411–420 of 427 posts
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> This is why the bump model that 4chan uses is superior. The elephant in the room is that 4chan's average quality of content is by far the worst of any major forum platform. The "bump" model is also used iirc by most bbs or older-style internet forums. In the modern age, incel forums are probably the most popular of these older-style forums (and surprisingly they probably have only slightly better average quality th…
I do respectfully disagree with you. The bump model allows chaos wherein you, the reader, must critically evaluate everything with no preconceived notions or pre-filtering. This is how you question, re-evaluate, and sharpen your knowledge through productive debates. There are diamonds and gems in "flat", bump-structured fora, that do not exist in other group-think, mass-consensus-based sites. Why does the average qua…
You cannot list them, because I already have and I have not been instabanned.
There is not actually much chaos in these supposed "bastions of free speech". Because in practice, threads are often created by highly motivated users and can be brigaded by coordinated groups (IRC/Discord groups). Even without so, culture and groupthink emerges simply because people mimic each other.
This is the problem with all utopian first-principles liberty thinking, in practice, they fall prey to the same easily observable defects in human nature. Thus, forums like hackernews thrive because of competent moderation in their stead.
High average information quality is a top 3 important metric for browsing any content on the internet, and quality does not "emerge" effectively through this supposed "diamond in the rough" system.
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I do respectfully disagree with you. The bump model allows chaos wherein you, the reader, must critically evaluate everything with no preconceived notions or pre-filtering. This is how you question, re-evaluate, and sharpen your knowledge through productive debates. There are diamonds and gems in "flat", bump-structured fora, that do not exist in other group-think, mass-consensus-based sites. Why does the average qua…
> You know what they are, but I will elect to avoid an instaban by posting them here. You cannot list them, because I already have and I have not been instabanned. There is not actually much chaos in these supposed "bastions of free speech". Because in practice, threads are often created by highly motivated users and can be brigaded by coordinated groups (IRC/Discord groups). Even without so, culture and groupthink e…
Not here, at least.
>Thus, forums like hackernews thrive because of competent moderation in their stead.
hahaha, well, enjoy, then!
I was an active contributor to Quora in the mid-10's -- my answers gained some 3m views. It was really something back then, as many people have fondly reminisced about the era. There were so many great writers who brought so much understanding to whatever crazy stuff they were passionate about by writing for free on Quora. You had diplomats, chefs, former propaganda writers, people living through violent conflict, do…
> the most inane bullshit questions as long as they got the views StackOverflow fell into a similar trap with reputation on controversial or highly upvoted question farms. The problem was further compounded by a ridiculous Triage queue system that could issue account suspensions and bans for honest opinions and feedback if your answers did not align with the prevailing groupthink of a few elite arbiters there. Not th…
I hope he expands his worldview by reading or experiencing more of the world.
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A lot of Wikipedia entries have become extremely partisan, and kept that way by moderators who are deeply invested in certain narratives. I find it very disappointing that no countermeasures have been taken- afaik Wikipedia still works exactly like 20 years ago, a barebone wiki governed by a lot of obscure, complex and unstructured politics. Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia t…
Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?
It went downhill as it got gamified and you saw the rise of powerusers. I remember there was a guy who'd answer a question within 2 minutes of it being posted. Mostly based on first page Google results and he was the #1 poweruser.
And people assigned him an authority based on the fact that to up that point most quality users were also important in real life. But this dude seems like he was just a Quora addict with no outside credentials.
These guys quickly gathered what kind of answer gets you the most upvotes and so Quora became a pretty ugly biased place. There were still small micro topics with high quality.
Then couple of VCs/Entrepreneurs started using it for content marketing. And after that you've only had marketing interns from companies doing content post there. Add to it lack of monetization.
I've had millions of reads and answers, it was a good source of credibility I would think but I deleted my entire profile some year ago with all my some very in-depth answers.
I owe a lot to Quora though, it was a goldmine in the early days. It got me on the track of learning to code and advanced my education. also writing answers itself makes you research and double check and lookup sources. If anyone from Quora reads it thank you.
Edit: oh yeah, the person mentioned in the article was one of those early powerusers that made people like me leave the site. How funny. Seems like it worked out for her though. I just hope the same thing won't happen to substack.
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Hmm I was going to say something about Stallman-like fanaticism, but then I remembered Stallman proved to be mostly right...
Richard is most concerned about injustices toward people that take away their freedoms. I am most concerned about the security of people and how software makes them insecure in order to profit from, or abuse them. These are proximate but different. It is a bit worrying that both freedom and security are thought 'fanatical' by some.
I'm afraid any discourse that's similar to religion in how it's done is 'fanatical' for me. No matter if it's about $DEITY, blockchain, "AI" or freedom.
Edit: oh, forgot Oppenheimer and Barbie. Haven't seen them and never will. I can't stand cults in my entertainment either.
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> they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place. Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
Agreed re: being a non-profit. My great hope was that Elon might do that with Twitter. Needless to say, I was… not right about that.
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How about Wikimedia?
Wikimedia is not a platform. Their sister Wikicities / Wikia / Fandom (also relying on MediaWiki), and now owned by Texas Pacific Group, is however, another example of a platform getting enshittified.
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A lot of Wikipedia entries have become extremely partisan, and kept that way by moderators who are deeply invested in certain narratives. I find it very disappointing that no countermeasures have been taken- afaik Wikipedia still works exactly like 20 years ago, a barebone wiki governed by a lot of obscure, complex and unstructured politics. Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia t…
Could you point to some examples of partisan entries?
This is typically done in under the guise of notability ("GPL/copyleft is notable, other alternatives aren't").