Considering the idiocies of mainstream people I have to face everyday, I bet the content creators are insane. Insane geniuses that is.
Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
41–50 of 332 posts
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#42Yes. 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 think it's mostly a psychological barrier in most respects. There's also no necessity to comment - lurking, despite the quite awful name we've given the behaviour, is a perfectly normal thing to do. Plenty of people read books who don't write them, etc.
I'd also presume (and it is a presumption!) that people who are commenting on one platform will likely also to be commenting on another. As in, I would presume they would establish a conversation as the preferred method of internet discourse they digest, as opposed to a one way consumption of data.
This also gives me an opportunity to use one of my favourite Cronenberg quotes: "The monologue is his preferred method of discourse" - Videodrome
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#43People 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 wa…
I would put it on Github. Check Stack Overflow and google for has questions about the format, answer there and point to your repo.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#44People 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.
I agree. While I don’t know how big the problem is, my limited experience is that notability is applied unevenly, and tends to be levelled against articles that particular editors find boring/annoying, mostly as an excuse to remove them.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#45One 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_...
probably uses a bot
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#46Calling it "inequality" implies that equality would be normal or better. That's just wrong
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#47People 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 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.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#48Am 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?
Similarly, I would like to know your mindset like what incentives or motivations do you see? Do you also feel that if you don't post a comment, the discussion won't go in that direction?
As a lurker for me most of the times I feel like I am on window shopping of ideas. Not looking anything in particular.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#49Am 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 wonder if it holds throughout history? How many people posted letters to news papers in the hay day of paper news..
most probably much less. The big difference is that they would publish mostly in local papers while the internet's audience is always global.
Re: Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
#50Earlier 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.
I think it's mostly a psychological barrier in most respects. There's also no necessity to comment - lurking, despite the quite awful name we've given the behaviour, is a perfectly normal thing to do. Plenty of people read books who don't write them, etc. I'd also presume (and it is a presumption!) that people who are commenting on one platform will likely also to be commenting on another. As in, I would presume they…
> There's also no necessity to comment - lurking, despite the quite awful name we've given the behaviour
This is especially true if the content itself gives authoritative or complete information about something, as Warnock's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma) described:
""" The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations:
* The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."
* The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.
* No one read the post, for whatever reason.
* No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.
* No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.
— Bryan C. Warnock """
In this way, I think the voting system became popular, not only because it's usable a mechanism to select interesting information, but also gives an important feedback to encourage the poster, same for the "Like" button. However, they has their own problems.