How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet • Hacker News Board

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

#371

Post by s3krit » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

derelicta wrote: post #31

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…

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

Sadly not federated, but Spacehey[1] exists! And it's actually quite popular among certain groups of people (the people that were there in the early-mid 00s that want to relive that world, and the younger group that want to live it for the first time). It's pretty cool.

[1] https://spacehey.com/home

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

#372

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

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…

[deleted]

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

#373

Post by seti0Cha » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

kelseyfrog wrote: post #303

soundnote wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.

Sure, and the result of which is an echo chamber, which was OPs point. I didn't see anyone complaining that their own speech was being suppressed. Does anyone question that it's ideologically homogeneous? It seems to me the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing.

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

#374

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:14 PM UTC

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #177

Can't really trust an academic on this matter, Wikipedia is like academia it's a closed system where a small group get to decide what opinions are correct, what facts get a mention and what are worth looking at with a feedback loop to itself that is used to control facts by deciding what sources are valid. Really the open decentralized internet is the antithesis of academia. Not to say its all bad but reading wikiped…

[deleted]

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

#375

Post by pvg » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:18 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #152

jwestbury wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.

I disagree. Science faces a similar problem with homogeniety, specifically in regards to funding usually coming from the state and in general state influence in research. To take an obvious example, the debate on the impact of sex and physical ability. It's obvious that males have an advantage over women on most physical tasks. I can't find a single event with an objective comparable scoring (e.g. how fast you finish…

Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not science and an encyclopedia is not a collection of all human knowledge, it's not an archive. Fringe stuff goes out the same way page-for-every-pokemon-evolution goes out.

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

#376

Post by cabalamat » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:19 PM UTC

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…

> Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions.

It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.

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

#377

Post by PH95VuimJjqBqy » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

NoboruWataya wrote: post #174

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…

My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture. I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and…

as if any gathering of people doesn't have their own culture.

Where did this idea come from that people are cardboard cutouts that you can write on to perfection?

Having said that, I don't agree with your second paragraph at all. Individuals would get into shouting matches when they disagreed, but if you think for a second it's more diverse in todays cancel-culture I can only conclude you're not thinking well.

flame wars have been a thing since almost the beginning, and contrary to what you may think, politics and differences were a _major_ driver of that.

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

#378

Post by the_other » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22

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…

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…

> What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.

Isn't that what the social networks are, internally?

I agree that attention/engagement farming is a major driver for the web's enshittification. I don't think content attribution and verified identities are the solution.

Two(ish) key features of the earlier phases of the web that seem relevant to me were:

- most content wasn't profit driven

- social interaction was not gamified, was slower and was often siloed/themed

Trending, dog-piling, attention-economy hacks were all greatly limited.

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

#379

Post by xnx » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:20 PM UTC

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…

This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but TikTok has been a great place for me to learn about all kinds of unique and interesting things and hobbyist communities I'd never known about: homesteading, commercial plane transport, tether car racing, DIY halloween decorations, interpretive dance, and a lot more. Top comments tend to be funny (though often the same joke) and smart.

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

#380

Post by SleepilyLimping » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 4:21 PM UTC

gosub100 wrote: post #88

sanex wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommenda…

I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team wh…

This was kind of the theory of using Brave Browser to earn BAT through ads, and then set up an "auto-contribute" list that took your earned BAT and distributed a % that you set to each person. The adoption didn't exactly happen, especially with Brave's weirdness lately.