Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> if it had asked for $0.25 The economics of credit-card transactions, unfortunately, make this fundamentally impossible.
How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
151–160 of 669 posts
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#152> 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…
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.
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 finished, how high you jumped etc) where males don't outperform at every level by a significant degree. For instance, high school boy records beat pretty much all female world records in track [0]. And this is fine. We adapt societally by having women's leagues. And every scientist would admit this up until maybe 5 years ago. But now there is a growing "scientific consensus" that really it's some other societal effect.
Humans knew this to be true for thousands of years, but in the last 5 years we're beginning to upturn that for some reason. So maybe some deference to the past is warranted. If thousands of years from now the "consensus" still says sex doesn't really matter, then I'll grant you that. But for now the "scientific consensus" doesn't make something true
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/to-understand-sex...
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you like Wikipedia to claim something that is objectively false like your doctor or parents or "society" tell you what gender you are and your thoughts on it don't matter? Maybe if you give an example of what issue you have seen?
Describing this man as a woman is objectively false. The reality is that he is a man attempting to mimic women, or rather, his idea of what a woman is. This is just one example of many. Perhaps worse than this, there is very obvious bias on any page or text related to critics of the transgender ideology. Even the Wikipedia page for Woman has been in endless battles over males trying to stake their ideological claim o…
Wikipedia editors shouldn't have more say in someone's gender than the person themselves. I guess that seems obvious to me.
And yea being inclusive of trans people and accepting current theories of psychological and medical treatment is a Western bias.
But I don't think any other angle would make sense, people are the gender they say they are seems to be a very simple policy.
Other discrimination against women seems to be a separate issue that should be addressed
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think professional trolls, bad faith argument, toxic influencers, lynch mobs, rage bait, and all the other moving parts that make up the Internet’s profoundly toxic political and social activism sphere also did their part. That stuff really exploded in the mid 20-teens. Of course you could consider some of that a special case of content mills and spam. It certainly can’t be separated from the ad based business mode…
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…
Covid lockdowns - people actually were lonely for a long period.
The decline of traditional news media - more extreme headlines are essential for more money to appear.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So as a result of this we get, for example, articles like this one on Dana Rivers, who murdered in cold blood a lesbian couple and their son: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dana_Rivers . He is described as "she" and "her" throughout the article, despite this actually being the crime of a man. In this case, isn't the crime more important than what she chooses to identify as? I'm all for prosecuting a murder, but brin…
Wikipedia policy mandating that this man be described as a woman is bringing gender identity politics into it.
Does this mean that, for people you like, you respect their gender, while you do the opposite for people you dislike?
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#156[flagged]
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#157To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.
They routinely run absolutely massive banner ads for themselves at the top of every page begging for donations they don't need. And these ads are the worst: extremely deceptive, unnecessary, and huge.
Laughable to claim wikipedia is "ad free" just because the one ad is for wikipedia.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole…
[flagged]
Well there were obviously good and bad things about it.
Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations.
We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#159Earlier 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…
Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechani…
I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)
A system where workers are part owners of their companies is probably better described as "distributed ownership" to avoid confusing connotations. If the first thing you have to do is explain to people that you're not advocating a Nordic style welfare state or a USSR/CCP/North Korean style dystopian dictatorship, you're using problematic terminology.
If I'm misunderstanding you and you're advocating that all businesses should be controlled by a (democratic) government rather than by their employees then I'd be against that because most people are not going to have enough time, under any system, to become informed about stuff they have no direct stake in. I don't want politicians or voters responding to a media fear campaign telling businesses what products to produce and such a system would almost certainly devolve into incumbent politicians using the media to keep themselves in power and ensure their preferred successors win. I think it essential that decisions on whether to start new firms or what they are to produce should be mostly depoliticized except where there's a strong public interest that the government needs to regulate (like firms that want to pollute the environment or sell harmful highly addictive products).
An economy completely under the control of a democratic government would allow 50%+1 people who don't like Taylor Swift's music to ban her from singing and deprive 40% of the population who are fans of her music of their right to listen to her sing (or in the case of representative democracy, allow a majority to vote for a "lesser evil" party that includes outlawing Taylor Swift concerts as one of their package deal policies). A more extreme example of why democracy needs to be limited in scope would be how the democratic government of Athens voted, by majority popular vote, to execute Socrates because his constant challenging questions they didn't want to answer were annoying to them.