At least in this community setting this number has been increased to 1% from around 0.001% in the traditional ways or content distribution like TV and magazines.
Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
311–320 of 332 posts
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#312I find Grady Harp's Amazon profile [1] activity suspicious, to say the least. Here's one of his reviews from January 11, 2019:
"Australian author Phillip Strang has gained his platform as an adventure writer through his career installing telecommunications networks in many remote and exotic parts of the globe, including time spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan - an experience that allowed him to gain direct insights in to the ongoing conflicts there. He has also spent considerable time in Africa including Liberia, Nigeria, and Guinea. It is this direct contact with troubled countries that gives his books intense credibility: he has first hand contact with the events he shares in his books such as DCI Cook Thriller Series (MURDER IS A TRICKY BUSINESS, MURDER HOUSE, MURDER WITHOUT REASON, MURDER IS ONLY A NUMBER, MURDER IN LITTLE VENICE, MURDER IN NOTTING HILL, MURDER IN ROOM 346, MURDER OF A SILENT MAN, MURDER HAS NO GUILE and now MURDER IN HYDE PARK.
We know the main characters and the genteel writing style of Phillip Strang so all that is left is a brief summation of the plot and the story is distilled well in Phillip’s synopsis: ‘An early-morning jogger is murdered in Hyde Park. It's the centre of London, but no one saw him enter the park, no one saw him die. He carries no identification, only a waterlogged phone. As the pieces unravel, it's clear that the dead man had a history of deception. Is the murderer one of those that loved him? Or was it someone with a vengeance? It's proving difficult for DCI Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Homicide to find the guilty person - not that they'll cease to search for the truth, not even after one suspect confesses.
Elegant writing and a keen sense of suspense – this is another Phillip Strang winner! Grady Harp, January 19"
There's no personal opinion about the book except the "another winner" at the very end. The first paragraph is author's flattering autobiography, the second paragraph is literally copy/paste of the author's synopsis and perhaps the very last sentence is actually what Grady Harp wrote. Sorry to ruin the illusion but this is a promotional account that simply posts whatever message the authors send in. Also I noted Grady Harp consistently rates books with 5 stars, which is again a sign of promotional account, as anything below that might as well be 1 star.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGZV527R2U6A...
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#313Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their…
> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image.
The author's definition of insane is stuff such as having read a lot of books, posting a high mumber of edits in wikipedia, or streaming videogaming for a profit.
That's not clickbaity. It's simply wrong.
Focusing on the most arguable assertion, the wikipedia user who has on average an edit per 4 minutes for pretty much the last decade. Based on my personal experience, it's very easy to reach that sort of rate due to wikipedia's auto-edit features, as it only takes a single click on a link to submit an edit.
For example, you can revert a vandalism submission by clicking the revert link, you can mark an article as stub by clicking on a link, you can add a post to a category by clicking on a link... You can even post a warning on a user page by clicking on a link. Each of these actions count as an edit.
This means that if you happen to stumble on a user who posted a joke on a set of articles, in the half minute it takes to revert all vandalism submissions and warn the user to not repeat that you will contribute tens of edits, which can give you easily a rate of 100 edits per minute.
Does that count as insane?
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. It's my opinion its become toxic over the past few years. Generally speaking I prefer unmoderated discussion forums. I rather choose what to read instead of being "protected".
This is interesting because the least toxic places on Reddit are highly moderated (askscience, and askhistorians are the two biggest examples). Indeed, Hacker News is just essentially a highly moderated subreddit, which is its attraction.
[deleted]
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#315Most of the comments here are either elaborating on the OP, or justify lurking. I am a mostly-lurker myself, but I felt the need to comment here, since I was hoping to see the discussion go into a different direction. The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their…
> The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. The author's definition of insane is stuff such as having read a lot of books, posting a high mumber of edits in wikipedia, or streaming videogaming for a profit. That's not clickbaity. It's simply wrong. Foc…
It is clickbaity. It is also wrong, indeed. But it's used here in the same way a person would say to a friend "You're insane!", when hearing of that person's unusual feat (like making 10000 wikipedia edits in the last month).
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#316One interesting thing regarding this was when Reddit added a "chat with a random user" -feature a few years back. I was so used to the high quality submissions and comment threads that when I was paired to chat with random lurkers it was kind of eye opening how they were just... really plain and hard to hold a interesting conversation with. And this is exactly why communism will NEVER work: 90% of the population just…
I've got to agree with this statement. In my opinion, it's an absolute blessing (and an unavoidable evolutionary outcome) that there is still varying degrees of friction inherent to the process of commenting on many websites. Imagine if every person could throw their uninformed opinions about every topic into the common space with no hassle whatsoever, the signal to noise ratio would be positively devastated. In fact…
4chan is the place where everyone can comment with very little effort.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#317Most of Titles We Read on the Internet are Clickbait Like This One. The title does caught my eyes, but I didn't see anything useful in the discussion. I'm actually training myself avoiding this kind of articles. Clearly, "most" and "insane" are two words that I want to avoid.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#318Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. It's my opinion its become toxic over the past few years. Generally speaking I prefer unmoderated discussion forums. I rather choose what to read instead of being "protected".
This is interesting because the least toxic places on Reddit are highly moderated (askscience, and askhistorians are the two biggest examples). Indeed, Hacker News is just essentially a highly moderated subreddit, which is its attraction.
HN it may have pretentious articles, the comments are the most substantial. Lately I've been lurking through HN Classics (1) (Many research papers and pdfs posted on HN that are old) and the comments are the best part of them.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#319I'm wondering how Jodel (or Yik Yak in the US) fits in. The only meaningful way to interact with it is by writing comments yourself. Only to read the comments gets boring very quickly.
I observe that the quality of the comments is worse compared to platforms with more lurkers but it's interesting to see, that a platform with, presumably, a higher participation ratio is working as well
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The number of Wikipedia articles is steadily increasing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia Deleting articles doesn't prevent anyone from participating, since anyone can write/edit articles on any notable subject. The deletion process protects Wikipedia from search engine marketers who try to promote their clients with biased low-quality content. They can go to Quora for that. https://en.wikipe…
At one point I was playing Serious Sam, an FPS. I finished the game and let the credits roll by, noticing a quirky name "Derek Smart". I searched for it on Wikipedia and arrived at the eponymous article, describing the life and creative work of a rash and stubborn but obviously ambitious and talented video game designer.
A bit later on, there was Croteam, the maker of Serious Sam, AMA on Reddit so I asked them if the reference to Derek Smart was an inside joke or what. The reply was along the lines of "he's a dear friend of ours and our inspiration". I went back to the Derek Smart Wikipedia article, pointed out the screenshot of the credits with Derek's name, the AMA reply and asked a very innocuous question: "Can we put this in the article?"
I got a reply that what I did is termed "original research" and the only acceptable way to include the reference would be if some noteworthy third party, such as Washington Times, mentions and explains the connection, meaning all the work I did up to that point was in vain. That's when I completely gave up on editing Wikipedia as it seemed to me, and still does, absolutely Sisyphean. Editors of that article then went on to argue how to phrase the incident where Derek Smart assaulted a vending machine to best fit the article.
The implication of "no original research" and "noteworthy sources of information" means a large mass of regional events and persons can't be included in the English Wikipedia unless they clear this arbitrary bar of noteworthiness that can still be gamed with ease: a) be an employee of a mainstream news source, b) publish a biased article on any given topic, c) create an anonymous Wikipedia account, d) create an article on the topic or edit an exiting one to embed the information you published and e) marvel as Wikipedia editors revert the changes under the guise of preventing vandalism.
Automated edit-correction tools are another grave issue for Wikipedia, as they instantly revert an article to its sanctioned version set by a reputable Wikipedia editor. How is Wikipedia "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" again?