
Social Media Endangers Knowledge - DiabloD3
https://www.wired.com/story/wikipedias-fate-shows-how-the-web-endangers-knowledge/
======
CiPHPerCoder
If you want Wikipedia to have more contributors, maybe the editors ought to
stop being so caustic toward new members?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CiPHPerCoder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CiPHPerCoder)

Created an account, created a barebones skeleton user page just to make the
red text link go away, immediately flagged for special deletion. Even when the
person agreed with my point, their tone was mildly hostile and lectury.

(Epilogue: I ended up not really contributing much since then simply because
of how I was greeted.)

Behavior like this _drives new contributors away_.

~~~
ahelwer
This drive-by criticism comes up every time Wikipedia is mentioned on HN. I've
written a few articles on computer science topics and haven't been bothered at
all by the roving gangs of bureaucrats. It's always a lovely experience.

If you write quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to
common knowledge and pop culture, your Wikipedia experience will be very
pleasant. Since the HN readership is skews educated and technical, they are
very well-equipped to write such articles.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
> This drive-by criticism comes up every time Wikipedia is mentioned on HN.
> I've written a few articles on computer science topics and haven't been
> bothered at all by the roving gangs of bureaucrats. It's always a lovely
> experience.

That's all fine and well, but I literally only created an account and got
attacked. I wasn't even given the opportunity to contribute yet.

Unless your intent was to imply that I'm unwilling or incapable of writing
quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to knowledge and
pop culture, your comment does not logically follow from the stated problem.

~~~
ahelwer
Your stated problem is that caustic behaviour toward new editors drives away
potential long-term editors. To support this assertion, you used your own
experience. As a counterpoint, I related my own experience, which was
different. I'm not sure where it fails to "logically follow" as though this
were some mathematical chain of reasoning rather than an informal
conversation.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
The way your post above was structured served to imply that I'm incapable of
writing quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to
knowledge and pop culture, which was the component of your post above that I
stated did not logically follow. My description of "illogical" was toward your
back-handed remark.

I'll note that you did not attempt to deny, retract, amend, or correct this
interpretation after being presented with it, which leaves me to believe that
was your intent all along.

In which case: No, that's not acceptable. Personal attacks do not belong on
HN, let alone baseless ones.

~~~
ahelwer
You seem really fixated on the logic here, and I'm feeling bored and
unbelievably petty, so let's break it all down.

Logical structure of your original post, in your voice:

A.P0: If existing editors behave poorly toward new editors, it will drive new
editors away.

A.P1: Existing editors are behaving poorly toward new editors, based on my
anecdotal supporting evidence.

A.C: Existing editors are driving away new editors with their poor behaviour.

Logical structure of my reply, in my voice:

B.P0: Existing editors behave poorly toward newcomers in certain domains such
as common knowledge and pop culture.

B.P1: Existing editors don't behave poorly toward newcomers in domains such as
creation of new technical articles, based on my anecdotal supporting evidence.

B.P2: Many HN readers have the capability to write new technical articles.

B.C: HN readers will not experience poor behaviour from existing editors if
they use their knowledge to write new technical articles.

Logical structure of first reply, in your voice:

C.P0: It is possible you are implying I am unwilling/incapable of writing
quality researched Wikipedia articles.

C.P1: If you were not implying C.P0, then your reply does not logically follow
(ed. note: probably meant "address" rather than "logically follow") from
conclusion A.C.

Logical structure of my reply, in my voice:

(clarifying restatement of previous)

Logical structure of your second reply, in your voice:

E.P0: Since you did not explicitly assuage my concerns in C.P0, my concerns
are valid.

E.P1: If my C.P0 concerns were valid, that constitutes a personal attack.

E.P2: Personal attacks are unacceptable on HN.

E.C: Your reply to me was unacceptable.

Now that we have a nice pseudo-logical representation of our conversation, I
hope all ambiguity is cleared up. Anyway, your propositions C.P1 and E.P0 are
both incorrect.

~~~
CiPHPerCoder
You're forgetting something: _They were hostile to me before I had a chance to
contribute._

Here's where your logic falls apart: B.P1 is demonstrably false, in at least
one occurrence. (i.e. Mine, where the hostility existed irrespective of my
writing skills or the value of my potential contributions, or the lack
thereof, because they were acting with zero information which shows their
tendencies. If you've already established social capital, you're part of their
in-group and therefore will not be attacked.)

But from the overall tone of the other comments here, and the sheer
upvote/downvote ratio of my top-level comment, it's probably not a rare event.

I didn't think you overlooked this detail. I misinterpreted your statements as
a personal attack based on the fact that I already explicitly made this clear
and you appeared to have enough mastery of the English language to possess
basic reading comprehension. But clearly I was wrong somewhere.

I apologize for giving you too much credit.

Hopefully spelling it out here, again, makes it clearer. If not, there's no
point continuing this conversation because it's only going to get nasty.

------
ACow_Adonis
Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these
phenomenon are really a problem.

As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from
a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would
actually expect contributor growth to fall.

Additionally, with the increase of the "great unwashed" online for lack of a
better term, yes, the density of intellectual and worthwhile thought online
goes down. But does that matter, or more accurately, is that cause for concern
over and above the general phenomenon of an "appearance" focused culture? Does
social media cause, or merely reflect the values of our underlying culture?

What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most
access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. I can download Wikipedia.
I have e readers. I don't even need to pay the university any more because I
have so much access to libraries, knowledge and communication and computation.

While I am of course concerned about our societies values and their
consequences, it is hard for me to take seriously the concern on the face of
it that social media is destroying knowledge, when it is available in amount,
redundancy and accessibility in greater amounts than it ever has been before.
Period.

Perhaps there is also some anxiety on the separation of knowledge from the
"appearance of knowledge" industry as well :p

~~~
intended
I’ll disagree with your statement because there’s a hidden variable/assumption
that has now changed.

There is a great amount of information available today compared to before -
__all else held constant __.

All else is not constant. Assumptions on signal vs noise have been upended and
getting to good information to an average person is now perhaps more of a task
than before.

Given an average joe, none of them will be on the level of informational
awareness as a member of HN.

They will not know or try to check the links on a Wikipedia page, be aware of
various turf wars, or the credibility of a page.

This is if they approach a page directly, as opposed to being diverted or
distracted from information.

In short- by measures both malicious, intentional and accidental, signal is
now swamped with more noise than ever before.

So I disagree with that statement as it is true only in a general, unspecific
and intractable sense.

(The rule of thumb is that all noise is signal to someone, and a lot of this
is signal for our hindbrains which are better customers than our rational,
non-impulsive minds.)

~~~
csydas
Quite frankly, I think you give even the average HN user too much credit. We
are awash in information and there just is no good method for properly vetting
it in a timely manner unless you are prepared to devote a not-insignificant
amount of time to doing so, and even reading the material presented past the
headline is often asking too much of many readers; how many discussions here
have gone on for hundreds of posts for hours as people who just want to get
into an argument banter back and forth?

We live in a wonderful age full of lots of information, but we're all pretty
poor at sorting it, and the informatoin we do receive tends to be less about
informing and more about persuading. I occasionally see the discussion threads
from our Marketing/Sales guys and I see the "fightcards" they pass back and
forth with highlights for winning out over competing products; while I see the
value in a sales situation, I can't help but see many similarities in think
pieces and the fightcards, in that they don't aim to provide deep and indepth
information on any particular subject, they're meant to be highly persuasive
towards a specific idea while diminishing another. I understand this in a
competitive sales situation, I suppose - you're more or less fighting memes
and myths from someone else, so you fight back with the same since the
audience doesn't understand the raw data anyways, or the raw data is
incredibly subjective. But for Thinktanks or other such outlets, I think this
is an incredibly dishonest way of discussing and presenting information,
regardless of the source behind it. Infographics, ByTheNumbers, AtAGlance, all
such methods are just coy tricks to avoid actual data and instead present an
opinion as fact. We see it with various news media too where the authors
conflate the number of references with validity, and you end up with news
blogs where every other word is referenced or a link to a reference, and the
references often contain so much information there's no reasonable way you
could validate even one of them in time before the article has taken off as
viral.

We are drowning in information and poor information sharing in general - even
when you have the cognizance to know to check things like the history behind
how a piece of information was assembled, there often is just too much data
for any one person to sort effectively, and tracing such data to a reliable
source is darn near impossible.

Our major media outlets failed us the moment they decided to try competing
with clickbait headlines and rapid, poorly researched stories, and we failed
them when we started falling for it hook, line, and sinker. Media outlets
should be on the ball with cameras and people and concise reporting, but the
actual information should be the result of slow, intentional, cumbersome, and
concretrated effort. We luckily still see this a lot from magazines, luckily
enough, but the rest is pretty dire.

------
legel
Having done a lot of data mining and analysis of Wikipedia (scanning its
entire corpus several times, machine learning new representations, studying
traffic and article growth stats, studying its ontological structure) I would
like to make two suggestions: (1) In its current structure, Wikipedia is
“almost complete”. For the way that articles are written, embellished with
media, and organized there doesn’t appear to be much room for change to most
of them. This should be concerning, because in reality Wikipedia is always
only the tip of the iceberg for everything. (2) In order to inspire a new
growth of editing and contributions to Wikipedia, which can expand the corpus
by another order of magnitude, new systems for organizing and communicating
knowledge need to be developed that can allow orders of magnitude more
information to be elegantly incorporated into existing articles. If anyone is
interested in pursuing this, I don’t suggest waiting for the bureaucracies and
crowds to develop it (although would obviously be thrilled if they did);
what’s in your power now is to fork the corpus yourself, and start a new open
source initiative on its back. This is the classic case of how hard it is for
big organizations to adapt in big ways (almost impossible), versus a small
startup enterprise.

~~~
guaka
Do you have links to your analytical work?

Bonus for links to your thoughts on how to fork and expand another order of
magnitude. This is something I'd love to work on at some point.

------
acobster
As much I think Debord's theory on the _Society of the Spectacle_ [1] is as
prescient as ever today, this article doesn't go far enough in making that
case. It even casts Google as some great democratizing force:

> _Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text-
> based advertising model....They effectively democratized the ability to
> contribute to the global corpus of knowledge._

Google completely changed how people access information, true, but they also
did way more to centralize the web than almost any other company, ever. That's
not the best news for objective knowledge. Yet they get a pass while "social
media" gets indicted with an anecdote about narcissism on Instagram?

At the time of this writing, searches related to _The Walking Dead_ are the
top trending ones. You need to present some much more compelling evidence that
social media is behind this shift away from "knowledge," and that Google is
somehow not, for me to believe they're not just as much part of the Spectacle.

All that is to say that this article takes too narrow a focus, and misses the
larger point because of it. The web isn't the solution or the response to the
Spectacle: it's a natural extension of it.

[1] The Spectacle is the idea that in popular culture people relate to each
other not directly but indirectly, through the "images" presented by culture
itself, i.e. "the Spectacle is a social relation between people that is
mediated by images."

------
nnfy
I don't think the problem is with social media. I think the problem is the
competence of the average person.

How many communities start out full of reasonable, productive discourse, like
HN, and then go downhill once they become popular? How many endless summers
has the internet suffered?

Mediocrity is the enemy of progress.

Edit: I also take strong offense to the nonsense that the desire to aggregate
knowledge began with the Islamic Golden Age. People have been centralizing
knowledge for far longer than Islam has existed[1]. Frankly, the inclusion of
Islam in this article comes off as forced and unnecessary. It doesn't surprise
me that the author is from Iran, although his wikipedia page doesn't list any
information regarding religion...

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world)

~~~
rhizome
Look at public schooling in the US, how organizations are working to cut it
down with charter school diversions, corrupting history and science textbooks
with religious concepts, and forcing teachers to be parents, police, social
workers, and underpaid teachers, and to do it with a smile on their face.
Higher standards than police and politicians.

Add all this up and you start to see the educational system looking like it's
being sabotaged.

------
not-sbrin
Social Media as an idea was great when it started. But like any idea, when
taken to an extreme, it tends to do disservice to its many participants. It
seems often some product ideas are just better when they are not scaled.
Craigslist, HN news, Basecamp - are good examples.

~~~
white-flame
I think you should replace "taken to an extreme" with "monetized in the
pursuit of mythical unbounded growth". It's usually not the concept itself
taken to the extreme, it's all the other crap bolted on because otherwise it's
merely profitable, and that doesn't suffice anymore.

------
imran3740
When it comes to articles like this, part of me agrees with the whole
"attention economy" problem. Companies want to suck away our time, etc etc.

But another part of me also realizes that this problem is going to be very,
very hard to get rid of. As long as social media keeps feeding our brains with
"things you might like" and endless junk notifications, it's going to be near
impossible to stop.

~~~
trophycase
Just stop using it. It's really not that difficult. Admit you're addicted and
browse impulsively and then give it up.

~~~
abootstrapper
That's like saying, "just stop smoking" in 1960. Ok, there's a handful of us
that recognize the danger here, and have ceased using social media, but what
are we going to do to help everyone else?

~~~
KGIII
What are we going to do? Accept that it is not our job to stop people from
doing things we don't like? I have no social media accounts, I never have, but
I don't begrudge others their pacifiers.

We all do harmful things to ourselves. I find it easier to accept if I just
accept my own negative acts. It's easier, for me at least, to accept that
other people enjoy different things. I'd probably make a piss poor evangelist,
but the reward is I spend less time being unhappy with other people's choices.

~~~
venturis_voice
You have no social media accounts that must be liberating! I suppose you
wouldn't know though as you haven't "been through the looking glass" as it
were, the dark side of Facebook.

I removed my accounts for a few months and whilst it was liberating it wasn't
as life changing as I thought it would be. Horse for courses I suppose.

~~~
KGIII
I've never had one. At least not one of the ones people consider social media.
HN and Slashdot are both social media, but nobody seems to call them that. So,
no Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc... G+ may have made me a profile. The
others may have data about me, but they aren't my accounts.

I never saw a need for one. If people want me, they know where to find me.
It's not some secretive thing. It's just more inertia. I can't be bothered to
make accounts and they'd just take away more of my time. I am not even all
that private, people know who I am. I've had many, many Internet friends in my
home. One stayed for about five years, as she and I decided to date.
Similarly, I haven't ever used online dating sites. That just kind of
happened.

------
jochung
>You cannot think with images

I disagree, and I think the way computers have made us regress to a purely
textual interchange format as the common denominator is an unrecognized
tragedy.

My notes in school used to be richly layed out, mixing diagrams, symbols and
formatting as needed, which was trivial on paper. Now I'm typing to you
through a predictive text engine because tapping or swiping out words is
itself too error prone on this device.

We've created a massive gap between what can be produced and what can be
consumed easily, information-wise.

I think the GET/POST nature of the web is also responsible. Rather than make
it easy to collaborate in a shared space, we all have to write on little
immutable post its and paste them side by side.

~~~
dredmorbius
Wittgenstein would have argued the precise opposite of the quoted point. Ideas
_are_ pictures in our minds.

That particular point within the article is one of numerous specious and vapid
objections it raises.

------
jamesrcole
This article portrays a very distorted view of the past vs the present.

It portrays the push for encyclopedic collation of textual knowledge, in the
past, and social media, in the present, as if they were complete,
representative pictures of all the attitudes within societies towards
information and knowledge in the respective time periods.

As if low epistemic-quality discussions and communication mediums weren't
widespread in the past, and as if there were no other ways that knowledge is
treated these days.

------
Alex3917
There are hundreds if not thousands of social media platforms designed for
learning and intellectual collaboration, many of which are as or more
effective than universities. Wikipedia itself is a social media platform. I
think there is some truth in what the author is saying, but it's also
completely lacking in nuance.

~~~
thundergolfer
Can you name a few of your favourites? I'm interested in participating and
building communities like this. I feel like certain subreddits are as close as
I've found.

~~~
Alex3917
So many/most professional associations have one, and they usually have pretty
good mailing lists and often other functionality as well. So if you Google for
whatever professional associations exist for your industry you will likely
find some stuff.

There are a lot of academia-related ones also, e.g. researchgate.

------
adrianratnapala
Ok, so the article lists a litany of things I personally don't like: videos,
like buttons, facebook. But so what? I don't like them, so I avoid them.

Other people are different. Why get upset about it? Why the urge to decide how
other people spend their free time?

~~~
lostbob
It is not about hobbies, it's about the addiction that so many are unable to
leave because everyone they know also does it. Never leading to insight or
realisation, but hate and depression from unrealistic expectations and stress
to find the next thing and never reflect.

------
saurik
> Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized
> web, is in existential crisis.

Wikipedia is decidedly not "decentralized"; it is a centralized system that
people are allowed to copy: that is not at all the same thing.

------
erikbye
In every other sentence, the author proffers an unsubstantiated claim, and the
article is premised on these.

------
thepompano
"[Online social networks] reduce our curiosity by showing us exactly what we
already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences."

I hate to defend the world's largest algorithmically-enforced echo chamber,
but is this a really strong claim - is this _seriously_ true? Like, a
measurable reduction in curiosity across the board for Facebook users? What
about if your friends are thoughtful and use Facebook primarily as a means of
textual interchange?

And if the inverse is true - that being shown what we do not want and do not
think makes us _more_ curious - how does the author explain polarization? And
are those irrelevant Youtube ads supposed to make me more curious about the
world?

------
ddmma
With all do respect there is no surprise (level of intellect and human
sensitivity) that Mr. Trump is also president... because of social media.

Almost nobody reads what they share and get only the title based on the sheep
following model.

Social media became a sense of belonging and replaces analog socializing.. we
became more and more shallow and incapable of solving simple tasks while we
delegate to externals, either a machine or other app, simple life tasks.

~~~
siissussjskk
I'd be careful characterizing Trump as only being elected because of social
media. Not everyone who disagrees with you are idiots. Misplaced hope and
conscious bias against the "other" (aka non-whites; women) are as much factors
to his success as memes. It's a fundamental problem (if you believe it's a
problem) that will never be tackled if it's characterized as outright
stupidity.

------
leroy_masochist
I really like this article, especially its point about typographic vs.
photographic information transfer and the mental pathways that are activated
when we process each respective medium.

------
stanislavb
It endangers not only knowledge by the mere sanity of many people...

------
abacate
Social interaction endangers knowledge.

Social media just exacerbates the problem further.

------
carbor1
Wow, this article's claim that text is what enables us to think is incredibly
elitist. Are illiterate people incapable of rational thought? Oral traditions
are deep wellsprings of human knowledge and culture.

~~~
narag
_Wow, this article 's claim that text is what enables us to think is
incredibly elitist._

But is it true?

 _Are illiterate people incapable of rational thought? Oral traditions are
deep wellsprings of human knowledge and culture._

Knowledge and culture is not the same as rational thought. Of course you can
reason without writing, but the manipulation of thoughts is much easier when
you can write them, the same as you can make calculations much more easily
when you can write the operations.

~~~
thepompano
_But is it true?_

You wouldn't know from the article, because the author of the article doesn't
cite any studies and just sort of takes Neil Postman's word for it.

------
eighthnate
Does a day go by without the traditional media pushing an article about how
bad social media is?

