How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet • Hacker News Board

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#161

Post by okr » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

CuriouslyC wrote: post #22

bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

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…

You need that. I like the internet as it is.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#162

Post by bnralt » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

Ygg2 wrote: post #9

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…

Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off.

So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#163

Post by OfSanguineFire » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #116

OfSanguineFire wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able t…

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…

By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the world's diversity of societies and views.

Mastodon's federation policies, which require mod instances to police anti-LGBT speech for example, expressly excludes that. If you spend any time on the Nigerian internet, for instance, you see this is a matter that ordinary people are strident about, but they would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people whose views conform to what the Mastodon founding generation is comfortable with. Don't people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or (Great Firewall aside) China have the right to join this ecosystem and still be the ordinary representatives of their societies that they are?

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#164

Post by red_admiral » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

toyg wrote: post #125

hliyan wrote: post #43

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.

I can't reply to the child directly due to nesting, so I'll do it here:

As far as I know, for in-person transactions ("contactless" in Europe) the economics work differently - for example SumUp quotes a flat fee of 1.69% plus a small one-time cost to buy and register the reader devices. That gets you parking meters, public toilets and the like.

However, for online credit card transactions (which are a very different risk profile, to be fair) there's a fixed cost of something like $0.20 per transaction on top of the percentage fee.

That is why, for example, substack has a minimum pricing tier of $5 for subscriptions, and why Patreon is "restructuring" because their original micropayments model wasn't breaking even.

So I agree with the parent poster that microtransactions _online_ are currently infeasible - not fundamentally impossible (Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Diners etc. could bring in a new pricing model) but it is impossible for even the NYT to set up a workable "pay $0.50 to read this artice" tier at the moment.

A kind of system where you micropay "on credit" and it's all billed once at the end of the month could, depending on the jurisdiction, make the service provider subject to regulation as a provider of financial services.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#165

Post by marak830 » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

I do not discount anything you posted. At all.

* I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced.

Just wish I knew a way to actually help.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#166

Post by marcosdumay » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

afavour wrote: post #109

bad_alloc wrote: post #2

People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances a…

IMO these are tech solutions to social problems. As engineers it’s perhaps only natural that we gravitate towards them but I think there’s real danger of counter-productivity. Lemmy and Mastodon are good examples of this. Federation is a PITA. I know people who tried to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and never succeeded, getting lost in the concept of different instances etc etc. Mastodon instances are relatively ex…

> Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run

Compared to a theoretic distributed alternative, yes. But the largest instance of Mastodon, with something around 1% of the users of Twitter costs around $700 a month.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#167

Post by ants_everywhere » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

marginalia_nu wrote: post #100

ants_everywhere wrote: post #16

Earlier 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…

Isn't individual action the only action? The only ones with hands and thoughts are individuals, whether they imagine themselves part of a collective or imagine themselves to be alone. Yeah sure you may not be able to fix the world yourself, but you can undeniably make it better. Waiting for some grand wave of collective action to arrive and fix the problem seems like it would above all stand in the way of even making…

> Isn't individual action the only action?

Yes, in an important sense. But, you know, architectural layers something something.

At the end of the day maybe everything is logic gates, but there's a difference between `cat`ing /dev/urandom and computing a trajectory for a plane, say.

Organizations and corporations basically exist (if you squint hard enough) to achieve this sure of layering. And to your point, a lot of what organizations do is manage incentives for individuals so that the collective work gets done.

BTW thanks for marginalia!

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#168

Post by tentacleuno » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

ants_everywhere wrote: post #130

tentacleuno wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter). Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify…

Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed. I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scal…

> I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.

100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automatically, through the software.

Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model. I feel like AI isn't used much in solutions such as these because you can't read what its been trained upon (e.g. if a right-leaning instance uses it, it may be biased against left-leaning content), and how the final model reacts to content. (Maybe there's a way to achieve this, not an AI expert by any means.)

It seems like it would be less transparent than the (arguably not great) solution we have now: shared blocklists.

Anyway, on the whole it would be great if we could take advantage of technology to reduce the administrative work required to host a public Mastodon / AP instance -- if we could achieve it, such work would most likely give way to more instances.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#169

Post by nickelpro » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:35 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #152

jwestbury wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree. Science faces a similar problem with homogeniety, specifically in regards to funding usually coming from the state and in general state influence in research. 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 finish…

The problems of homogeneity among hard sciences is in no way bettered or solved by introducing quackery and conspiracy theories to the mix.

The rest of your post is insane, "War on Christmas"-style. No one reputable is claiming men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.

Re: How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

#170

Post by tvieron » Wed, Nov 08, 2023, 2:36 PM UTC

aCoreyJ wrote: post #153

tvieron wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That site seems to have a captcha issue. 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.…

> 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Maria_Penttil%C3%A4

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Finnish_female_serial...

Does describing this man as a "Finnish female serial killer" make sense? He is male. This is just factually incorrect.

Any attempts to change this categorisation were reverted, and all discussions about it were removed from the Talk page.