weird.

Anyway, my point is that as an encyclopedia WP is weakened, not strengthened, by making it into a cultural conformity center that omits whole dimensions of human experience.

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

#295

Post by shadowgovt »

soundnote wrote: post #267
afavour wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a reason there's other letters besides 'G', and "a minority can be hostile to another minority" isn't a new idea.

Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.

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

#297

Post by Grumbledour »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #33
tusqasi wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact. (I have zero idea about the actual numbers)

Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.

I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages?

Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site.

But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it.

I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!

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

#298

Post by pseudostem »

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…

Math stack exchange IIRC is independent of stack exchange

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

#300

Post by giraffe_lady »

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…

The problem with the culture of "just assume people are joking" is that some people aren't joking. The background of edgy jokes was used very effectively by actual hate movements, to massive impact.

We all have to live with the consequences of that, and one of yours is that you're not getting the benefit of the doubt on nasty jokes anymore.

You need to acknowledge that something went wrong, and then consider why it did. Rather than have this naive nostalgia for an internet culture that only existed because "thick-skinned" is a euphemism for "people not actually in danger."

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