I wonder how much the open content had an effect here, there were several fork attempts when communities weren't being heard and so rather than stay and fight they set up outside the system and fizzled away.
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
421–430 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#422Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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…
> 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.
IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".
If anything discord is way more open than IRC in that respect. In IRC you can own a channel and ban anyone who comes from another channel you dislike. You cannot pre-emptively ban all members of another server from your discord server.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#423I have since distanced myself from Wikipedia as I feel I was increasingly pushed out of the "Cabal" (a term used to describe editors with aligned interest who usually worked together to set standards others must follow) who vigorously enforced the policy without considering the experience of, and willingness to engage with, new editors. I would rather have them create their own world while I move on to contribute to…
Agree, I had one very bad experience on Wikipedia. It was not a controversial or political subject area. I reverted ~30 bland look-at-me copy pasta contributions that might have belonged on the category page, but certainly not on every instance page. Obviously the right thing to do. Not controversial - or so I thought... Some jumped-up self-appointed 'editor' appeared as-if-by-magic , made an obviously stupid decisio…
> and that was that - 30 polluted pages.
This happens. Unless you're heavily-invested in the subject of an article, you can just shrug and move on, no? There's over a million articles you can choose to edit.
And by the way, when you made your edits, were you appointed to the position of editor, or were you a " jumped-up self-appointed 'editor'" as well?
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#424It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.
There's certain "radioactive" topics on Wikipedia where it's almost impossible for contrarian views to get a fair hearing: evolution, vaccination, nationalism, etc.
Contrarian views on many topics are not backed by facts but by emotion. A collection of knowledge is not obligated to let contrarian viewpoints with no scientific basis share the same space as factual coverage of a topic.
This is the problem I see far too often with people who criticize Wikipedia for their NPOV policy.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#425I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics whic…
Reddit has this problem and it ultimately drove me (and I'm sure many others) away, it seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion, and god forbid if you have an opinion that goes against the grain of a sub. FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I…
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Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#426>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…
Here an example of a theory that current practitioners will just plainly call pseudo-science (and is very likely wrong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics If anything, my criticism of this article is that the first few paragraphs don't explain how fringe it is. (And I'm firmly on the opinion that working on it is important, because it's the only path out of the almost disproved box that we hav…
All theories are wrong. Some are wronger than others.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#427Earlier 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…
This. SEO has become a real current day Paperclip Apocalypse, just through ads instead of paperclips. And to think we’ve barely introduced AI to it yet!
Google's been using ML in ads long before LLMs were invented.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#428Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if all the toxicity is just a reflection of people's state of mind. Just seems to be a lot more anger and sadness online in the late 2010s early 2020s than there ever was before. There just seems to be a lot of lonely and depressed people out there, and unfortunately they often time they seem to congregate to wallow in each other's depressive thought loops. It's hard enough to escape from the gravity well of…
When the internet was young, i thought the comments sections were going to leave us confronted with our own shadow selves. I pictured a utopia where we saw that raw honesty and all became a bit more accepting of our own inner critics, shadows, golden shadows and the like. In retrospect, I was naive. Just because we see something our shadow wrote next to our handle doesn't mean we recognize that as ourselves. If anyth…
You're not the only one :)
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#429Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$ When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent
This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port. For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevan…
Would you recommend fastmail? I am shopping for email service
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#430Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I always find it deeply hilarious when people online expand on their definition of "diversity of thought." Mostly because it always means more of exactly one single type of "thought".
As I'm fond of saying, I'll always defend your right to make such statements, but that never implies it's valid or true.