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Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

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Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#21

Post by jopsen »

kokokokoko wrote: post #14

It's a question of motive. Once the immediate payment motive is removed, what other motives do people have for the content they create online? When reading something online I always ask myself what motive the person had for writing it.

Some people are just bored..

But for many of the top creators mentioned in the article I strongly suspect that writing reviews, making comments or editing Wikipedia is a part of their identity. Something that gives their life meaning.

And to be fair, writing reviews or editing Wikipedia certainly is a meaningful thing to do.

These 1%'ers have a massive impact on the world. An impact they couldn't necessarily have if their motives were financial.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#22

Post by nurettin »

The picture presented in this article is incomplete. There is a constant stream of people attempting to become supporters or contributors and going back to their respective brackets when thry fail to do so.

Some are discouraged entirely and some try again later.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#23

Post by segfaultbuserr »

chrisco255 wrote: post #6
keithwhor wrote: post #4

Yes. 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…

I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.

I've been lurking on Hacker News for (at least) two years before deciding to participate: I would visit the homepage daily, read some interesting news and comments, and finally leave the site.

It's pointless to comment if one cannot add new information, perspectives, arguments, or humors to the thread, as a result, one really needs to make an effort to engage in the discussion. In practice, it means you'll need a proper keyboard, and a fast Internet connection to search for references. At least, at there, or at Reddit, or even at 4chan, this principle applies. I mean, you can make pointless comments, but you'll lower the SNR of the entire community, or your comment will be ignored or filtered on 4chan, or downvoted (or not getting votes) on HN/Reddit/Slashdot.

There are other places where the barrier-of-entry is lower, like the comments section below the stories on "ordinary" news websites (not HN), etc, but make an comment is even more pointless.

I guess the best counterexample I can think of is Twitter. It's no more than 140 chars and highly personal, so making a knee-jerk comment is common, and you can use a mobile phone instead of a proper computer to do so.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#24

Post by pcnix »

avenius wrote: post #17
chrisco255 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still think it's surprising that there are so many lurkers who literally never engage in the discussion, considering the barriers to do so are so low.

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…

There's also your attention surface. I typically read threads/posts from a variety of communities, but might prefer to reply only on some, and lurk on the others. I'm sure this is true for a lot of people, from anecdotes I've heard.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#25

Post by adambyrtek »

skilled wrote: post #7

While I find the research interesting, I have to say that this is not what I read on the internet. Wikipedia has no use for the kind of work I do, and most books I am recommended by other people, so I don't need to sit and read a review. As for Reddit, I do use it but again, only in very niche forums where the discussion is never one-sided or made to look informative. The same goes for my news sources and other conte…

The thing is that among "actual people with firsthand experience" the ones who blog are probably outliers as well, so the original principle still holds.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#26

Post by pjc50 »

flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

Deletionism is the thing that will kill Wikipedia, by deleting itself and gradually narrowing the circle of permitted contributors.

There are some situations where the non-English Wikipedias have far more information than the English ones though, because of how "notability" works.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#27

Post by ndnxhs »

flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

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 was rejected because my sources were not academic enough so I removed those sources and added the only official source in existence which is a zip file containing code examples and example files. My second edit was rejected for not sourcing all of my info.

Literally the only info available is the zip and forum posts. I mainly used the forum posts while learning and verified it against the data I was seeing in the file. How am I meant to share this info for others to benefit from? If I make it in to a blog post it's not an acceptable source but if I post it as a PDF and pretend its some wanky research paper then it probably would get accepted.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#28

Post by pjc50 »

Kaveren wrote: post #20
sigttou wrote: post #10

Am here for over 2 years now, rarely upvote something, haven't submitted anything and this is just my 2nd comment... Pretty sure this rule holds for close to all kind of forums.

I don't know if you're willing to make a 3rd comment, but I'm trying to understand the lurker mindset from the perspective of someone who posts quite actively. Is is just that you don't care enough to reply, feel like your opinions are unpopular, don't feel like you have anything to say, or something else?

I'm not sure one needs to make an argument for not posting.

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#29

Post by retSava »

flexie wrote: post #11

People come to Wikipedia to get an answer. Many users of Wikipedia are kids, or non-native English speakers for whom contributing is a challenge. Or laymen that don't know about the subject and naturally don't feel like they could contribute anything. Or people who simply don't know how to contribute. Or people visiting via mobiles where it's really difficult to research and contribute. If you adjust for all those us…

I'd say that many times, that's true of Swedish topics too. I wonder how well that fits with eg Wikipedia in other languages where English may not be so fluent though, eg German?

Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People

#30

Post by michaelt » 

  One of Wikipedia's power users, [...] Assuming he
  doesn't sleep or eat or anything else [...]
  that's still one edit every four minutes.
When your hobby is replacing hyphens with en dashes [1] and removing errant newlines [2] I doubt it takes 4 minutes per page.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plymouth_Brethren...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raymond_Ramazani_...

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