How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

jonasdegendt wrote: post #188

gwd wrote: post #4

I 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…

Post by pjc50 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 5:17 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #43

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…

Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not. Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the othe…

    pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

    so do you give refunds a la steam?

    pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

    pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

    pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

    pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

    pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

    pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

    getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods

    nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

    winner-take-all effects are very strong

    Play store et al already exist, why not use that?

    Free substitute goods are just a click away

    Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is

    No real consumer demand for micropayments

    existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

    friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

    first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

    Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

    accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?

Post by vladms » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 5:18 PM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #325

vladms wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are some strong statements without any reference. Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?) There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so…

But we decided on one singular truth and literally censored/banned and/or publically shamed all other variants. You get vaccinated, you won't get ill, won't spread the virus, herd immunity, end of covid. At a time, this was the one and only acceptable truth, and everything else, from low efficiency of vaccine, sideffects, "you'll nfect grandma, even if you're vaccinated", "there will never be herd immunity" was consi…

Post by adr1an » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 5:19 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #402

gwd wrote: post #4

I 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…

[flagged]

Post by cableshaft » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 5:20 PM UTC

jonasdegendt wrote: post #188

gwd wrote: post #4

I 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…