Voting lurkers do so because they can. The main drivers of this dominant behavior are antiquated social media technologies supporting voting and sharing.
Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
101–110 of 332 posts
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anecdata, but I'm a typical lurker. If I don't have something to contribute to a discussion, I stay silent. I think that goes for a lot of people. There's also the commitment angle - if you engage in a discussion, you're typically committed to follow up on the responses you get. That can be more of a time/attention commitment than people are interested in, and with the growing toxicity of online discourse a lot of pe…
"Commitment" to a discussion is optional. It's perfectly reasonable to give your point of view, and come back a few days later to see if there were any interesting replies.
Depends on the forum. HN emphasises that, by not notifying users that they had replies. Reddit on the other hand colours your mailbox in red so you're aware of replies without actively seeking them.
I don't know which foster the best quality discussions, but I feel the HN way is a bit impersonal.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#103That doesn't mean the communities aren't functional. The lurkers are still voting on the commenters. There's various internet communities who've tried different ways to keep that judgement mechanic high quality, and with varying degrees of success. HN is maybe one of the best. The ability to create and to judge might well be separate. How many food critics are good chefs, and vice versa? Perhaps it's due to not havin…
I disagree about HN being among the best for managing judgment. Down-voting requires X amount of karma but up-voting doesn't.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#104Outliers write most of what we read, period. Our whole existence is outliers. Most people don't live in our town, don't do our job, don't live in our country, don't speak our language.
The problem is we think our life is normal and everyone is like us when that isn't true.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#105Yes. Most of the content you watch on TV was written and acted by outliers. The products you use and consume were crafted, marketed and even distributed by outliers. First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me. Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, v…
It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit. That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies"). Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and tem…
> It's a problem for Wikipedia which says a central principle is that it's the enclyclopedia anyone can edit.
Anyone can edit it, but only those with enough obsessession can meaningfully make a change (beyond fixing typos and such) that will persist. That was my impression anyway, after spending a bit of time trying to contribute and it seems to be very much inline with the message in the OP.
I don’t bother anymore.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
That staging area exists, and it's called "Articles for creation" (AfC). The website directs new editors to the staging area for their first article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio... Drafts in AfC will not be deleted for being non-notable, but they will also not be indexed by search engines. When a draft is ready to be published, a reviewer looks over it and ensures that it is properly…
That's getting closer to what I was thinking, but that's for new editors, not new articles. "Only experienced editors should ever create an article from scratch. Others should first create a draft page and build the article there." And as you say they aren't indexed.
Experienced editors usually create a "userspace draft", which is in a different staging area:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Userspace_draft
Userspace drafts also won't be deleted for non-notability, and they can be published whenever the editor feels that they're ready.
Neither of the draft spaces on Wikipedia are indexed by search engines, because these staging areas generally aren't proofread by other editors.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia does a lot to prevent new users participating. The mediawiki software is very confusing and has a lot of different functionality crammed in to the same page edit tool that doesn't even make sense. I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission wa…
The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia. The notability guidelines are there to prevent people from writing about things that can't be verified by reliable sources, and it's a mechanism to help ensure that articles are accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability While not every topic belon…
> The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia.
Grandparent said it was rejected because of the citations, not because of any supposed lack of notability. Are you implying that reviewers refuse articles for other reasons than the ones they actually give?
(Edit: from what I gather on this thread, the citations were both secondary and substantial, so the notability criterion was probably met.)
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia. The notability guidelines are there to prevent people from writing about things that can't be verified by reliable sources, and it's a mechanism to help ensure that articles are accurate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability While not every topic belon…
> The file format you tried to write about isn't notable enough to have its own article in Wikipedia. Grandparent said it was rejected because of the citations , not because of any supposed lack of notability. Are you implying that reviewers refuse articles for other reasons than the ones they actually give? (Edit: from what I gather on this thread, the citations were both secondary and substantial, so the notability…
Lack of citations establishing notability means wikipedia generally assumes something isn't notable enough, and per GPs words no such sources exist. (I'm not saying this is necessary a great and problem-free system, but that's how it works as far as I understand)
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#109That doesn't mean the communities aren't functional. The lurkers are still voting on the commenters. There's various internet communities who've tried different ways to keep that judgement mechanic high quality, and with varying degrees of success. HN is maybe one of the best. The ability to create and to judge might well be separate. How many food critics are good chefs, and vice versa? Perhaps it's due to not havin…
I disagree about HN being among the best for managing judgment. Down-voting requires X amount of karma but up-voting doesn't.
I think that’s a key element to the success. It introduces an obvious upward bias in karma, but I don’t see that as a problem.
For one, it prevents creating new accounts to downvote someone that pisses you off. For me personally, it means I downvote only for “adds absolutely nothing and is somehow harmful to HN community”. I probably upvote : downvote at 20:1 or greater.
When deciding if a comment voting system is good or bad, I look heavily towards the outcome, and secondarily towards the mechanism. I think outcome on HN is second to none.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikipedia does a lot to prevent new users participating. The mediawiki software is very confusing and has a lot of different functionality crammed in to the same page edit tool that doesn't even make sense. I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission wa…
> I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. One of the core principles of Wikipedia is "No original research". Your proposed article sounds like it was just that. The Wikipedia editors would rather have you share that research in a blog post or similar.
The original research has been done by the company inventing the file format. Reporting on it is not original research.