One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all.
The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
I'd expand that: Wikipedia's greatness is due to its policies and guidelines in general. It is not surprising that they were drafted by a second-time encyclopedist and PhD in epistemology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
The next best thought out knowledge-based site is StackExchange.
Larry Sanger is now a conspiracy theorist [1], believing gems including:
- Antifa did the coup.
- Face masks are harmful.
- There have been "almost zero" deaths from COVID-19.
- Soros may have paid people to riot for George Floyd.
- The Ten Commandments were God's words: not "inspired", but precisely dictated. [2]
Since Wikipedia is hostile to conspiracy theories and religious woo, Larry has in the ensuing years tried (without success) to make a Wikipedia-equivalent site that will be friendly to his nuttery.
Your source on [2] does not quite support your interpretation: if you follow the Twitter thread from the beginning, or read Sanger's linked blog post [0], he makes no claims about his own beliefs. He's explicitly considering what one would conclude about Biblical inspiration _if_ one believed what the Bible says about itself. No faith is necessary to consider that question.
[0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/10/on-biblical-inspiration/
Every time I read 'rationalwiki' its just a bunch of personal drama about people the writers don't like. Never seen a single good article on there, it's just a bunch of circle jerking politics pretending to be a "rational wiki" like calling it the ministry of truth.
He pretty much sums it up in one sentence. I don't care about Sanger or his politics. These writers have no lives, all they do is criticize things that don't matter.
> Besides being the cofounder of one of the biggest websites on the Internet, he is mostly known for two things; criticising Wikipedia, and having created many failed WikiProjects to fix said criticisms.
This writing is fine penmanship for a 2nd grader about why I hate Kevin and his Pokemon cards.
I think I am confused by your comment in the context of Larry Sanger: are you suggesting that rationalwiki is incorrect and that Larry did not say any of the things quoted?
Only thing I know is a group of limp wristed keyboard warriors hate some people write a wall of text and try to "rationalize" why. The facts don't matter, only the tone does and it's full of impotent anger.
This is a natural product of how power works on the internet. Barring an algo that downgrades time spent, the people with the most power are proportionally the people who do the least things elsewhere.
I was clued into this when the BLM protests happened. When I poked into all the names of the protesters I could find who were present on-site, very few of them had day jobs.
It's just a secular leftist response to Conservapedia that mostly focuses on debunking (mostly far-right) pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. I think you're taking the name a bit too literally and the concept a bit too seriously.
Conservapedia and Wikipedia don't call themselves "rational" and the other guy took it seriously, not me. I know its just a bunch of whiny losers. What if conservapedia called itself the unbiased wiki and everyone quoted it?
Searching that sentence verbatim on Google produces, as a first result, a paper on the National Library of Medicine [1] that states in its abstract:
> Extended mask-wearing by the general population could lead to relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields.
How is that a conspiracy theory? At most, you can argue that it's not absolutely conclusive or that other studies reach different conclusions. But that's far from declaring something a conspiracy theory.
I think some people consider information contrary to that communicated by government officials to be conspiracy theory: If the government didn't tell us the truth about something, they conspired to tell us something untrue.
By this definition of conspiracy theory, anybody who is not a conspiracy theorist is credulous. I proudly call myself a conspiracy theorist AKA skeptic.
You should really read your sources a little more closely:
> As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.
> These symptoms were accompanied by a sensation of heat (p < 0.0001) and itching (p < 0.01) due to moisture penetration of the masks (p < 0.0001) in 10 healthy volunteers of both sexes after only 90 min of physical activity.
Heaven forbid! It's almost comical how certain people furrow for the tiniest of cherries to support their antivaxx, antimask knee jerking while their bodies get submitted to a gauntlet of health risks from contracting COVID.
Wikipedia actually/also inherited a lot of original "policy" from Ward Cunninghams WikiWikiWeb [1] . So right at the start, there's some overlap between wikis, design patterns, and agile development (from back when those terms actually meant something). A big lost opportunity in the history of wikipedia was to name the body of best practices the "Policy"/"Guideline"/"Essay" system, as opposed to "Community Patterns". In reality they do function closer to patterns anyway, which should be unsurprising seeing the original source(s).
There's also the whole way the software works. So that's twice that Wikipedia owes Ward Cunningham.
Well, that and the most important exchange of all of course:
"My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales [a]
Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham [b]" [2]
I guess that's one reason I can't fully trust Wikipedia. Because of its beauracracy, primary sources can't make much headway. If I had an entry and they got my birthday wrong, I can show them my birth certificate and they wouldn't accept it. But if I talked to Fox News and said I was born in X, suddenly it's "a good source for wikipedia".
I think it's a good rule of thumb to not have people edit articles too close to them, but for some objective facts you may as well let it in (and remember: "facts" means "can be proven OR disproven". I can make a fake birth certifricate but you can objecively prove through later talks that I lied. Or the hospital realizes they messed up and my own birthday is a lie to begin with. Much easier to reason with than "am I a good person?")
2. A mainstream publication republishes this because wikipedia is generally trustworthy
3. Someone else at wikipedia notices nonsense and removes article
4. Article gets reinstated using a referense to publication at (2)
It may sound weird but it has happened a few times. Wikipedia could probably do more to avoid circular references, but there's really no simple answer.
For an amusing but harmless example, see the Amelia Bedelia article. It's been long since reverted, but I'm sure there are many similar prank edits that survive to this day
1. make sure the primary source is publicly viewable and archiveable (be it a blog, acedemic profile, about us on a news site, or even a social media post).
2. ensure that there's some way to verify this as a primary source. This one pains me the most, but if we trust news sites to vet anonymous sources, may as well trust social media communities to vouch for a source really being that person. IME social media loves to call out lies, so them trusting a personality isn't as scary as it sounds.
3. be able to mark a source as "primary" to give a bit of distinction so we know there is some lack of vetting compared to a mainstream resource (which hopefully has such vetting built in). similar to [citation needed], it can be footnoted like [2, primary].
There is and always will be nonsense that penetrates through, but I don't think we should discount primary resources as much we do currently. That's not how real life reflects on such resources. Wikipedia has loosened up and started to use more social media as ciations, so this isn't a radical direction.
I don't think the avoidance of primary sources is due to bureaucracy. It's long been a policy in the guidelines. I can sort of see the reason if you look at something like say vaccine safety, primary sources would be papers and the like, secondary articles in the nyt and the like. The trouble with papers is there are loads and hard to understand for non specialist and you can find one saying they caused problems in this instance or not in that according to your biases. Whereas nyt articles etc are written for the public and try to be kinda balanced.
Not quite sure what the birthday problem was about.
Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources. When a source is not freely available online that often involves going to the library and looking things up; there are people who spend many hours a week doing this, unpaid as a hobby.
> Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources.
There's an insidious aspect to Wikipedia's reliance on verifiability: any wild claim can be posted, repeated by third parties, and afterwards have Wikipedia refer to those third parties as sources. I know this to be a fact because I read a Wikipedia article on the subject.
This really isn't true. There are references hidden around Wikipedia which link to a report for proof, but the report was actually linking to the Wiki page to begin with. It becomes circular proof, and it's pretty tough to spot.
For me, it's that such a high traffic site can operate on a budget and infrastructure that is so much less than the mega-sized websites full of other peoples' work product called "Big Tech". Those "Big Tech" companies then turn around and use Wikipedia's work to capture their audience, e.g., in search results. It cuts through any myth that it takes a trillion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees to run a high traffic website.
[Accessing Wikipedia from command line I never see the nags for donations.]
So when the sources contain inaccurate information then Wikipedia does so as well. I don't see how that is a good thing people view Wikipedia as the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica which was curated by experts. Wikipedia should strive for the truth since finding truthful and factual information is becoming increasingly more difficult online.
Pre-Wikipedia encyclopedias could be worse! And their inaccuracies could last a long time since not everyone could afford or wanted to update their entire set. You also had no way to see the discussion behind claims to help inform your interpretation.
> "The truth can be very elusive"
no shit, this must be the understatement of the day.
not sure if people care much about truth these days, maybe rather just for validation of their biases.
having said that, wikipedia is the site i turn to most often for information so i agree - it is the last good place...
My (admittedly personal & anecdotal) impression of Wikipedia is that the objectivity of the content highly depends on the subject - particularly anything that touches on more recent historical events and public/political figures continues to be of the debatable objectivity (at least on the subjects that I'm familiar with enough to notice the problem).
Someone recently pointed out the incongruity between the English wikipedia article about the "Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion" and the Arabic Wikipedia article about the "مجزرة مستشفى المعمداني" (Baptist hospital massacre). Without sidelining the thread discussion with unproductive arguments about the conflict, I found it really fascinating how the two articles can paint such different pictures, just by picking different sources or in some cases even using the same sources but organizing the information differently (eg which disputed facts get to be in the article's infobox)
The Portuguese Wikipedia version of the Macau article (last I checked) reads like a historical adventure novel and is chock full of nationalist propaganda, endlessly praising certain officers and soldiers for their "bravery" and service to "national prestige".
That is exactly what I see most of the time in high quality discourse around current events. People pick the items they want to emphasize or de-emphasize and that is what creates different narratives.
Yes. There are some remarkably high-quality articles on somewhat esoteric topics that don't directly touch on politics that I'd definitely recommend, but if it touches on politics, it's highly likely to be tainted and editorialized.
I would argue the opposite. There's no way to have a nuanced and constructive topic if it ever touches, either by implicit or explicit association, other sensitive topics. Example, create a list of the qualities that a country must fulfill to be socialist, compare that list with the characteristics of countries that are considered socialist, and find examples of countries that fit those characteristics and ask yourself why they are not considered socialist. At the end of the argument you notice that there are no country totally socialist, capitalist, communist or any other economic theory. Every country is a piecemeal of different concepts and policies that may or may not make sense in conjunction to everything else. But socialism/communism bad.
To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.
I'd be willing to say this is causation. Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night to make 0.006 cents on ad revenue. So the content can actually be useful instead of drowned out in SEO and ads.
> Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night
So much this. One thing I regularly think about is that there are many popular websites that could be sustainable with a smaller headcount, but they took VC and need to eat the world.
Should we expect more useful websites in the next 10 years? Should we expect them to rot and need replacement in the decade after that? Should the Fed add "make the Internet a nice place" as a fourth mission?
I find working from a computer the most satisfying to contribute. I mostly just make updates on the map for my town, the places I really engage with. Biking is a new hobby of mine, so I've updated bicycle lanes and paths, as well as crosswalks that I come across. I also sometimes update local business information and such.
As someone else noted, Andriod also has the StreetComplete app, which is great for making simple and fast edits. Sometimes when I take the bus or am riding in the passenger seat of a car, I'll use StreetComplete to update the bus stops or street info as I go by.
I also use Komoot for planning cycling routes, which itself uses OpenStreetMap. It's nice to see my edits show up in other places, like Komoot
Back when I used android devices, I used https://streetcomplete.app/ - great user interface, it directs you to a location and asks you simple questions.
This probably isn't the spirit, but the simplest thing is to right-click on the map and pick "Add note", that's definitely participating, although there's an "outsiderness" to it, you have to hope an "insider" (someone who has created an account) actually works on the map to address your note... someone unlike Wikipedia where both anonymous and logged-in users get direct editing access to the underlying data.
They routinely run absolutely massive banner ads for themselves at the top of every page begging for donations they don't need. And these ads are the worst: extremely deceptive, unnecessary, and huge.
There's a huge functional difference between fundraising ads (no matter how manipulative) and the kind of commercial (and behavioral) ads you see everywhere else: the incentive structure it creates. Behavioral ads also require extremely intrusive tracking.
Commercial ads incentivise optimising for impressions, i.e. getting users to see as many ads as possible. This leads to clickbait, bloating one-line news bits into entire articles and extending the number of clicks necessary for a user to get what they want. Social media makes this even worse by making the ads "content" (i.e. "sponsored posts") and thus trying to drive up "engagement" which in practice leads to outrage bait (because people are more likely to comment or share what they disagree with or dislike).
Wikipedia on the other hand just has a slightly annoying banner made more annoying by lazy-loading (and thus shifting the layout) that shows up for a few weeks each year.
Unless your complaint is with "supposedly non-profit organizations trying to make more money" (in which case I'd say your problem might be more systemic than just a website with an ad) I'd take this over the former any day.
The Wikipedia ads are nothing but clickbait. Wikipedia itself doesn't need any funds, but the ads urge users to click by claiming that the site may go offline if they don't. Then the money is embezzled and spent on left wing causes. This is pure commercialism of the worst kind, but it's actually worse than that because many countries have various kinds of truth in advertising laws that apply to companies, whereas Wikimedia Foundation can get away with this sort of deception.
They run house ads, and it's the same ad on every page. It's not engagement driven, and it's not deceptive like Google's ads that look like search results. Whether or not they need the money is a different question.
The parent comment only claimed that the ads were deceptive (which they are), not that they are deceptive __like Google's__. That is entirely a straw man which you added to conveniently knock down.
Wikipedia ads are frequently phrased in a way to suggest that the funds are vital for keeping the site up when in reality, the majority of the funding goes to various social "justice" orgs.
Honestly once you learn the truth about their finances their banner campaign are actually the absolute pits of advertising and the most deceptive and emotionally manipulative type of advertising going.
Laughable to claim wikipedia is "ad free" just because the one ad is for wikipedia.
I completely agree that their campaigns are distasteful for a number of reasons, but I think the original point was more that the lack of ad slots for sale has prevented the site from turning into the addiction optimized hellsite that most websites have become now
I have since distanced myself from Wikipedia as I feel I was increasingly pushed out of the "Cabal" (a term used to describe editors with aligned interest who usually worked together to set standards others must follow) who vigorously enforced the policy without considering the experience of, and willingness to engage with, new editors. I would rather have them create their own world while I move on to contribute to other communities more willing to welcome me.
I should probably be the last person to say "There Is No Cabal" but ...
Many times, what you actually experience is a variant on the smart mob concept [1], which are enabled by watchlists and diverse central coordination pages[2] . The number of ways you could organize people on wikipedia without them even realizing (let alone being offended by it) by smart use of smart-mobs was (and probably still is) endless.
Of course, for a casual observer, these smart mobs look very much like coordinated cabals, even if in reality the individual members don't even know each other.
I'm not sure how well this base principle has been documented though. Possibly
Agree, I had one very bad experience on Wikipedia. It was not a controversial or political subject area. I reverted ~30 bland look-at-me copy pasta contributions that might have belonged on the category page, but certainly not on every instance page. Obviously the right thing to do. Not controversial - or so I thought...
Some jumped-up self-appointed 'editor' appeared as-if-by-magic, made an obviously stupid decision to keep all the copy pasta, backed it up with a kangaroo court of 1 or 2 buddies weighing in on the Talk page, and that was that - 30 polluted pages.
> backed it up with a kangaroo court of 1 or 2 buddies weighing in on the Talk page
If they had a couple of other editors backing them up, then it doesn't sound all that "jumped up" to me. Sounds more like you are playing with a different set of rules in mind.
This happens. Unless you're heavily-invested in the subject of an article, you can just shrug and move on, no? There's over a million articles you can choose to edit.
And by the way, when you made your edits, were you appointed to the position of editor, or were you a " jumped-up self-appointed 'editor'" as well?
I moved on, it was many years ago. But now that you mention it ... :)
No, I was doing everyday wikigardening of pages that were well-known to me. The 'editor' was jumped-up and self-appointed in the sense that: they were not the original poster of the copy pasta; they had no previous record of creating or editing those pages; they had a bezillion WP edits (indicating an almost full-time obsession with editing random pages); and they had no rational argument against my common-sense application of normal WP rules & style guidelines.
I've been editing since about 2005, so I have a lot of edits (but nothing you could describe as a bazillion). They would seem fairly random, because I edit when I find a page that needs improving. Arguably, it's more likely to be "obsessive" if the edits are not random, but all in one subject-area.
Also, I revert crap edits when I find them, usually when I was not the original poster. You don't have to be the original poster to revert a crap edit; and if you were, there's a smell of edit-warring and proprietorship.
i think there is a "cabal" everywhere where moderation is involved. i have hit the wall on various platforms. i just try to move on, there are things that are more important in life than who is right on the internet.
>Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories.
Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth.
To your last point, I think this is something people get confused about. I think no reasonable person says science is always right and there is never any corruption in the process. Science is done by humans and humans are fallible. The argument is that science is the best we have, not that it's perfect.
One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They will believe 1000 things and when 1 of them turns out to be true, they both think it validates the other 999 and will never consider they were perhaps right for the wrong reasons. My point is that, as you say, "Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth", but it's the best we have. I'll also paraphrase one more quote that I heard from the great Tim Minchin, but he didn't know who to credit it to, "if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out".
But who gets to decide what stays on and what gets deleted? Does the tectonic plate theory stay on wikipedia, or do we delete it, since it's just a conspiracy theory (let's say we flew back in time a bit)? What about epsteins "suicide"? Would an articl about "heart problems as covid vaccine side-effect" stay on wikipedia a year and a half ago, or would it get deleted? In hindsight, it's easy... but who gets to decide about the 'now'?
There is no answer that will satisfy everyone. In fact, there is no Right(TM) answer. The answer is the people who put in the effort to make wikipedia and the processes they've developed. Wikipedia isn't a right we're owed. It's done be people and those people make the choices and I can guarantee you they will make wrong choices at times. What I don't like is the attitude some have, not necessarily you, where it's either "this isn't perfect so it's all bad!" or "they were wrong about this one thing, therefore they are wrong about everything that I disagree with them on". We're humans. We're trying. And I believe most people there are doing it in good faith. That's literally the best we can do.
Wikipedia editors are supposed to evaluate what the consensus of reliable sources is, and report that. So there's a second-order game being played around what counts as a reliable source.
> Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience.
So just throw all theory/hypothesis in the same bucket because one might be true? You can't cherry pick one thing that happened to be true and say "it is wrong to label that pseudoscience" There are a lot of bad theories and hypothesis out there.
Clathrate gun hypothesis is just that, and should be labeled as such.
Wikipedia's articles can be updated along with scientific progress. Wikipedia would only be in trouble if they held articles back compared to contemporaneous scientific knowledge. Not sure what your point is other than that scientific progress is a thing and consensus on how things work evolves over time as we figure things out.
They laughed at Semmelweis, they laughed at Wegener, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. One of these is not like the others!
The plate tectonics hypothesis was criticized because there was no known mechanism for how continental plates could drift. Until that mechanism was understood, it was perfectly good science to be critical of Wegener's hypothesis, and a Wikipedia of that time would have been entirely correct to document the hypothesis as controversial. Hindsight is 20:20.
It's also very much not an encyclopedia's job to try to discover the "truth", whatever that means! Its job is explicitly to document current consensus understanding, however flawed that might be. Trying to figure out the "truth" is very much above Wikipedia editors' pay grade.
Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are something entirely different from simply proposing hypotheses that might not be backed by currently available evidence, and it's incredibly fallacious and dangerous to try to equate homeopathy or flat-Earthism or climate change denial with something like hand hygiene or plate tectonics.
Wikipedia is supposed to represent current consensus so that's not a particularly strong critique of an encyclopedia. When the current consensus is wrong, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, will be wrong.
>Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience.
I am almost certain they would of. The "fringe" and "pseudoscience" labels are used much more broadly on Wikipedia then one might expect.
I have seen a Palestinian scholar, whose research went against the prevailing Euro-centric Western view, labelled as "fringe" on Wikipedia even though it was being published by UNESCO and Cambridge University Press and he was by every metric a mainstream academic. The main editor's critique of his work was mainly ad-hominem and that it hadn't been acknowledged or "approved" by Western scholars. He didn't seem interested in verifying the texts that he cited and quoted; texts that the previous scholars were ignorant of. This was simply a case of a likely correct but minority view that was also difficult for an English speaking Westerner to verify, as the cited works were obscure and written in the 9th/10th century in Arabic. One of the few known manuscripts was located in a religious building in Turkey and not known to be available online in either scanned or transcribed form.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, whose goal is to capture the consensus state of knowledge at a particular point in time. An encyclopedia that only captures "the truth" is an impossibility. No one has direct access to the truth. So I'm not sure what you're proposing as an alternative.
If anything, my criticism of this article is that the first few paragraphs don't explain how fringe it is. (And I'm firmly on the opinion that working on it is important, because it's the only path out of the almost disproved box that we have.)
Wikipedia is a repository for established truth, not for discovering truth. For discovering truth you have https://www.kialo.com/ and the one I'm working on, https://en.howtruthful.com/ but I've only in the past 2 weeks been able to work on it full-time.
That's true, but it's fine if Wikipedia, not being able to discern truth and falsehood as "a collection of people arguing online about stuff," uses consensus as a low-resolution proxy. It's the best tool they have given their circumstances.
> Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release
But it usually isn't, which is why consensus works as a pretty good low-resolution proxy for truth.
"Current consensus" is the closest thing we can even pretend to be "the truth" on complex scientific topics.
If Wikipedia existed in its current form in the mid-20th century, it would have dismissed plate tectonics. But, importantly, as the scientific consensus evolved, so would Wikipedia's stance on the theory.
This is the key difference between science/academia and politics/religion. The former changes with new evidence while the latter doubles down in the face of it.
and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives.
I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in.
But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.
How do you feel about science? How is science different than Wikipedia? The scientific method is just a method for taking down hegemonic statuses quo, and honestly, doesn't seem that different from how Wikipedia works.
Has anyone else noticed how the articles for certain topics are written in a different style from how they once were? For example while reading about the Russian Civil War I came upon the article for the "Jewish Bolshevism" conspiracy theory, which was in vogue amongst the White movement. The current article now says explicitly that it is false, whereas older versions (pre-2018) just described what the theory was. I also see this a lot on political articles, you will now read "x falsely claimed y" or "x falsely accused y". The same articles written in the old style, if they exist, always omit the "falsely", they never make a truth judgement within the article body. I for one do not appreciate being preached to in such an awkward and heavy handed way especially in politically fraught and controversial topics where the basis of this judgement is often nothing better than a news report. As for the conspiracy theories, Wikipedia is feigning knowledge and authority it does not possess, as it is in fact more difficult and often impossible to disprove such theories than it would be to do the contrary. I often find that Encyclopaedia Britannica handles these topics more elegantly, they simply say what it is and leave it at that.
100%. I have noticed this in a ton of contested topics. It will often make some kind of judgement on the topic nowadays, which is not what I want out of Wikipedia. It’s my biggest issue with mainstream media as well. I don’t need your opinion on what happened, just give me the facts. But at least articles in the NYT or other media outlets are attributed to the author. With Wikipedia, there is no author to attribute the opinion/bias to, which makes it far more nefarious in my opinion.
For the longest time, Wikipedia simply presented facts, with sources, and allowed the user to make their own judgments. Nowadays, many pages are so heavily and obviously biased in one direction.
A personal example I noticed is when I did research on Intelligent Design. The page for it is so heavily biased in one direction, the idea that it’s completely BS “pseudoscience.” That may be the case, but how about you let me read the article and come to that conclusion myself, rather than poison the well from the start, by attempting to bias me in one direction before I’ve even read anything beyond the summary.
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 which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.
Reddit has this problem and it ultimately drove me (and I'm sure many others) away, it seems like you can't have a nuanced opinion, and god forbid if you have an opinion that goes against the grain of a sub.
FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I stopped contributing because user XYZ essentially bullied me", yadda yadda.
I stopped contributing like 15-ish years ago because it seemed pointless. Anything I might think to contribute by its very nature doesn't already have a presence on the site, and it seems like any and everything that does get added immediately gets some asshole throwing up a debate to try to get it deleted.
One of the things in particular I felt that there should be more of a presence of (because it was basically nonexistent at the time) and I had some good knowledge of, was for Flash animations and games that had literally tens of millions of views and were practically pop culture for some of them.
But because there wasn't a dead paper news article I could easily cite, that was enough for it to be 'not notable' and eligible for long and stupid debates on whether or not there should be an article about it on this virtual Wikipedia that doesn't have a size limitation.
So stupid. Lost interest pretty quickly after that (I had contributed a few dozen minor edits before I started trying to submit those pages).
I also notice that a lot of the references that are included on these pages were ones that would be consider not-notable back then, because they are online web articles. Those weren't primary source enough for them at the time.
I feel like on has been so inundated with bots and shill accounts from PR firms, non profits, and state actors that nuanced opinions get shutdown via mass downvoting by bots they also artificially boost fake shill posts as well.
>So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.
Well, that failed spectacularly. The Stack Exchange sites are some of the most hostile, caustic places on the Internet, surpassed on that axis by only a small handful I'm aware of.
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.
> 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.
It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.
That probably incentivizes selling accounts to bot farms, usually in social media you give more weight to people who have stuck around longer rather than the accounts that have less activity and might be fake.
I think slashdot did something like that, but limited the amount of total votes you have per day. But that site's a little before my time. Would be nice if you could set the weights on voting yourself, along with other aspects of site moderation/ranking.
Even assuming equal levels of internet usage, there is also the related problem that unpaid internet moderation naturally selects for narcissists. (And, really, it's the only way the system can work, since the only real currency of the internet is to make someone feel important within a community. It's the only reason sites like Wikipedia and SE can get thousands of hours of free labor from thousands of people.)
Well, sort of. The "jerks" thing is true in part, but I think the majority of that feel comes from a disconnect between what people want Stack Overflow to be. Many of the contributors (and the founder) want it to be Wikipedia, a place to enter search terms and find your specific problem and its solution, documented exactly once. But many novices get used to finding answers on Stack Overflow, and they quite reasonably see a bunch of questions and answers and decide it's a place to ask for help, which it a thing that looks similar on the surface but is quite different. And so you get a lot of well-meaning answers/moderators closing the majority of what comes in as repetitive noise, because from their perspective it is, and so the majority of people who ask (quite reasonable) questions, especially novice questions, have a terrible experience initially engaging. But yes, ALSO jerks are there.
Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms.
basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."
It worked for a long while, and things only got bad after a lot of changes from the original rules.
Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)
Any discussion on any forum in the early to mid 1990s you would often see a comment "don't flame" (aggressively argue or insult). Argumentative people were not seen as normal by people on a BBS or forums of the time. Even casual swearing was not tolerated. Both of those behaviours are now very common and accepted or seen as normal or worse yet not even noticed as a problem.
I didn't quite find the quote mentioned by GP but for stack overflow itself, an explicit design goal is to minimize discussions and make the site focus on Q&A, since the kind of argumentative jerks mentioned by GP tend to be involved in long discussions. I quote from Jeff Atwood:
> At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.
Memory is so weird... I feel like I saw it in person. But given that the site was started in 2008, and some other details I remember about the talk would indicate that I must have heard it at least a year after it launched, I can't figure out a venue where I would have seen it in person -- the most likely venue being a talk at uni, and I was long out of university at that point.
Why at least a year after? I also remember the speaker relating a conversation he had with someone from whom it seems like he was asking for money: maybe a VC? The VC told the speaker, "I sat on a plane next to somebody who told me he doesn't answer anything on stackoverflow any more because all the questions are answered too quickly." And the speaker responded, "So wait. You talked to a random person on a plane. This person had heard of my website. And his main complaint was that questions were answered too quickly?"
Wikipedia says SO did get VC funding in 2010, so that sort of matches; and quote from sibling comment is along the same lines. So I don't think I'm imagining things, but I also don't think I'm going to be able to give much more information. :-)
The gender remark was totally uncalled for, off topic, and not backed by any evidence (other than your personal experience in the form of "I suspect"). Maybe you can rethink what you had in mind. But please don't take my comment as a platform to expand on it.. I'm already regretting pointing this out... But it seemed almost sexist..
Hmm I guess I would like to add some nuance. I’m a trans woman, and I have thought a whole lot about gendered roles in our society. Indeed, women and afab people are taught in our society to behave a certain way - to be deferential to men, to please others, and to avoid confrontation. Men and amab people are taught to speak their minds, not shy away from confrontation, and to be direct. This cultural pattern is indeed sexist - it seems to be driven by a patriarchal society.
But as observers if we are cautious about what we are saying, it can be okay to point out that women are socialized a certain way and this can lead to certain conversational patterns. We need to be careful to realize this is not some biological thing (hormones make impressive changes but this isn’t one of them), but I think it’s okay to point out common socialization differences if we are careful to attribute them to socialization. At least it can be okay. Certainly it is a delicate subject.
I thought it was an interesting hypothesis for why I see women actively avoid the sort of debate spaces online that I seek out. They are all absolutely dominated by men and it doesn't matter what part of the political spectrum the particular echo chamber embodies, this happens in both leftist and right-wing spaces.
Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men? Mens' brains are literally doused in a hormone that makes them aggressive for many years of their development. Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?
Go look on female-oriented forums like Mumsnet, you'll find similar levels of conflict as are found in male-dominated places, especially around contentious topics.
or Instagram, or Tumblr, or book writing forums, or true crime forums, or certain political forums. it takes a special kind of man to sit in his own bathwater and ruminate on the fact that there are no women there; it's because of the testosterone in the water, which means that women don't bathe, which is why they sink.
> Is it sexist to say that women seek out conflict less than men?
Inherently? No. In practice, generally.
> Isn't it sexist, or just weird, to suggest that testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior?
It is erroneous to conflate the positive claim that "testosterone has no effect on mens' behavior" with not making the claim "women seek out conflict less than men", and that is particularly true in the context where "conflict" is specifically online debate.
Are you making a causal statement or one of correlation? Your original response doesn't make this crucial part clear. And, because of the way it's worded, it appears that you made a causal claim: `if gender then behavior`.
Argumentative women, especially in the '90s, tend(ed) to be called bitches. That obviously changes behavior. Beyond that, much of the progress we've made in education equality is recognizing that boys and girls are, on average, different, and accounting for that. Be it nature or nurture - it doesn't matter at that point - you need to be inclusive regardless of the source of a difference or else you're failing half the population.
Everyone is, of course, an individual, and their preferences and behaviors can vary wildly outside of "norms".
The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating. Disregarding whether it's true or not, and my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor, it looks like a fairly neutral statement to me.
> my own reservations against using "robust" as a descriptor
I thought for a few minutes about what word to use there. Perhaps "direct" on its own would have been better; but I wanted connotations of "assertive" and "strong".
I used to participate in certain political mailing lists that had a much higher proportion of women participants than, say, Usenet (and I knew many of the participants in these lists IRL). My experience was that it was predominantly women that objected to the style of discussion that inline replies often led to. Inline replies being the Usenet norm, perhaps that explains why Usenet was such a male-dominated environment.
FWIW, I don't think it's misogynistic to say that on the whole, women have different attitudes from men, or behave differently. To what extent that's the effect of hormones or socialization, I don't care to speculate.
I gradually came round to the view that the objectors had a point, and I toned down my use of inline replies a lot.
Forget human beings for a minute here and just think in terms of masculine/feminine energy. Where the masculine energy is defined as the "breaking apart" and the feminine is defined as the "coming together". You can see how this describes so many aspects of reality. Also understand that all humans, both male and female, have aspects within them of both natures. Okay.
Now, is it just the case that the "threaded" reply style you see on Reddit and HN is just, simply, masculine in it's purest form. It branches endlessly. Dividing and sub-dividing forever. Destructive. Masculine. Not necessarily bad but, you know, masculine.
Whereas the inline nature of traditional forums is not that. The chronologicalness ensures that arguments are either resolved relatively quickly or become lost in the noise. There is no real opportunity to break down an idea. As a result, you don't see that extreme division take place.
So it may be the case that the structure of the site determines what sort of moderation you need to do. If the site is threaded, you're going to need to worry a lot more about divisive topics. Whereas, tradition-style forums will probably need to set out separate dedicated spaces for, say, "serious discussion" so that conversations with more depth are allowed to take place.
If you want to get into the reeds of it, I think "assertive" and "strong" are too positively loaded (which I guess is why you didn't use them). However I would say the same applies to robust, coupled with the fact that "robust" on its own is not really applicable to the kind of communication you're referring to. The positive undertones are probably also why you saw a bunch of unnecessary knee jerk virtue signaling in response.
I would personally have stuck with just "direct" (which is neutral), and perhaps added "blunt" (which is neutral-negative).
You're right! (I don't think I considered the word "strong"). On further reflection, I think I chose "robust" as an evasive euphemism.
I think "robust" was applicable to the kind of communication I was referring to, in the sense in which some meetings of diplomats are described as "a robust exchange of views" (that's euphemistic too).
"Blunt" would have been less euphemistic; but it carries violent connotations that I didn't want to convey, as in "blunt instrument trauma". It's not one of the words I considered, and anyway "direct" covers it.
> The claim was that women to a higher degree find "direct, robust speech" alienating.
I'll assume that (1) you're not sexist and (2) you're asking why is this claim rooted in sexism.
The nature of this claim is rooted in an idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves. It is not worded to indicate that its root is, for instance, a commentary about how _external factors_ exert different influence on individuals due to their gender.
This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior. It's not actually a causal relationship. It's purely correlation.
(Not the poster to whom you are replying) I didn't suggest there was a causal relationship, nor that the observed behaviour was due to some intrinsic properties of the respective genders, nor that gender controls behaviour. I just said that I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Right, I was operating under the assumption that this all was driven by a misunderstanding. It's a sensitive topic. I see how the ways in which language is written can make readers jump to particular conclusions about the writer's motivation (and, ultimately, the intent of their writing).
> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Not trying to pick on what you wrote here, but I wanted to take a moment to break this specific sentence down to illustrate my message. Without surrounding context, this sentence appears to make the claim that all women dislike something. And specifically, the qualifier is _only_ gender. Worded this way, it starts to look like a statement about a causal relationship. (Again, my apologies, I know that you don't mean this at all).
It's a sensitive subject, so I think it always helps to wrap the message with language that attempts to really clarify whether or not there's an underlying implication of `if gender then behavior` that someone _may_ get from reading. (And that can be hard to do, because _sometimes_ a reader will decide to draw incorrect conclusions!)
Hopefully this was all actually interesting and something that you didn't already know beforehand (if not, apologies!).
I do think that there's a way to re-word sentences like this one to show that there's no underlying intent of `if gender then behavior`. For example,
> I suspected that women disliked inline replies more than men.
Could be re-worded to show that it's a claim rooted in statistical averages of expected behavior (so, implicit assumption: it can just be correlation!) -- "On average, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more often than men."
Or, one could expand it by including the complete chain of logical consequences: `society creates gender norms` (expectations around behavior rooted in one's gender, inherently the crux of sexism) -> leads to `if gender then behavior`. This could lead to that sentence being written as, "Because of the pressure that society exerts on girls and women to be conflict avoidant and conflict resolvers, I suspect that women dislike inline replies more than men." Crucially, at least to me, this is a big difference because the `I suspect` part is _conditioned_ on the `Because of the pressure` bit.
This kind of wording also explicitly notes the existence of sexism and how that social phenomena can become the causal force that is ultimately observed through behavior and the correlations of that behavior with gender.
Well, I can qualify what I say; and then I can go back over my qualifications, and qualify them too. Your proposed rewrite is OK; it conveys my meaning. But it reads a bit like a sociology essay, when it was really just a tangential comment on an article about Wikipedia.
One of the Wikipedia rules is "Assume good faith". It's tedious to harden all your comments against people who assume malevolence, and it makes the comments over-long and hard to read; so I don't do it.
> idea that any observable behaviors between genders is due to the nature of genders themselves.
> This is the nature of misogyny. The invalid logical implication that gender controls behavior.
Why do you consider the very suggestion misogynistic (leaving aside whether it's true)? "Misogyny" means "hatred of women," in the literal sense. What you're stating is that biological essentialism implies misogyny, which isn't true. As a counterexample, there are radical feminists and self-described misandrists who argue that men and women act differently for inherent biological reasons, and they aren't misogynist.
I don't know how to interpret this answer. The nature vs nurture aspect of the alleged gender preference against direct/blunt speech was never even discussed.
It seems to me like people are just letting their own biases shine through. Perhaps the people claiming sexism falsely believe that a higher preference for direct/blunt speech is always superior somehow?
But (semi-)jokes aside, "reply in-line" can be good for debate in the sense that you can dissect arguments point-by-point and argue them individually. It does however also mean you can derail the conversation more easily by attacking multiple irrelevant fragments of the post without addressing the actual point.
Replying in-line to multiple points is useful to you, the reply guy, when writing the first reply. It's completely useless to anyone else two replies in as you're basically forced to either maintain multiple different conversations in the same post or need to decide which ones to abandon.
It's trivial to overload any conversation using "reply in-line" with the shotgun approach of throwing a bunch of low-effort nitpick replies into one post and seeing which one sticks. This is the opposite of robustness. Instead of being forced to steelman the other person's argument because you need to reply to the post as a whole or risk being called out for nitpicking, "reply in-line" allows you to unravel the argument, pick out the weakest parts, ignore the rest and then derail the conversation by replying to an army of strawmen all at once. This is the conversational equivalent of bikeshedding.
I used to, but mostly changed my mind. I still do it with certain people/discussions, but that's usually for long, high-context, complicated discussions.
In the general case, I try very hard to make no more than one point or ask no more than one question per email. It feels reductive and limiting, but it really does make comms with the median person work much better.
I'm not sure what work that weird, irrelevant gendered speculation is supposed to be doing, so I have no comment.
It's also worth to mention that Wikipedia is absolutely not a good source for contemporary events. These use artificially constructed validity when it comes to primary news sources. While certain media outlets are known to be state propaganda, many accepted outlets are propaganda too and do not deserve to be sourced. However this issue is not unique to Wikipedia.
I find it a good source just for the non-political reason that the "news" is obsessed with "what just happened" and "what's about to happen (maybe)" and Wikipedia is more of a summary of the whole topic.
I love Wikipedia. It's my favourite website of all time.
However, to say that "fringe" editors were largely driven out is false. In many places, "fringe" editors co-operate to win edit wars and form secret voting blocks in community decisions in an attempt to push their misshapen ideas into the mainstream.
Not that I don't agree. I would however rank Sci-Hub, Library Genesis and Anna's Archive higher than Wikipedia. And don't forget about Internet Archive and Arxiv.
This vast amount of high quality human knowledge was not available in the good old internet 20 years ago.
The irony is wonderful. 'Last' is a relative term, and was poorly chosen as an attention grabbing headline. Also worth mentioning is the Internet is not the WWW, and content is so often conflated with the network that it overflows into 'academic' papers.
What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minutes. It's truly amazing.
I would love a place that works almost exactly like Stack Exchange, but which is geared toward polling experts' opinions on something (which is a thing that SE explicitly says it doesn't allow.)
Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary.
The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?")
This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked.
I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.
Which is fine. SE wasn't meant to be the end-all be-all of Q&A. You can have any kind of Q&A, just not on SE. SE is simply not interested in those as it would dilute the other topics that don't lend too well to those policies.
SE has become (for a while now) the Platonic Form for RTFM.
It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."
Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites...
I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?
I like the AskHistorians subreddit, but I haven't found much else. I think AskHistorians and Stack Exchange have a somewhat high "barrier to entry" for actually answering questions, which might be part of it. (I mean this in the sense that you're going to get down-voted to hell if you don't really know what you're doing on Stack Exchange, and I think you actually have to be a historian to answer on AskHistorians.)
HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.
The difference is that the answers to history related questions don't change with nearly the same frequency that tech related answers change, and even still r/askhistorians doesn't just lock "duplicate" questions so answers that are new or subtly different can still be submitted.
Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.
Yes, many SE sites are pretty great, but they probably wouldn't if they were as large as Stack Overflow itself. The failure modes of SO are well known. Still, given how invaluable a resource it has become to the large majority of programmers, it's certainly doing many things right.
Not all, but many of the SE elite are awful to deal with unless you want to spend more time following their arbitrary demands than providing helpful answers to people's questions.
There is nothing in the article mentioning anything other than Wikipedia. The title is completely unsupported and I think intentional click-bait. Trump is also mentioned several times in the article as well.
Can't really trust an academic on this matter, Wikipedia is like academia it's a closed system where a small group get to decide what opinions are correct, what facts get a mention and what are worth looking at with a feedback loop to itself that is used to control facts by deciding what sources are valid. Really the open decentralized internet is the antithesis of academia.
Not to say its all bad but reading wikipedia you have to be aware of that it's an opinionated lens of viewing the world, and by not realizing you're viewing through a lens is why over the past decade people keep getting blindsided when reality doesn't play out how their bubble told them it would.
Honestly I feel a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses would be much more useful for actually making sense of the world we have today.
I barely recognize much of the 70's and 80's history on wiki. A lot of it clearly wasn't written by someone who lived through it, and if it isn't linkable it basically doesn't exist. History is written by the victors, and they only do the internet. All those books, newspaper and magazine articles of that era just don't exist outside of libraries and microfiche and it's clear none of those wiki editors are going there.
I've seen younger people start to complain about this as link rot reaches into their generation.
At least academics have standards, even if they don't always follow them.
> I barely recognize much of the 70's and 80's history on wiki.
Yup. History is a battleground; so is politics, and in some cases geography. Even food can be a battleground; "Biryani" is on my watchlist. It is constantly being vandalized, to state that the canonical version belongs to this or that community.
Interestingly, articles on religion don't seem to be battlegrounds to anything like the same extent.
Even with the internet, there are things (eg. from the beginning of covid), where I clearly remember someone (in my country) saying/promising something, eg. regarding vaccines, anti-covid measures, etc., and those things don't exist anymore. I've found a few articles or transcripts in google cache, but the orignals are gone, archive.org doesn't have them and poof, they're gone. "we've always been saying X" will become the truth, since any record of them saying otherwise has somehow disapeared... and it's only been two years!
> Wikipedia is like academia it's a closed system where a small group get to decide what opinions are correct, what facts get a mention and what are worth looking at with a feedback loop to itself that is used to control facts by deciding what sources are valid
Came here to say this. 98% of the content is perfectly fine. Searching for "lemurs" in any search engine returns a perfectly trustworthy (calling all lemur experts!) wikipedia page. But, look for anything divisive, political, cultural, etc., and I've increasingly noticed the articles take clear positions.
I'm actually very curios about this. Can you link to an example of a clear position? I ask because I'm thinking it may be that, as political discourse becomes more polarized, it is conceivable that a mostly neutral article is perceived as biased in the wrong direction by both camps.
So if you can find a good example of what you have in mind, it would be really helpful to examine it and see what might be going on.
Specific examples just incite a never-ending low-fidelity Internet debate that I'd really prefer not to get into, but despite my hesitation, I'll risk suggesting that you search for blog posts by the co-founder of Wikipedia Larry Sanger.
> a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses
I love this idea. Not likely to happen with Wikipedia as it currently exists, but could possibly be built with a Wikipedia article as one of many links listed for a particular subject.
Slight tangent, but this is why I go to All Sides News when I feel I need more varied perspective on an issue. I don't use it a lot, but when I do I'm super glad it exists.
This isn't really controversial. People create institutions, so people leaving or joining can create institutional change. What's weird is that they frame leaving as a force for good, when this is the exception, not the rule. Usually when people are running away from an institution it doesn't get better.
Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals themselves, including one this month. The deletionists are the worst of all, the digital version of book burners.
I got banned for life from Wikipedia, because I commented on a request for adminship from a user the literally banned forever 9 weeks ago.
I wrote countless articles for them, but they didn’t give a crap. I now contribute photos to commons.
Don’t bother contributing to Wikipedia. Only people who fiddle around with changing URLs, categories and templates are appreciated. It’s not worthwhile putting in the effort.
Somehow, vandalism is associated with my account, even though it's only attributed to an IP address, not my logged-in user. They still let me edit though!
"Vandalizing" in the Wikipedia context means editing pages to add stupid, offensive, trollish, or deliberately incorrect content. It happens all the time, which is why some pages (mainly those about controversial topics) have additional protections to make it harder for untrusted people to edit them.
It is amazing how frequently Wikipedia is vandalized. It happens several times per second. Much of it is removed automatically by bots that will roll back edits which contain strings like "qeqeqeqewqeerrttt". On weekends, you can expect something like "List of Sluts" to appear on the articles for many highschools - they will disappear within a minute or so.
You can configure Wikipedia to send you an email whenever a certain article is edited. I monitor several thousand articles that way, and remove malicious edits. Lots of editors do that, and vandalism is usually cleaned up very quickly.
It's a long story, I was a legitimate editor for a about a year and just built up a grudge which turned into making more unhelpful edits until I got banned. Wikipedia is not a good environment for when things go wrong.
It's basically like a endless library but with big gaps missing on the shelves, and you know that the books that are missing there were destroyed intentionally, and attempts to bring new books to the library are sabotaged. I hate parts of Wikipedia like articles for deletion, where endless debates around notability are held. The fact other sites monetize Wikipedia's rejected content infuriates me too.
It sounds like you're not addicted to Wikipedia, you're addicted to imposing your particular point of view on everyone else, and all the messy Internet drama that results from that. Things don't go your way in a collaboration and so you "vandalize" other people's contributions, and then blame the platform that "addicted" you?
It sounds like if you joined any open source, open collaboration project, or volunteer organization, you'd be a huge pain to work with unless everyone agreed with you all the time.
I disagree, I have read a lot of articles on wikipedia and whilst they are factual and tell the truth, they don't always tell the other side which can still be truthful. I am not talking about the most popular topics but more so around niche areas of politics.
I wonder how the internet would look today if we didn't had to have NAT. Would everyone have their own servers without even realizing that most of time, would federation and peer to peer be the defaults?
Bookmarks and history are still terribly primitive. (Mosaic had full text history search.)
Imagine something like automatic archiving everything one visits with tools to prune the data, some granular scoring based on number of visits with automatic [intelligent] organization in a folder tree/web directory. A slider that on the left only shows the tree of bookmarks somewhat to the right everything ever visited, further to the right the rest of the www starting with the largest websites. Have both a fixed tree and a dynamic one. Bookmarks visited often gradually migrate to the root. Less often is moved into appropriately named folders. Different bookmark buttons for different projects. (say, start with work/recreation/administration) Do paid listings, say 5 euro per year per domain. Have additional hosts to subscribe to that expand your index with free listings.
I think my blog is also a pretty good place, albeit probably uninteresting to most if not all people. But it's my place, and nobody else influences me.
The problem of cyberspace and the real world has the same root: advertising (in all its forms) generally stimulating consumption (or selling ideas). The real world would also be a nicer place with less advertising. Somehow they discovered that controlling the form, manner and timing of advertisements is a great power. And they are fighting to take this power from the big networks.
it may not be along the lines of the article's point, but using wikipedia can often not be the most ideal.
i understand how they have managed to stay autonomous, but the banners to raise funds get worse every time they have a new campaign. it is almost one step away from finding a ublock filter for those banners. (also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533)
It is very good that the internal and political inner dynamics or wikipedia or pointed out. People should be aware of them. However, judging wikipedia´s place in the internet or the internet in general is an normative judgement that has nothing to do with Wikipedia´s internal dynamics.
I wonder how much the open content had an effect here, there were several fork attempts when communities weren't being heard and so rather than stay and fight they set up outside the system and fizzled away.
One band-aid that would help (but not fix) the internet is a revolt or at least a separation between web2.0 and web1.0. There should be organized, easy ways to consume and switch between 2.0 and 1.0, and while I know this already exists to some extent, I am referring to a social movement on top of the technical differences. Publishers should be pressured to offer web 1.0 (or at least know that a sizeable subset of viewers only consumes 1.0).
Next, there should be a market for re-publishing web2.0 into 1.0. For instance, if a news article is posted on a major outlet, services (people, bots, whatever) should crawl it and strip the content and pictures and re-serve it as web 1.0 content. Then, a browser add-on or internet service should allow you to enter the URL to the main article, but then switch to the 1.0 version (thanks to someone who already translated it).
This is NOT the same as "disable javascript in your browser". If you do that, many sites will turn you away. I'm proposing a translation layer of a rendered webpage back to 1999 style, then sharing that document in p2p network.
This would take the edge off one major form of enshittification of the web, make your mobile page load faster, eliminate tracking, and so forth. Although it wouldn't solve the deeper issues of click-bait infotainment and misinformation.
I thought the main distinction between web 1.0 and 2.0 was that 1.0 sites are operated and created (content written by) by the same people, whereas 2.0 sites are mostly content from the users of a site.
(I know the name is a bit of a retrofit from after O'Reilly decided to host a web 2.0 conference. Back when it was meaningless.)
I was mainly going after javascript and the notion of interactive pages and styling. I might be using the name web2.0 incorrectly, if so my apologies. Chrome had "reader view", not sure if that's still around.
> This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse.
This isn't a good thing. Wikipedia is supposed to be a source of knowledge, not a arbiter of reality.
From Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Ergo, deleting unpredictable ("fringe") information makes you stupid.
Also, consider that we need to learn to deal with ambiguous and false information to be able to learn to discern true information in the first place. (E.g. just like a profanity filter needs to have a list of profanities to work, eh?)
Then there is the simple truth that things that are crazy "conspiracy" nonsense sometimes turn out to be true!
Cosby is a rapist.
Epstein ran a resort for pedos.
Crypto AG was a CIA front.
Something called MK Ultra really happened.
I could go on all day. E.g. over half of the regime changes in the Twentieth Century were the result of coups, aka conspiracies.
In re: pseudoscience, there are several healing modalities that I have personal experience with, that are outside the mainstream, and all of them are decried as pseudoscience. Just because something hasn't yet been systematized by mainstream science doesn't make it not exist.
I know of a prominent author who had his article in WP deleted by deletionist activists calling themselves the "Guerrilla Skeptics"!
It's a kind of culture war: norm core skeptics vs. the weird.
Anyway, my point is that as an encyclopedia WP is weakened, not strengthened, by making it into a cultural conformity center that omits whole dimensions of human experience.
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 and federate.
* Look into alternative search engines like marginalia to find "small-web" content
* Talk to your friends to also make the move or at least look at alternatives to the large sites.
We can't just wait for the problem to fix itself, this is something where internet users have to become active. It won't solve itself.
EDIT: Commenters here are rightly saying that discoverability is a problem. Again, relying on search engines is required for productivity, but when we consider browsing for research or leisure, don't underestimate manually curated link pages. Webrings were a thing we might wanna consider again.
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 to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.
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 day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show"
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?
It was much more diverse back then only if you were looking for or desiring that diversity. I was drawn to it for that reason, the foreign languages, the strangeness. I feel like the same people now who prefer homogenization of their internet are people who never experienced that diversity. Because they are people who don’t really like diversity, not in the literal sense. They like a certain type of diversity, which is how the internet got ruined.
The bad kind of diversity is projecting your ideology onto others, and deciding to like them. The good kind of diversity is attempting to understand what it would be like to think in ways that are alien to you.
To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things.
Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.)
I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.
Presumably: The bad sort is a diversity where people look different but all think more or less the same, so the proponents can pat themselves on the back for being good and openminded people but don't actually have to deal with genuinely different people. You can see it in how those sorts tend to despise people who look the same as themselves but have different views and how their love of diversity disappears the second the different-looking person doesn't hew to their ideology.
Like San Francisco used to be more diverse, that’s what I’m getting at. People will argue that point, because the word diversity has taken on different meanings. I’d say there is diverse-diversity and less-diverse-diversity. I prefer one thing, other people are more tribal and prefer that other structure. Both types are needed, but I think we could use a bit more diverse-diversity at the moment, to increase dynamism. Mix things up a bit. At least with respect to the internet.
Interesting. If I'm understanding the analogy to San Fran's past diversity, you mean like it used to be far more multicultural-but-overlapping and now it's a bit more homogeneous-techbro even though a lot of people from different backgrounds still live there?
If I've understood correctly... Yeah, I don't know if it's for good or ill but I think we see less of that kind of diversity as the enlargement of the Internet allows people to build virtual communities that are more like-minded and have less need to tolerate uncomfortable differences (in that you have the option of going somewhere else instead of "putting up with the asshole next door" because this is the only online space that caters to the thing you like).
On the other hand, I have no strategy to force people to coexist in the same virtual space when they don't want to, nor do I have concrete evidence that's even a desired outcome.
> [nigerians] would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people
Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know.
There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.
How can you possibly claim that social diversity was universal in the old school internet when "tits or gtfo" was an extremely common meme for anyone who claimed to be female?
No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.
There's nothing about the fediverse, as a protocol-backed set of services and nodes, that prevents a group of like-minded individuals from forming an LGBTQ hostile family of, for example, mastodon nodes. But there's also nothing about the fediverse, as a community, that compels anyone else who owns a node to host or share that content.
You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives).
The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that.
(I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).
Somewhat unrelated: a few months ago, before most mastodon instances started censoring their list of servers they blocked from federating, you could just look at the rules page of almost any popular server and see a server URL and why they were blocked.
To me, this seemed counterproductive. But it was at least interesting to see the creative URLs some people come up with.
You seem to be viewing the fediverse as a blob, but it's actually a federated network. There's no need to join an instance if you don't like the moderation!
The point is that the federation mechanism explicitly means that any server that is federated will have to follow those policies, because the admins of all the large servers hew to a certain ideology that will not tolerate dissent from key talking points. So the server can technically speaking exist on the protocol but in practice won't be federated with the broader network unless it's palatable to Californicated activist types.
This reads like, "I don't like it because my messages won't end up on other servers," which I guess that's fine. We have to be cognizant that no one running a server is obligated technically, socially, or morally to platform anyone's speech because doing so would violate the NAP of admins.
Sure, and the result of which is an echo chamber, which was OPs point. I didn't see anyone complaining that their own speech was being suppressed. Does anyone question that it's ideologically homogeneous? It seems to me the question is, is that a good thing or a bad thing.
"I don't see anyone questioning, so we must conclude it's true," is epistemological laziness. Any hypothesis must be testable and actually tested before believed otherwise it's religion. JTB applies here too.
What the heck are you even talking about? I'm not running experiments, I'm trying to have a conversation. Do you or do you not believe the fediverse is ideologically homogeneous? I see people here arguing that it is, but that it is justifiably so. I don't see anyone clearly claiming it's not, but someone might. I think it is homogeneous for the very reasons you gave (i.e. people are not obliged to propagate speech they think is bad), but I'm not sure whether I think that's a good or a bad thing. If you think I'm wrong about it being ideologically homogeneous, feel free to tell me. If you want to weigh in on whether that's a good or bad thing, please do, that's why I asked the question. If you really want to challenge my epistemological standing to offer an opinion at all, well, I guess we're done here.
I'm saying that while believing in unfalsifiable beliefs or refusing to falsify them is certainly anyone's prerogative, I have to ask, why would anyone want to do that?
You're cracking me up. I should stop responding, but I can't help but wonder if you'll respond with this same sort of thing even if I say random stuff. I think pumpkin ravioli is overrated. What do you say to that?
The fediverse is not ideologically or politically homogenous, there exist right-wing and apolitical instances, there exist instances targeted at exclusive and obscure subgroups, etc. If you never bother to look beyond the most popular instances, you obviously won't see many unpopular views.
I think there's a terminology issue here. If the left and the right servers are never federated, then the experience will be homogeneous even if the fediverse is itself not. In other words, I probably shouldn't not have used the term homogeneous and stuck with "echo chamber". I was trying to avoid that term because of its pejorative connotations. It seems to me there is value in being exposed to what people you disagree with are saying, and there's value in not having all the drama that entails, which tends dominate all discourse. The fediverse by and large has chosen the later, no?
Experiencing homogeneity is a natural thing. Humans always self-segregate into groups when gathered in large numbers. I don't see anything wrong with people choosing an echo chamber if that makes them happy. It's being coerced into the echo chamber or the open forum that I disagree with.
I more or less agree with that, but can't help but feel that a certain amount of exposure to contrary views (even though unpleasant/unwanted) is more healthy for society. It at least has the potential for defusing straw-man understandings and also keeps people realistic about where they stand with respect to the larger society in terms of beliefs and practices. I'm not sure that the Twitter model does much for that, but the longer form conversations like Facebook may.
Pretty much everyone gets exposure to contrary views, and they probably wouldn't seek out echo chambers for recreation if they didn't! Most people don't actually want to argue about politics when they vent on their social media, they want to engage with their friends, who probably feel similarly to them. There's no need to worry about these conversations being unbalanced any more than you worry about balance when line workers talk shit about managers and managers talk shit about employees. If people wanted balanced conversation, they would join a political debate forum rather than a social network that connects them to their real-life friends.
An alternative federation with different core tenets could exist, but it would have to do the legwork to find people interested in supporting it, build out nodes that want to be in that federation, and publicize its existence.
It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.
What's wrong with that, though? Forcing people who don't want to interact to interact in the name of diversity isn't likely to lead anywhere productive. Those who are so heavily invested in their political views that they don't want to speak with anyone who they don't fully agree with will be siloed, and those who want diversity can be federated more broadly.
If you literally can’t find a space where your views are palatable, then it’s possible there’s something wrong with them.
And if what you’re seeking is the privilege to compel other people who take responsibility for setting up and administering such spaces to carry / broadcast your unmoderated views regardless of their own, what we’re talking about isn’t really any principled kind of liberty.
I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed.
> they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse
I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.
You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
The point is: "anti-LGBT" is much more about politics and ideology than it is about the actual minorities - the minorities are used as a shield against criticism by activist types, who claim critiquing their ideology is hating those minorities. The typical rhetoric is also highly exaggerating, where if I disagree with the sensibility of trans identification, for example, people will readily accuse me of "denying their existence", as if disagreeing with one idea they hold invalidates their entire person (well, I guess it could if they really have no other content in their heads), when it's just one idea.
Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.
> The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell.
I think you're committing the error of treating social categories as set-theoretic absolutes when humans are far more multidimensional.
It's like "Well they're not really patriots; they tell me Americans are great but they don't want me talking to Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr." No, they don't, because those Americans were traitors who hurt their fellow countrymen. "Listen to more LGBTQ voices" and "Don't listen to Gays Against Groomers" aren't actually contradictory concepts; 'listen to' doesn't mean 'give equal, uncritical weight to every'.
The missing sociological tool you may want to dive in on is 'Intersectionality,' which is the concept of how one's privilege is contextual and multidimensional factor; a person can be both oppressed and oppressor.
Lefties always rationalize their embrace of illiberal tactics like censorship by citing extreme cases (“we just want to filter out people who want us dead”), only to turn around and apply the tactic very broadly (wrongthink = permanban). This Motte-and-Bailey fallacy is the rhetorical lever which has allowed the left to crybully millions of erstwhile liberals into becoming so many cheerleaders for censorship.
You’re putting words in peoples mouths here. I’m not LGBT but it’s my understanding that many LGBT folks are open about wanting to block beyond just extreme cases. They wish to participate in a community of shared values, which is hardly a new notion. What is new is that the blurred lines of public vs private spaces has confused everyone’s concept of “free speech”.
An LGBT community is in no way obliged to listen to anti-LGBT voices. In the same way that an unlocked front door is not an invitation for me to enter, the fact that many of these communities are on public platforms doesn’t guarantee your access. Nor is being blocked from that community a strike against free speech: you are able to speak freely in any other location of your choice.
> I’m not LGBT but it’s my understanding that many LGBT folks are open about wanting to block beyond just extreme cases. They wish to participate in a community of shared values, which is hardly a new notion.
Nobody cares about gatekeeping in niche communities. The problem is when niche groups enter larger communities and employ the tried-and-true Motte and Bailey harangue for censorship, which ultimately ends up becoming political and problematic, as with old twitter.
> What is new is that the blurred lines of public vs private spaces has confused everyone’s concept of “free speech”.
What’s new is erstwhile liberals abandoning their commitment to open discourse, advocating for corporations to police speech, and boycotting/organizing against corporations who commit the sin of platforming wrongthink.
> An LGBT community is in no way obliged to listen to anti-LGBT voices. In the same way that an unlocked front door is not an invitation for me to enter.
Agreed! But nor should LGBT voices be permitted (or, rather, used) to dictate rules to everyone else on the planet.
> Nor is being blocked from that community a strike against free speech: you are able to speak freely in any other location of your choice.
This is a cynical and deeply authoritarian take. Does first amendment apply to social media? Of course it doesn’t. The first amendment prevents the federal government from squashing speech, because they can’t be trusted with such power over the people. Are you of the opinion that a power that’s considered too corrupting to be wielded by our elected officials can be responsibly wielded by unelected technocrats?
Your comment reminds me of a time I was a member of a sports club. One other member was thrown out as they were revealed in a newspaper article to also be an active member of a neo-Nazi organisation. But, they'd never said or done anything that gave the slightest hint of it and appeared to be quite pleasant and liked within the club.
I wonder if anyone in the sports club would ever have noticed if it weren't for a journalist looking into that neo-Nazi group.
> It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average.
Nerdy = Educated, because most people joining at that time were academics or people who really wanted to use the internet despite the difficulty to get there at the time.
As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. There were a lot of people from different continents even in the early days, while of course the majority was from the US. And as far as I know, diversity of thought is not tied to the type of melanin you have in your skin.
> As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say.
I'm sorry, but you're taking offence at reality here.
When I got to Usenet in the early 1990s, it was clear that most users were from North America and involved with college. This group was overwhelmingly white. Furthermore at many institutions, access required learning enough Unix to run rn. A barrier to entry that favored people who were nerdy relative to the general population. Email had similar demographics at the time, for similar reasons.
Therefore it is historically accurate to say that more than 50% of users were white and nerdy, even relative to other educated people. You're right that the other users included a lot of diversity. But afavour is absolutely right about the majority.
On diversity of thought. It is absolutely true that we had diverse thinking on Usenet at that point. However it is like clustering in some high dimensional space. The existence of diversity along some dimensions of thought within some dimensions doesn't change the fact that along some other dimensions there is more diversity of thought when you include people from different backgrounds and cultures.
The Early Internet was white and middle class because they could afford it. But there were no recommendation algorithms or content siloes, so even if it was less diverse, it was potentially much more diverse and free than whatever we have today.
Today we have most of the world online, but they live on 5 websites, so even though it feels like there's more diversity and breadth, it has become a much more homogeneous culture.
There must be a name for this scientific phenomenon (variable increases between two spans of time, but the relative effect of it on the entire system has decreased)
I suspect GP was referring to the diversity of thought as well as the diversity of race. However, I would also expect the average isn't a useful metric in this context.
The early internet didn't attempt to silo you as it had no real technical capacity for it. Maybe only (for argument's sake) ~2% of the internet back then was non-US/Europe, but that meant ~2% of the messages I read came from non-US/Europe. Nowadays, Xitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. all have algorithms that try to fit me into a bucket with similar people, so even if now 50% of the internet is non-US/Europe, what I'm actually experiencing is far closer to 0% than it used to be.
The internet I experience now is far less diverse even than just walking down my local high street. Looking at that mastodon link, for example, is so unbelievably unrepresentative of the kind of diversity (by all axes) I experience just by going outside.
It took a bit of digging, but the page 'Hip hop' was created in June 2001. 'Hip Hop (Music)' was mostly a retitle of that page in April 2003, and what was left eventually became 'Hip Hop (culture)' by way of 'Hip hop culture'. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_culture&o...
I always find it deeply hilarious when people online expand on their definition of "diversity of thought." Mostly because it always means more of exactly one single type of "thought".
People of a similar background tend to have similar thoughts. If you grew up white in America or black in Africa you will have at least a few experiences that most people of your background share. Expand the amount of people with diverse background and you will get a wider range of thoughts.
> hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to.
Well there were obviously good and bad things about it.
Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations.
We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.
Can we though? That comment demonstrates very clearly that it wasn't as democratic as people are remembering.
You had a chance to make an inclusive internet, and you made an encyclopedia that was blind to the largest most significant art & cultural movement in generations. What are you going to do differently this time?
I find "we didn't, therefore we can't" a kind of defeatist and unrealistic reaction. The internet has been shaped and reshaped a few times, in a lot of ways for the better, I don't see why it couldn't continue to be refined.
I'm not taking that position, quite. But I'm not seeing much contrition for it being that way the first time around, or sophisticated evaluation of why it was, or a plan for how to improve it in the future. Without those I think the hope that it'll improve in these ways is simply naive.
What I'm arguing is that we're taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back rather than a linear path of improvement. In this case one of the steps backward being the walled gardens, steps forward including the democratization of the internet as a whole.
I enjoyed the tweet above as a glimpse into the past, but it's far too cherry-picked for you to use it as an indictment of the early internet. The article for 'Gangsta Rap' (May '01) predates 'Country Music' (Oct '01), 'English Language' (Nov '01) and 'Mayonnaise' (Jul '02), but you wouldn't think very highly of me if I used that to make an opposite claim.
I don't think the 'Hip Hop Music' (Apr '03) cherry-pick even holds up on its own. The creation edit says it's being taken from an already-existing page called 'Hip hop', whose history I'm unable to find.
No, although I understand why such a simplistic and easily-digestible idea would be appealing to a group of people who increasingly want simple answers.
We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned.
We want to go back to the Internet where you can say wild shit and people are smart / savvy enough to know you're just being edgy and not an actual hateful person.
We want to go back to the Internet that wasn't controlled by gigantic megacorporations who have incredibly outsized influence on what people do and do not see.
In short, a lot of older Netizens want 1999 back. And for good reason.
> We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned.
IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".
If anything discord is way more open than IRC in that respect. In IRC you can own a channel and ban anyone who comes from another channel you dislike. You cannot pre-emptively ban all members of another server from your discord server.
> IRC had channel-wide, server-wide blocks available since the olden days, as well as user-to-user blocking. The term "flamewar" is old school from these days where people got hella banned. Forums had trolls that were banned and re-banned, see: the age of the term "sockpuppet".
And you had to really work to get a ban in most forums and IRC channels. You had to really step out of line - and continue stepping out of line.
Cast even a momentary glance at the things people get banned for on Reddit, or used to be banned for on Twitter.
A woman declaring, "Men are not women." is enough to have her Twitter account permanently deactivated. Try telling me that's even remotely close to how things were in the 1990s Internet.
> And you had to really work to get a ban in most forums and IRC channels. You had to really step out of line - and continue stepping out of line.
I disagree with this. It was easy to get kicked out of a channel for just being kinda annoying, and then if the mods just didn't like you they can just ban you. Also, like I said, it was normal to channel-ban (i.e. pre-emptively prevent any members from a channel to join yours) notorious channels.
Also yeah I would also kick people talking about "men are not women" just for being off-topic in my channel, which was about computer builds lol. If someone got kicked for being off-topic and came back and continued to be that way they got a ban for being annoying. It was super common to just ban vaguely annoying people.
The problem with the culture of "just assume people are joking" is that some people aren't joking. The background of edgy jokes was used very effectively by actual hate movements, to massive impact.
We all have to live with the consequences of that, and one of yours is that you're not getting the benefit of the doubt on nasty jokes anymore.
You need to acknowledge that something went wrong, and then consider why it did. Rather than have this naive nostalgia for an internet culture that only existed because "thick-skinned" is a euphemism for "people not actually in danger."
Hits different when they're talking about you, huh?
It's the kind of thing that could make a person want to build a space where they could talk to like-minded folk and not have to put up with that culture-jamming noise every day of their lives. Fortunately, there are more tools than have ever existed in human history to do that now.
Just noting that openly, not at all subtly racist hatemongers somehow have jobs and are called "antiracist". And in Lombardo's case, educating our teachers this way doesn't exactly sound like a good idea.
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but if I may try to interpret: it sounds like you want to go back to an Internet with not nearly so many people on it, where the culture of "being online" was more homogeneous.
One can imagine why that's a problem in a world of 8 billion people, all of whom (some say) have a right to be online.
Anytime someone says, "Blah blah sentiment blah blah... BUUUUUUT", what they're really saying is, "I'm doing exactly what you think I'm doing, but I don't want anyone to call me out on it!"
And just have the goddamned courage to say what you want to say to begin with. You're exactly the problem. You can't even be honest enough to say, "You just want the Internet to be white again!"
We didn't have voice communication when I was young. Sending a single high-resolution GIF took 10-15 minutes. In 1996, it took 28 minutes for me to receive a single 4 MB MP3 via DCC in IRC using mIRC. We didn't know what color anyone was. Oftentimes we didn't even know what nationality someone was. You were judged solely by the quality of your content. How good were your arguments? How cogent was your point? How well do you present yourself in communication.
I sought not to put words in your mouth because I didn't know your meaning. But if they come out of your mouth as an intepretation of my interpretation, I have to assume that's what you meant to say.
> You were judged solely by the quality of your content
I remember; I was there too. A not-insignificant portion of "quality of one's content" was whether it fit the right 'hacker' mold. How well did you present your argument? Did you use the right words? Were you savvy to the right concepts?
Those concepts were couched in the culture that originated the Internet, which leaned in a certain race, class, and gender direction. You didn't know what nationality someone was, but they got ignored if they didn't use the right words. And the choice of what words were right wasn't a democracy; it was a biased selection from the first people to trailblaze the culture, who brought their cultural baggage with them.
You and I are both old enough to remember "There are no girls on the Internet."
Now that we're building a net for 8 billion people, a lot of those norms are obsolete and over-constraining.
And what a shame that we can't really call people the f-word anymore, can't even use LGBT slurs, angrily shakes fist at the sky.
Seriously, I don't get the people who miss these things. I admit that it was funny to the 14 year old version of me to call my friends the n-word while playing Call of Duty, but rather sooner than later we understood that some things aren't edgy, just offensive, unnecessary and hurtful.
And it's not as if edgyness went away completely. Reddit has it's corners, there's plenty of *chan sites, if you search around on YouTube you'll encounter "eDgY" content (edgy in that context == "racist, anti-lgbt, mysoginistic etc.")
Netflix and YT have stand-up specials from edgy comedians. I saw more than one "edgy" Discord server, with "edgy" memes and jokes.
Also typical that a bit furter up in this comment thread, the one thing which is deemed to be wrong with Mastodon is that Anti-LGBT speech is not allowed, which somehow means that you loose diversity. Because what I want when talking to diverse people is hearing them hate gay people for absolutely no reason at all.
Anti-LGBT takes are not opinions to me. I label myself as a tolerating, open-minded person, which doesn't mean that I accept or want intolerant and closed-minded people near me, and I refuse to accept that this somehow makes me intolerant or anti-diversity.
My experience of the internet in the 90s is that it was very homogenous and Western-focused, and I doubt it was much more diverse pre-Eternal September. Also most discussion took place in smaller forums which either focused on a specific topic (and so all members shared at least one common interest) or had a very specific culture.
I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse. It is in fact modern social media that has sucked in people of all walks of life and dumped them onto the same platform. An internet of small, open communities sounds more like the internet I grew up with.
> I think it's revisionism to suggest that the old internet was far more politically and culturally diverse
Of course it was more diverse because no-one was kicking anyone off any platform when there was no social media and content policy in application in the first place. I don't even know how you can seriously think that this was not the case.
Wasn’t there but I find it hard to believe that webmasters were kicking off people with views they found toxic. That Forms don’t have ban wars. There’s nothing about the internet or social media in regards to “cancel culture” or anything like it. Humanity has been doing it since we formed communities.
I've read people cannot actually fathom large numbers, and by extension I have to conclude they also cannot fathom scale or how that changes things.
There's a difference between your neighbor rejecting your belief in green jesus (thrall from World of Warcraft) and the entire world doing it.
That's the difference between your bog standard PHPBB forum from the 90's and FB today. We have _precedence_ for this, people have literally been booted off all major platforms at the same time.
The early internet had both people interested in Communism in its myriad splinter groups (Marxists.org was one of the first big websites) and people advocating libertarianism in its myriad strands. Compare Mastodon where there was discussion that sites failing to mod out libertarianism might be considered beyond the pale, and ineligible for federation. (I'm not defending libertarian rhetoric, which I find tiresome, but it has been present in internet nerd culture since forever).
The early internet had a huge Buddhist scene (which produced a massive boom in IRL communities). Plus every other "alternative religion" in a Western context, from Hare Krishna to Eckankar. It was where New Atheism started, and at the same time, you could see the occasional figure advocating for American evangelicalism of precisely the sort that most riled New Atheists. People post-internet who know anything about the religions of the world outside the ones in their own area, almost certainly gained that knowledge from the internet.
The rather limited nationalities and races then using the internet did not mean little diversity of views, because you had just enough curious people around that, in aggregate, they could be curious about everything.
as if any gathering of people doesn't have their own culture.
Where did this idea come from that people are cardboard cutouts that you can write on to perfection?
Having said that, I don't agree with your second paragraph at all. Individuals would get into shouting matches when they disagreed, but if you think for a second it's more diverse in todays cancel-culture I can only conclude you're not thinking well.
flame wars have been a thing since almost the beginning, and contrary to what you may think, politics and differences were a _major_ driver of that.
Clearly you haven't seen the entire fediverse. There are tons of "free speech" instances along with a garden variety of other "alt" instances that are as active as the mastodon affiliated ones.
They tend to all be mutually blacklisted by each other, meaning that you won't see their posts appear in your federated timeline, however you can still individually follow and interact with accounts across the blacklist line.
What I personally do is host my own Pleroma instance where I can manually configure which instances I chose to associate with. Sure, I don't show up on anyone else's federated timeline but I mostly lurk anyways so I don't care and I get a large degree of control over what kind of content I see.
“Fediverse” tools are a bait and Switch. I don’t need a glorified Wordpress blog that has elaborate censorship tools built into it. Networks like Mastodon also won’t implement E2E encryption because it would throw a wrench into their ideological crusade. Sounds like exactly the kinds of people I don’t want to associate with.
I can run my own web server, serve millions of users, and provide an RSS feed with technology from 10+ years ago. The Internet is Federated by design and it works fine for me.
.social is but one of hundreds of instances. That's also what the parent comment was trying to say - we don't have to be drones, all unified under the same social server.
You're welcome to find an instance that aligns with your mindset or create one and shape it the way you like.
The fediverse is an echo chamber for many groups, including notably hard left gen Z. It's integrity is similar to that of early days 4chans /b/, in that it wholly rejects reality around it, and it serves not as a discussion forum, but a self-fed enshittification engine racing to the most extreme take.
It couldn't look any more different from the intellectually curious people that largely constituted the beautiful artificial frontier of the early net, sprinkled with little webpages, and optimistic exchanges of early explorers.
I've never interacted or understood /b/ much but my impression of 4chan in general is that you kind of get a slice of humanity because of their rules + anonymity. Both the good and the bad.
But I've never seen anyone describe it as rejecting reality, nor have I ever got that impression from much that I've seen from there. It's mostly people fucking around, whereas the hard left you're referring to seem to be taking it a lot more seriously than most on /b/ (that I've seen, not much personal experience with it).
What you see on mastodon.social is the result of Elon Musk buying Twitter. One and a half years ago it looked very different from the current mix of US politics and social issues, with more European-oriented, non-English content. As a European, it lost a lot of relevance to me, personally.
>representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing... Just look at mastodon.social/explore
Wow, I've never used Twitter or Mastodon, but I just visited that link, and it's all American politics, abortion, trans, and computer nerd stuff. Wow. Boring.
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 human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.
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 other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.
I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.
I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.
I've literally read several articles today (mostly via HN) from which I have garnered enough value to pay at least $1 to each author. And I'd gladly pay it, as long as it's not a subscription and I don't have to enter my card details all over the place, or have my money charged as a large number of individual transactions.
Especially for micropayments. If I google and find a minor 1-liner that taught me something I'd deposit $0.10 or $0.25. If it was something I was struggling with for a long time - like some arcane tar or mt command to use my tape backup drive, I'd give at least a few $. These amounts add up quickly, and encourage a much more wholesome form of publishing.
This was kind of the theory of using Brave Browser to earn BAT through ads, and then set up an "auto-contribute" list that took your earned BAT and distributed a % that you set to each person. The adoption didn't exactly happen, especially with Brave's weirdness lately.
> and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.
My problem with recommendation algorithms, at least YouTube's, is that by design they recommend things based on keywords and categories for videos you have watched previously. So what happens is that I get hooked on some new topic, say cave diving for example. And then I watch a whole bunch of cave diving videos ... until I get sick of cave diving and want something different. But because of my viewing patterns, my recommendations are FLOODED with cave diving videos that I don't care about anymore.
I don't know how to solve that problem. And it might even just be a "me" problem related to the way that my brain works.
Not just a "you" problem. I have to routinely reset my youtube history (I don't have time to prune it) to avoid stale recommendation. I have few interests, but every once in a while, I'm on a research spree or just want some new vibes, then my home view is ruined.
If they are not getting rid of the algorithm, it would make sense to let me manage the keywords that are driving it.
I really want the ability to easily create multiple persons/personalities like Netflix lets you do.
On Netflix I have a seperate "user" for asian movies so the main user is not flooded with recommendations for asian movies. Those 2 users have extremly different list of recommended movies.
When I watch a few "The girl is doing her homework" music movies on YouTube they quickly drown out everything else on the homepage. When I later watch a few "watch later" engineering movies, the music videos are drowned out and I then have difficulty finding more music videos. It's like starting over from scratch every time.
We had per-use systems. I remember when people would pay multiple £ for one (1) phone ringtone. I think Minitel may have been per-use metered as well? Either way, both were obliterated by the massive benefit of not paying per use.
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.
Reply to hliyan, since HN is not giving me a reply link for their post:
As far as I'm aware, a "medium-like" model works when all content you're paying for is "on the platform", this includes not just medium, but also substack, and a lot of streaming sites like twitch. There's one company involved, and one jurisdiction for settling any disputes.
Once the enities you're paying are corporations themselves - potentially based in different states - the picture becomes a lot messier; I would imagine that a system where both a reader in Germany and one in India can micropay per article for a combination of the NY Times, the Toronto Star and the South China Morning Post is beyond what current market dynamics can offer.
After all, Patreon was supposed to be the next step up from medium etc. albeit with content creators as individuals rather than corporations, and that's already struggling.
NYT could easily setup such a system by asking you to top up your account by a bigger amount (say, the price of a monthly sub), but only charge you cents per read article
I've wondered about that. Patreon used to group all of your subscriptions into one payment, but they've recently been going away from that. I can't understand why, the small $0.20 + % adds up for multiple transactions. But if you only have to pay the $0.20 once, it effectively gets distributed across all of your subscriptions. It baffles me why Patreon went away from the single subscription model.
This would have to be a "load up a wallet and 'pay'" sort of thing, where the website owner gets the money in aggregate minus a transaction fee when they request it.
there is an ongoing initiative in EU (I think US has something similar brewing) called SEPA-Inst which in theory allows free transfers between bank accounts in the EuroZone. sadly, it still comes with a lot of caveats and not possible to guarantee it being free, depending on counterparty banks and potential FX charges.
it will be interesting to see if lightning/crypto etc. will continue to increase pressure to improve this capability in the traditional banking system - it would enable all sorts of new payment/pricing models for online services like discussed here.
i would love to be able to just make micro-payments for things i have found useful, regardless of what site they are on.
And it's why, when paying like that, you're typically paying more than would have done in cash, or the amount is high enough to cover the extra transaction fees. That's definitely the case for most UK carpark operators - the minimum amounts you can specify online are always higher than the ones for cash, because of transaction fees.
You're probably also misjudging how tiny those amounts are. Vending machines, for example, nowadays don't really stock anything costing less than £0.50, if they take credit cards. Public toilets can often be £1 or £2.
A social-first Internet makes sense but this is not going to be the way people do it. Let’s consider some models for rewarding content authors:
1. You are asked to pay before viewing the content. This incentivizes content owners to display clickbait titles but does not incentivize content quality. People will click through lots of interesting titles and have a hard time finding out the valuable ones.
2. You are asked to pay after viewing the content. This is similar to a donation - just look at the state of open-source software. Only a few geeks who understand the value of donation will pay.
3. You are asked to pay a subscription fee upfront, and the fee is split between all content owners that you did read. If you view YouTube, have you signed up for YouTube Premium? Why not? Do you trust YouTube not to hold your videos hostage and pay only a tiny bit of revenue to uploaders?
There is this Dutch company called Blendle that started out with this idea, the NY times even invested in it. But unfortunately it was not a viable model, so they switched to a all you can consume type of subscription like every other platform
You just spent much more than $1 of your time arguing against spending a dollar. You would never spend 25 cents to read an article, don't fool yourself. If that was an option, you'd invent another reason not to pay. Oh, I need to fold my laundry, no time to read this article.
(I know it's bad HN to put two replies to a comment, but I found my prepared argument: The Problem With MicroPayments is MicroFraud)
Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:
pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?
so do you give refunds a la steam?
pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying
pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?
pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)
pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off
pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?
pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?
Part 2: business model problems!
getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods
nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%
winner-take-all effects are very strong
Play store et al already exist, why not use that?
Free substitute goods are just a click away
Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is
No real consumer demand for micropayments
=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero
existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money
friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned
first most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)
Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.
accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
> where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph
I do think that latter part is an interesting idea, modulo performance questions and echo-chamber concerns. Also, what about providing anonymity to oppressed peoples?
Perhaps for my last point above, we could have bifurcated services, where the user explicitly knows if they are operating in verified space or anon space.
The idea of a social first internet is that each person would maintain their own trust graph, rather than relying exclusively on centralized authorities to do so. It's a lot easier to game google than to try and astroturf the entire internet, and it's harder for google to quickly tweak ranking algorithms to fix some bad results than it is to revoke trust in the social graph from a bad actor.
I think professional trolls, bad faith argument, toxic influencers, lynch mobs, rage bait, and all the other moving parts that make up the Internet’s profoundly toxic political and social activism sphere also did their part. That stuff really exploded in the mid 20-teens.
Of course you could consider some of that a special case of content mills and spam. It certainly can’t be separated from the ad based business model and the attention maximizing algorithms that drive it, since most of that stuff rides on the fact that being crazy or toxic maximizes engagement.
I wonder if all the toxicity is just a reflection of people's state of mind. Just seems to be a lot more anger and sadness online in the late 2010s early 2020s than there ever was before.
There just seems to be a lot of lonely and depressed people out there, and unfortunately they often time they seem to congregate to wallow in each other's depressive thought loops. It's hard enough to escape from the gravity well of depression when you're alone in reinforcing the darkness. Can't even imagine what getting stuck into one of those quagmires might be like.
They were always there, but the impetus for frictionless experiences to drive revenue also removed all the barriers and effort to congregating and often exploiting those people.
It was there on Usenet, it's been there since people were scratching messages on bathroom stalls and subway walls.
But yes, now we have effectively created cult generators and not only does no one want to turn them off, really smart people (even many with good intentions) keep making them more efficient.
When the internet was young, i thought the comments sections were going to leave us confronted with our own shadow selves. I pictured a utopia where we saw that raw honesty and all became a bit more accepting of our own inner critics, shadows, golden shadows and the like.
In retrospect, I was naive. Just because we see something our shadow wrote next to our handle doesn't mean we recognize that as ourselves. If anything, we're shadow projecting much harder than ever.
To be honest, i do not think the internet invented that. There are parts of the world, were lynch mobs still are considered justice.
Were face is more important than facts.
To generate a healthy eco-system, for a unhealthy human species.. thats quite the challenge.
> SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet.
Right, so how do we fix it? I'm wondering if uBlacklist has a place here (a tool to block domains from search results) -- it would be interesting to see if we could all come together and contribute to a database of SEO farm / junk websites to improve search results.
Destroy spyvertising ads by making the business model illegal, so don't-care-where-my-ad-is-hosted ad networks die. Non-spying ads on sites that naturally draw lots of real eyeballs will still be a thing, which is fine. Actually-free sites, open source, and open protocols, would all see more interest and development in such a world, filling in most of the gaps people worry about from the death of shitty-ads.
> What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.
Isn't that what the social networks are, internally?
I agree that attention/engagement farming is a major driver for the web's enshittification. I don't think content attribution and verified identities are the solution.
Two(ish) key features of the earlier phases of the web that seem relevant to me were:
- most content wasn't profit driven
- social interaction was not gamified, was slower and was often siloed/themed
Trending, dog-piling, attention-economy hacks were all greatly limited.
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 mechanism, it seems a a bit too divided. It's unclear to me what the appropriate mechanism is, but I think that's the right sort of way to frame the problem.
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 an effort and trying.
I completely agree. And then I saw your username and knew you've put in the work. Thanks for doing something and putting your money/time/energy where your mouth is! A lot of people approach these problems by waiting for the stars to align or waiting until everybody on this planet agrees with them and then take action. It has to be this, it has to be that, no choices, no priorities, no decisions. In their minds they take on all of the world's problems at once.
For a couple of years I have been working on my website software to make the internet more open again (or at least, keep some of the openness around). I'm by no means making any dent in the universe sofar, but I rolled up my sleeves, I bet on the open internet, and started to work. No need to wait for other people.
For me, it has all to do with RSS and the curation of content. Yeah, curation is more work than having someone else's algorithm decide what you eat for infodinner. The internet itself - and the web in particular - already take care of the sharing and distribution of this curated content. With my software, if I 'retweet' an RSS item from a website that I follow on my own 'timeline', it already spreads further than the initial target group of that item. Virality and connectedness is already baked in the internet. The techniques for a social internet are already there, for years.
Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone. This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.
> Individual action takes place in a context of social cues and incentives. Those who understand this try to work together to change those things, which in turn changes the “easy defaults” for everyone.
I think this discounts the fact that people are not mindless automatons following the path of least resistance. Individuals are capable of difficult things that fly in the face of collective theory, and time and time again such individual actions have changed history.
> This is a million times more effective than limiting your approach to nagging people to do better for ideological reasons.
This is ultimately a false dichotomy, blind to a third option, which is to act as an indiviual, act according to what you think is good, in spite of what anyone else is doing or thinking.
If you try to do something yourself in such a way, people will flock to tell you to stop trying to change the world, because it is not pointless and cannot be done. If it is indeed pointless, I ask, why must the attempt be aborted?
I haven't had anyone rushing to tell me I must stop watching a 4 hour video essay on youtube, which is surely even more pointless.
> I think this discounts the fact that people are not mindless automatons following the path of least resistance.
That is nowhere implied or required by what I am arguing. I am just saying changing incentives is more effective at a broad societal level than nagging people. This is plainly observable and undisputable.
For example, add a mortgage interest deduction to the tax code. Doing so in no way reduces or discounts the ability of every person in that jurisdiction to make financial decisions based on a million factors that are weighted uniquely by each individual. But behavior of the market overall will inevitably change, because the incentives have changed.
Individual action directed toward the problem itself is what you do to feel like you're making a change, often at cost far in excess of the benefit of that change (which is part of why this mechanism often fails, even when a large majority want that change). There's nothing wrong with it, but at a society level, you can't count on it to get much done.
Individual action directed toward affecting policy in organizations that can overcome coordination problems (largely government) is where you focus if you want to have a big effect, but maybe not get as much immediate satisfaction.
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.
I find this mindset debilitating. Every person on earth, the very people who might accomplish real change, they are all individuals. Yet every one of them can deflect responsibility onto collectives, collectives that in turn consiting of individuals who can do the same, resulting in inaction and indifference.
Someone else is always to blame, someone else is always more responsible, and that someone else isn't even a human being, it's a corporation, a political faction, an ideological movement. None of those entities are of course ever going to seize that responsibility, because there is no agency in any of them to do so.
Yes, I think we're actually talking about the same problem from different angles.
The problem you mention in the second paragraph is sometimes called "diffusion of responsibility" [0]. A related concept about the difficulties of individual and group action is "belling the cat" [1]. You may be familiar with these, I'm just throwing them out there in case anyone reading is also interested in this topic.
Framing in terms of agency, I guess I'd say I agree with you that each agent has a responsibility or an obligation to take action. But it's not clear to me how to ensure that the actions build on each other rather than canceling each other out in the aggregate. It may take a strong person with a sense of duty to get things started but eventually they will need help.
If hackers pray five times per day to the European Union, they will one day step down from the sky regulate and ban all our dreams into being.
Jokes aside, you're completely right, but I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc.
> I think individuals should remember to limit their effort when it's without reimbursement. In order to not burn out and become bitter, etc.
You're projecting your will onto the world and making it more like how you think it should be. It's nice when other people share your vision and chip in to support the effort, but I don't think that can be a prerequisite. If it is, then you will never be true to your vision, and that is, if anything, recipe for crashing and burning.
Some goals are so great that they can not be reached alone. Space flight for example, was a dream for many, but it required massive joint effort to finally achieve.
Even people seeking hyper-individualistic goals are paid, for example in sports. I don't mean that getting paid is a prerequisite, but if you're struggling alone you have to check after some time if it's really worth doing.
‘Don't be distracted by the myth that “every little [bit] helps.” If everyone does a little, we'll achieve only a little. We must do a lot. What's required are big changes in demand and in supply’ --David MacKay
There was absolutely nothing "collective" about the early web. 180-degrees the opposite. You're not going to recapture that ethos, either for the overall Internet or even for a smaller interested subculture within in, by making it NPR. It would be something else, and likely not any better than the corporate walled garden.
I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership.
I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)
Yes, the reason it is vulnerable IMHO, because within our mostly liberal system, there is too little support for coops in the law. We do not protect enough against people taking power from others. That's why I believe liberalism (which at least ideologically values this diversity) cannot survive without socialism.
> one person one vote with the stake of ownership.
I'm not great with the terminology of this stuff. Just to be clear on what you're suggesting, do you mean that each person has a stake of ownership as well as a single vote? So functionally something like a corporation with one kind of stock where no owner owns more than one share?
And do you mean to have restrictions on stock ownership? Like everyone in the country gets a share? Or only employees can own a share? Or anyone can buy a single share? Or something else?
I think there are interesting points to explore along the design space of how we distribute stock shares. I just don't know enough about it to have much intuition, and I'm trying to get a sense of how I could model it.
What I am suggesting in practice would be similar to either consumer or worker cooperative. These are similar to publicly-traded companies, except the stakeholders are not some Wall Street randos, but people who actually use company products or employees of the company.
Of course, for this to be truly socialist, the system has to be democratic, i.e. each person involved has equal and non-transferrable vote.
What type a company should be is up to discussion. I believe infrastructure (natural monopolies) are better served by consumer (public) ownership, while companies that can compete on the free market are better served by worker ownership.
As I said elsewhere in the discussion, I think lot of Internet infrastructure should be publicly owned. (And on this infrastructure, businesses could be built.)
Personally, I would prefer an economic system where every company above certain size (say 20 employees) must be either publicly-owned or worker-owned, i.e. democratic in the above sense. Which makes me into a pretty traditional socialist. But that's tangential to the discussion about the Internet.
I'd second this: self hosting and so on is a poor substitute for democratic, socially owned infrastructure. That's the only way we can make social, rather than corporate, networks accessible to everyone in a sustainable way. At the moment the fediverse gets by on goodwill. That isn't sustainable.
The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy.
We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the current owners.
I think this misunderstands what "ownership of means of production" really means in Marxism. The point is NOT that the capitalist owns the factory, which they then rent to workers, who can choose to do whatever they want with it. The ownership of means of production instead refers to full control over the production process, including the social structure of work that makes production possible. Marx's point is that it is this social structure, primarily, that should be collectively owned (that's why all the discussion about alienation).
It's kinda like "owning a home" doesn't imply just owning the walls, but implicitly also a place with privacy.
So in today's SW world, means of production is not a computer, but rather the datacenters of the cloud, proprietary APIs and control over browser standards. And control over habits of the users, who also participate in production, by generating "content". These things cannot be simply replicated by the workers.
So if someone improves the logistic infrastructure involved in getting the products from the workers to the consumers none of the value they generated belongs to them? That actually explains a lot. Even today, places with food insecurity don't have supply but distribution problems, so it's a pretty hard problem to solve.
If you improve the operation of the worker-owned company, you will get rewarded just like any other employee who improves things.
If you want to improve things by doing things on your own, you will own the fruits of your labor. If you need additional employees to improve things, then you will probably have to share with them.
> How is owning the fruits of your labour different from capitalism again?
Capitalists do not get money because of their labour. They get money because they own capital. An heir who inherits a large company can continue to receive his share of profits and dividends simply by being the "owner", even if he passes on the administrative work to others. If he has not worked, but consumes, he enjoys the fruits of the labor of others. The capitalist concentration of wealth in the hands of a few means that these few enjoy a quantity of fruits of labor that a person could never generate even if they worked for more than 100 years. So, obviously, capitalism has nothing to do with giving each person the fruits of their labor.
No, it has nothing to do with price of labor (although in socialism there is no labor market), and everything to do with removing subjugation of others due to ownership of private property.
In socialism, if you want other people to help you build the company, you have to do so on equal terms, by giving them equal stake in ownership. That doesn't mean you don't own fruits of your labor.
I think you misunderstood my comment. In order for socialism to remain true to its intent of being democratic, it needs liberalism. By 'government capture' I mean the authorities in government taking control over an ostensibly democratic system (as frequently happened in the real-world attempts at socialism). You need to have an ability to rebuild these democratic systems elsewhere, which is provided by liberal freedoms.
I'd actually agree to a significant extent that people should own their employment (this is the original American Founding ideal of "free labor" that Jefferson and Lincoln both believed in) but I think you're better off not using the word "socialism" to describe that economic system. People associate that word with "communism" which is defined as a dictatorship where the government operates as a single monopoly under the pretense of representing the will of the people. The word "socialism" is also associated with corporate dominated market systems where the government provides a safety net and some labor rights for working people.
A system where workers are part owners of their companies is probably better described as "distributed ownership" to avoid confusing connotations. If the first thing you have to do is explain to people that you're not advocating a Nordic style welfare state or a USSR/CCP/North Korean style dystopian dictatorship, you're using problematic terminology.
If I'm misunderstanding you and you're advocating that all businesses should be controlled by a (democratic) government rather than by their employees then I'd be against that because most people are not going to have enough time, under any system, to become informed about stuff they have no direct stake in. I don't want politicians or voters responding to a media fear campaign telling businesses what products to produce and such a system would almost certainly devolve into incumbent politicians using the media to keep themselves in power and ensure their preferred successors win. I think it essential that decisions on whether to start new firms or what they are to produce should be mostly depoliticized except where there's a strong public interest that the government needs to regulate (like firms that want to pollute the environment or sell harmful highly addictive products).
An economy completely under the control of a democratic government would allow 50%+1 people who don't like Taylor Swift's music to ban her from singing and deprive 40% of the population who are fans of her music of their right to listen to her sing (or in the case of representative democracy, allow a majority to vote for a "lesser evil" party that includes outlawing Taylor Swift concerts as one of their package deal policies). A more extreme example of why democracy needs to be limited in scope would be how the democratic government of Athens voted, by majority popular vote, to execute Socrates because his constant challenging questions they didn't want to answer were annoying to them.
No, the word socialism is correct, it describes pretty much what you call "distributed ownership", although a condition should be it's also democratic. I don't see why to avoid a well-defined term because of a connotation, that's a receiver's and not a sender's problem.
Regarding democracy, this kind of voting (although it's unequal) already exists with publicly traded companies. Interestingly, nobody is worried where billionaires will find the time or interest to vote in many companies they own; it's always the common people being the problem.
It's almost as if the whole point of Mastodon wasn't anything more than just to be another echo chamber. But hey no bad guys from "the other side" so guess we good.
HN is still the best. We need more HN not Twitter or Mastodon.
The whole point of Mastodon/Fediverse is that mastodon.social is not your sole option.
Unlike other platforms, you have a choice. You're in control of who to follow or block, and what to mute. There is no algorithmic timeline that surfaces unwanted content to you. You can hide the boosts (i.e retweets) of any account. You can simply default to follow accounts you're interested and rely entirely on your local timeline.
There are many Mastodon servers that are more niche, or at least less akin to Twitter/Mastodon.social. I originally made my account in mastodon.social but I'm in the process of moving to another server where the server timeline aligns more with what I'm looking for (though I can migrate my followers/followings, yay!). This server is also run cooperatively, which further aligns the interests and motives of everyone involved.
I was on the (Lemmy) fediverse for a few months, selfhosted instance, a lot of comments and post, kept one niche community from Reddit alive over there. It’s pretty much worse than Reddit in most ways. Most small communities don’t exist, small-ish communities get all the assholes big subs have on reddit, because so many people browse all instead of subscribed and post on anything (literally. I had a meta community on my single user instance where I’d just log some descisions and had people vote & comment on those).
You have the power mods issue, only far worse, because they are vastly more powerful now that they control whole instances.
Then you have all the fascists who claim they are leftists but are actually just "anything Anti-USA is amazing". They also run major instances.
I ended up deleting my instance, returning to Reddit (and simply using it from desktop only, and regularly delete my content), and the quality of discourse is already so much better again. I did create an account on beehaw and treat it as unfederated (only subscribing to local communities), the people there can be a bit strange, and there’s not a huge amount of content, but at least they aren’t as bad as the rest of the Lemmy fediverse.
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 expensive to run because the day to day operation of federation is way more complex than a centralised solution would be.
There’s nothing wrong with centralised services and Wikipedia is a great example of one that works. You just need the right governance structure and an audience willing to chip in to cover costs. Federation is over complicated and often unnecessary.
> 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.
What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.
But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services.
How would you solve that?
How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?
I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic.
Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.
Does it need to be solved? If we're talking about the magic and wonder of the early internet, then I raise you my 800-count Geocities counter and my Neopets storefront with probably got less views than that.
The early web was much, much, much smaller. There weren't slashdot effects that made you go viral. You just did things because you felt cool, and getting like 800 views lifetime or 1200 views was exciting.
Oh right. No one here is actually talking about early internet are they... because they want modern internet attention with a million tweets and half-a-million views by going viral.
> How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?
Things weren't discoverable back then. You surfed on hours on web-rings looking for like-minded folk. When you found them, they weren't active any more (not by modern day active anyway), but seeing their pages encouraged you to dig deeper.
-------------------
That's IMO, the wonder of the early internet that has been lost today. People didn't seek attention back then, because the internet was still niche.
But now that the internet has proven itself to be one of the best ways to project and capture attention, its become a better reflection of society. I don't think we're going back.
Wikipedia doesn't really have attention-seekers. Just moderators diligently doing their job. Community driven sites off of the advertising networks are likely closer to replicating the feel of early internet, by self-selecting away from attention seekers.
You're commenting on a discovery engine right now. HN surfaces stuff you never searched for but find interesting all the time. Still, you can't expect for there to be the kind of traffic we see on the big sites today for all the little blogs and whatnot, but that means there would be different motivations behind these more personal spaces. It wouldn't be about driving more clicks, but about expressing oneself to, sharing with, or informing people. Not sure what the economic model for sharing your passion is, but maybe it doesn't always need one.
The constant drive to draw up all of human attention so that those people can be sold something or the other is probably still going to win out in terms of volume, but maybe there can be some more nice things in the world.
Lemmy's surge in popularity over the summer is a big help. People share a lot of links to smaller websites and Fediverse accounts to Lemmy communities. If you're sharing things on a more blog-like system that uses ActivityPub, you can tag an appropriate Lemmy community in your post for increased exposure.
Mastodon has reversed its stance on full-text search, making it generally available in recent releases (though I think it still requires ElasticSearch, which smaller servers and self-hosters may not want to fuss with).
I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.
Discovery is the adversarial point which breaks so many idealistic systems. The ability to get discovered is worth real money, from outside the system. So as soon as there's a discovery mechanism with a substantial real audience, effort will be devoted to "hacking" it.
Sadly not federated, but Spacehey[1] exists! And it's actually quite popular among certain groups of people (the people that were there in the early-mid 00s that want to relive that world, and the younger group that want to live it for the first time). It's pretty cool.
I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact.
Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.
I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages?
Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site.
But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when
indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it.
I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!
Yes I've been thinking about this a lot too. There are these unquestioned notions about what is possible, and they're more often than not self-fulfilling prophecies.
I think it's easier to convince someone they're wrong by showing than telling. This is fairly central to what I'm trying to do with my search engine project. Build something so profoundly contradictory to expectations about what is possible to make sticking to those notions completely untenable.
I think the SerenityOS gang does a fantastic job at this too, much better than I do arguably.
Think of the numbers of tik-tok, youtube, facebook, instagram, snapchat, and all those Social media users.
All these users are "normal" people nowadays. Maybe the effects habits of the minorities on the trajectories of "The Internet" are diminished.
(Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)
I don't think "the majority" matter, in the context of what parent commenter is talking about. I generally subscribe to the idea of Eternal September (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September), where "the majority" is the root cause of the problems.
The early web was not great because capitalism didn't exist and corporations were nicer back then, etc. The early web was great because it was a subculture, driven by a niche population that was more technically savvy and prone to create rather than just consume. Today's web is poor because it is now the mainstream culture, it is driven by a wide population of casual, unsophisticated users that are prone to consume content only and are therefore best served by walled gardens.
As the casual consumer web grew, the early maker web's signal got increasingly lost in the noise. There are still interesting blogs out there, but they are harder to find and attract less engagement because even those of us from the spirit of that original web now spend so much time on platforms like Reddit (and even HN) instead.
Even if you want to produce novel content, you really HAVE to engage with the entrenched closed platforms in order to reach any audience at all now. And therefore there's little way to discriminate, if you want to attract a community of early-web minded people while avoiding the mass normies. Most attempts that try this either fizzle out altogether, or inadvertently take a wrong turn into culture wars, instead attracting alt-right trolls who think the problem with the web is too many political progressives now.
I think it is a pointless goal to try to change the entire mainstream Internet. To somehow change 2020's normies into 1990's geeks. I think the only feasible goal, and only necessary goal, is to carve out space for that geek community to thrive as a subculture once again. Honestly, "the web" itself may be an inappropriate platform for this. It may only be possible with something new that requires some technical savvy and friction in order to access, to discourage all the phone users from venturing in.
I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$
When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent
This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port.
For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work.
I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription.
Edit:
I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.
Yes. I've used them for a few years now and never had any serious issues. Their delivery rate seems good, I don't get much spam, and so far as I know I have not missed legitimate emails.
They have a fast web client where you can perform actions on your entire inbox. So far as I remember gmail only allowed you to do actions on the current page of mails. If you don't want to use their official clients you can always connect via standard IMAP and SMTP.
Also they support plus-addressing like gmail, but also subdomain addressing. I.e. instead of name+alias@yourdomain.com you can use alias@name.yourdomain.com. You can also set up nice email filters quite easily, and their server supports the JMAP protocol [1], which they made. So if you want to interface with your mailbox programmatically they have a more modern protocol to use.
The years I've used them I only remember them having actual noticeable downtime once. Other than that rock solid. Their first line support isn't super technical, but I've only tried to contact them once.
Edit: Essentially if you want good olf-fashioned mail, Fastmail is about as good as it gets. It does not have the smart inbox concepts that Google Mail and Hey do. And not so much in terms of other fancy stuff either. But it makes up for it by using open protocols for mail, calendar, and contact lists. So no danger of lock-in.
I think we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations.
There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down.
Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors.
And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm).
...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect).
But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got.
The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations.
My pitch to the public: “Join the Fediverse and help build the weird new Internet.”
The Epsilon galaxy is a friendly outpost of services in the brave new decentralized digital universe, now known as the Fediverse. (I coined the term Fediverse “galaxy” to refer to a cluster of federated services/nodes run by a single entity, and it’s gained some traction on Mastodon).
I'd also add try and give monetary support content creators that you enjoy. Consuming things for free then relying on ads to pay the people that make things is part of how we got to this point.
Also in response to your edit, isn't the entire point of Hacker News about discovery? One thing we could do right here on is have a weekly thread for people to post general places on the internet they find interesting (webpages, services, communities) but perhaps don't feel like they constitute a unique thread of their own.
I'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation.
You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services.
People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either.
We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition.
It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.
In my opinion, a big part of the success of Wikipedia is that it offers its content under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA). This specifically allows for commercial re-use and re-sale.
The license provides a wide umbrella so that many different people and entities can use the content without worry. Contributions provide a fly-wheel of improvement.
A lot of the current batch of internet companies provide walled gardens and eventually succumb to the trappings of monopolies. In some sense, I think it's survivorship bias. The only entities that stand the test of time are the ones that provide content under libre/free licensing.
While I don't disagree with your list, I think a missing component is access to the commons. Without a rich commons, our society suffers as content sinks into a copyright quagmire.
* 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.
> I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced.
That already helps significantly. :)
> I have nothing to say so don't host
A fair point, probably only a small % of people on the internet need to actualyl host something. There is some middle ground with federated hosting like write.as , so hosting is not always needed.
This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but TikTok has been a great place for me to learn about all kinds of unique and interesting things and hobbyist communities I'd never known about: homesteading, commercial plane transport, tether car racing, DIY halloween decorations, interpretive dance, and a lot more. Top comments tend to be funny (though often the same joke) and smart.
Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind.
Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these.
That's just leaving the internet to the most insane. A tiny bit of effort to post cuts out 95% of participants, leaving mostly the obsessed, often with a specific axe to grind. Cutting by 95% again is distilling nuttiness.
The thing that should happen is carefully cultivating closed memberships, and real tools for formal group decision-making. Mods are just benevolent dictators, and the debate that happens around mods with absolute power is essentially theater. Wikipedia barely hides this with its votes that anybody can show up to, and its code of rules being a arbitrary wise-sounding series of koan-shaped aphorisms. Wikipedia has been vulnerable to anybody with a few bucks and an issue that they're willing to camp on.
The only reason one can't manipulate Wikipedia at will is because you may have some real life opposition who is also attacking the same articles you are. Instead of formalizing that competition between people of different opinions, Wikipedia has ultimately fallen into dictating who is correct based on the opinion of the highest ranked interested person, within an organization that survives on donations and on volunteer editors who get income from any number of sources. This can't stand up to the manipulation of someone invested in distorting the history of hard-shelled tacos, it certainly can't (and isn't) standing up to state-state level actors.
I don't know if it can be fixed. Maybe we can slow the deterioration but we might be beyond the tipping point. The internet I joined 25 years ago is long gone and it's never coming back. It's partly a technological problem and a resource problem but it's also larger scale problem with our values.
Taking a much higher level of perspective on the issue, I don't know if people complain in the way that it matters. I mean sure they complain, but internet usage globally is up by a lot and it keeps going up, even as we discover some issues with over-use on our health. So yeah people complain but the internet, even as it is today, is I think by any metric the most loved technology available worldwide.
If the internet was getting way worse in practice wouldn't a bunch of people start using somethng else and new user rates decreasing? By all metrics the internet is the best it ever was and keeps being super useful for everyone.
I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.
>You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse
>Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore
But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.
Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation.
> Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents
Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?
There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much.
Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.
Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is).
My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon).
It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.
It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble".
Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.
I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp)
But I disagree with some of your other comments
> The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter
The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon.
> it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices
For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting.
> It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me.
The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site.
> will not make a community
If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.
Mastodon doesn't need to "make" it or "happen". Mastodon is not out there trying to become _the thing_. It works exactly as expected for a segment of people. It may not be your cup of tea and that's fine! Good thing we can have both.
This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time.
But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.
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 and flag malicious content -- of course, you wouldn't want to ban whoever the AI tells you to, just use it as one of the signals for whether content could potentially be harmful.
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 scale that is hard for any one moderater to see.
There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.
> 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.
> It would be great if that could become public, too
Absolutely, that would be awesome
> Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model.
My only thought here is that something like the Hacker News model works pretty well (at least in theory). You would focus on norms of communication rather than on the content being expressed.
You'd still get bias for things like one community may prefer things very deferential. Another might value frank communication. But presumably nobody likes screaming or brigading. I think you're less likely to get left/right style biases if you focus on the quality of the communication rather than its content.
An approach like this would still miss important things. For example, you can say very toxic things in a civil voice. So you'd likely have to combine different orthogonal signals to have any sort of guarantee that your site isn't slowly drifting into a place where people know how to consistently violate the rules while evading detection.
At least on federated services there are no algorithms pushing them in your face. Create your own instance, invite like-minded people. You can't do that on centralized services.
The first time I heard about Mastodon was from conservative libertarian-type folk who disagreed with Twitter policy, several years ago. I disagree strongly with their politics but at least they decided to create something instead of just use it as victim politics like the mainstream politicians.
I can appreciate this kind of thinking as much as everyone else, but I think that the "fediverse" is too much of a distraction. Federation can be a great thing, but it's an adjunct to a solution, and not much of a large scale solution in and of itself.
What the web needs is new layers to make what your suggestions much more practical.
Creating a website was a nice idea back in 2003 when mostly geeks with skills were using the web. Today, most people don't want to put forth the effort of creating a website. Many geeks with skills that are still around today don't want to bother creating a website because few people will find it. If you make a website, at best only people who read websites will find it. A growing number of people today don't even know what a "website" is because they hardly live on the web proper. Free web hosting is generally bad news because the platform is far more likely to either shut down or provide zero support.
So back to the thing I said about new layers to the web...
If we're going to bring back websites, then we need to bring back the idea that sites will be hosted on many individual machines that aren't necessarily server infrastructure. With the bandwidth most ISPs and devices are capable of today, data isn't a limiting factor in terms of serving a standard website to even thousands of users. The web was meant to be closer to a peer-to-peer model, and it can be used peer-to-peer, but the layer just isn't there to make that model seamless. Most P2P protocols avoid fiddling with the actual network stack and do entirely their own thing; BitTorrent for the most part lives in their own client applications, as historically have many other P2P protocols. That was fine when geeks were using them, but this is insufficient for making the web itself P2P.
The closest implementation to what I am describing here is Yggdrasil:
Yggdrasil implements P2P mesh networks by behaving like a VPN, assigning an IPv6 address to peers based on public keys. There's no one network, so people are free to create their own networks, and the same address can be used between networks. Although it has some similarities with anonymity networks like Tor, it is not designed for anonymity, which I think is a good thing because Yggdrasil should focus specifically on the networking aspect. Although it's technically in alpha status, I've already been using it to network devices together in my home office. I even have it installed in my car's Android head unit so I can SSH into it and do Linuxy things with it.
The current issue I see with Yggdrasil is that it's not plug-n-play enough to become the de facto next generation layer of the web/internet. It still requires manually configuring a JSON file in order to join a network and so forth. Yggdrasil isn't difficult to install, but if the world wants to go with something like it as this next layer, we need to get it to a state where the user needs next to no knowledge to set it up.
With this hypothetical layer, groups of people can form their own networks and exchange addresses. This is perfect if you want to have an application similar to WhatsApp or Signal that is mostly private and scoped to groups of people, but allows users to cross into multiple groups.
In terms of websites, it's perfect because you get an IPv6 address that is publicly available to anyone on your network and with none of the hassle that's involved with getting a public IP address on the clearnet. It's all a matter of who is connected to the network.
If you want anonymity, this layer can still work through another layer like Tor, or even live entirely within something like I2P. A benefit to using I2P here is that its design makes DDoS attacks more difficult, at least in theory.
With such a layer, hosting sites can become much more trivial. For everyday people who are a little more technically savvy but don't want to be fussing with the command line, I picture simply downloading something like a Reddit clone that runs like any other app on Linux or MacOS and it runs with a neat little admin interface. Share the address (or the domain if a secondary DNS is used) and you're off to the races.
I love your attitude, and I agree that we should be trying to fix this, but the problem is not a lack of signal, it's an increase in noise. Fixing the web means changing it in fundamental ways.
Suppose your webbable hobby is curating trustworthy product reviews. You're the hero that's going to fix the web AND capitalism. You can still do that, but you're going to help fewer people because you have to split your attention between you know, doing the thing, and doing the kind of marketing which helps people tell the difference between your thing and the ones that are secretly ads. Meanwhile, the bad guys can focus entirely on the latter. Sorry about the time you wanted to spend comparing blenders, your hobby is now competing with marketers... Or you have to make peace with either obscurity, or contributing to the thing you're trying to kill, because you know that the second you start making an impact somebody is going to rehost your site interleaved with misinformation.
Yes, let's fix this thing but the answer is protocols with different inherent priorities. We can't shout over the noise, we need to build something less noisy.
My personal view is that we should stop building trust around server names and implicitly trusting whatever those servers send us. In this model the non-content-generating work converges on systems to identify and remove malicious content (either from the server or from the browser screen).
Instead we should be addressing content, and sourcing it from whatever device has a copy and is most near. Our browser should know which people we trust and should make it easy for us to lean on that trust such that we can propagate only the trusted bits in the first place.
That is: stop identifying ads so that we can block them, start identifying trustworthy content so we can all participate in propagating it more efficiently and supporting it's creators.
Or to put it differently: there needs to be no way to spend money to promote content. No third parties injecting bits anywhere. If you notice that kind of shit, you apply annotations which distinguish the signal from the noise and then you propagate only the signal. If people abuse this power, you revoke trust in them and move on.
It'll require an awareness of information hygiene, which will be work to maintain, but all of the alternatives I can see involve tolerating life in a Skinner box
All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years.
Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with services designed for masses, to be used by the masses. This will drown all the interesting bits that used to be visible earlier.
The direction of development suggests that these 'good places' will be more and more scarce in the future. Further, (curiously both) privacy and surveillance laws are slowly creeping in and making it harder to freely offer services similar to those that have already died once. This further levels the playground for bigger players.
I'm still using text only usenet groups to talk to other people about star trek, cyberpunk, linux, and IRC. Activity is low, maybe a post or two a month per group, but it's real people and decent community. Come back and join us. Usenet/IRC/email/self-hosted blogging still works. There aren't fewer of us, there are just more people in the walled gardens.
The idea and sentence work just as well if you remove "blockchain-based" part. Where is the advantage using complicated things when easy things work just as well?
I've soured on Wikipedia. You can't make edits without turning Wikipedia internal politics into your full-time hobby because you run into people who have. That doesn't mean their opinions are more or less correct, yet they count for more.
Any political or politically controversial topic you basically get the US State Dept.-approved official/propaganda narrative on the topic with 0 room for other views. To actually get the full view of these topics that should be in the article, you instead have to refer to the dozens-of-pages-long Talk pages to see all the non-corporate-media viewpoints being squashed and silenced. These in turn aren't readily available in mobile format.
I recently was researching a news outlet blacklisted as a source from Wikipedia, which is known for being very pro-Palestinian. When I googled the very first username for the vote on Wikipedia to ban them, it belonged to a pro-Israeli think tank writer in DC. How interesting it would be to unmask the rest of the votes.
So my trust in Wikipedia on the issues where you need trust is basically 0.
> To actually get the full view of these topics that should be in the article, you instead have to refer to the dozens-of-pages-long Talk pages to see all the non-corporate-media viewpoints being squashed and silenced.
This is exactly what I do. When I visit articles about politically discussed topics I often read the Talk pages. I usually find important and (regularly) well-sourced information on there that, for some reason, do not make it into the article.
Wikipedia doesn't cover politically charged topics very well. I mostly edit topics which don't have such a problem.
Even so, I've managed to edit the Derek Chauvin article without any trouble. There's a certain shape of controversy that's painful to get involved with.
Usually it's matters of nationalism. For instance, anything with respect to India is a complicated thing to act on.
> Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change.
Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher
A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds. So you have every newspaper say something like X is a [y]ist, and Wikipedia states it as fact with a lot of sources [1][2][3]. But it's all the same people
Lack of viewpoints is the least of the problems with "traditional media". Fox news and MSNBC have the same, debilitating problems as NBC, CBS and ABC.
1. They cover things poorly, little depth
2. They are beholden to their sponsorship (a great non-political example is their unwavering support of particular CFB conferences)
3. They offer opinions first instead of facts
4. They are highly selective of only certain topics (Wikipedia is really broad despite having moderation)
5. Wikipedia has 120k active editors. Networks are lucky to break 1000 employees.
I think that US traditional media could do a better job, they've just catered to the LCD. There are examples of non-US media that do a solid job of maintaining NPOV and cover topics in reasonable detail without injecting overt opinions.
The current Fox vs Disney/ESPN war going on in college football is pretty amazing if you don't have a dog in the fight. Seems inevitable it would eventually happen given the money involved but they are quite shameless about what and how they're reporting right now.
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.
While it was already obvious to some people before then, after everything that happened from early 2020 through most of 2022, it should be completely clear to everyone now that "expert consensus" has absolutely nothing to do with being factually correct.
Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong.
Even worse than being wrong, so many of the ideas that were deemed "correct" by "expert consensus" often ended up being overtly harmful, and caused far worse outcomes and far more problems than were already being dealt with at the time.
In hindsight, we can see that correct and useful information tended to come from the "fringe voices" that were drawing upon much wider and diverse knowledge and experience, while correct and useful information tended to not come from the highly-centralized and highly-controlled "experts".
These are some strong statements without any reference.
Haven't you personally dealt with any situation in which you have to take a decision based on incomplete information? That was covid for most part of it. You could compare it with a bet, and some bets look retrospectively "bad" (although we have no way to check, don't we?)
There were also plenty of "fringe voices" with ideas that were proven wrong over time, so not sure how you imagine "someone" would have selected "the right ones".
> The mRNA shots were not tested at all for transmissibility yet we were told they prevented transmission
Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission.
But I'm unclear if you're trying to say that this turned out to be false (the reduction in transmission), or that you're pointing out how some policies were driven by claims that didn't yet have strong enough evidence backing them up?
> Data that has come out since does seem to indicate it lowers transmission.
You can't retroactively justify a lie. If I think Bob is in jail and I tell you he's not in jail, it doesn't matter later if he turned out never to have been in jail.
The claims that were being made, and being used to push policy, were at the time something that hadn't even been tested.
I was asking clarification, because it all depends what we mean about truth and lie here.
If we're saying that reduction in transmission is a lie, well that might be false, as data now seem to indicate it does cause reduced transmission.
But if we're saying people claimed that they ran a trial specifically to investigate the effect on transmission, when no such trial took place, than I agree, this would be a lie.
Now I never felt like "official" sources said there were trials about transmission conducted and that proved massive reduction in transmission. But I can believe maybe there was one somewhere.
I do agree though that policies were made with claims that had sometimes poor evidence or incomplete data and experimentation. And we should all wonder and discuss what could have been done policy wise that would have been better. Was acting fast on low confidence better than waiting for high confidence? Would more educating and less regulating have had better results? Etc.
Take a look at some of the details about what I’m saying. If you still feel like you were told the truth then that is fine. No trials on transmission were done yet we were lead to believe they were. I was skeptical myself at first.
I was never under the impression that there were any trials specifically about transmission.
I can believe some people said or published articles saying that it would reduce transmission, I'm not sure they'd all claim it was from evidence that it did, as opposed to just inference that it would.
I'm interested where you feel you were led to believe it would?
I also find the word "truth" in your sentence a bit confusing, do you mean that you actually read from "official" publications that trials about transmissions had been conducted even when they hadn't? Or do you just feel like there were claims of reducing transmission made, and you later realized their rationale didn't even include trials specific to transmission?
I feel this is important. Because someone could have claimed it will reduce transmission, and based their reasoning on how pior vaccines typically have that effect, or how logically if it prevents infection or major infection, it should lower re-transmission. Or other rationales.
This wouldn't really be a lie, even though it could turned out to be wrong.
Every single public health official got up and told us that the mRNA shot prevented transmission. They had no science backing those claims.
I have a hard time believing you somehow missed fauci or Walenski or ALL of the mainstream media going on for months about the vaccine preventing transmission. There was even the famous Rachel Maddie “it stops, with every vaccinated person”.
So if public health officials didn’t believe it stopped transmission why attempt (and fail) to implement a mandate through OSHA?
I was even more curious, and it's pretty hard to search for what information was available on the web in early 2021. So don't judge me, but using ChatGPT is the fastest way I could think to get an idea.
This is what chatGpt thinks was the CDC statement in early 2021:
> In early 2021, the CDC indicated that while COVID-19 vaccines were highly effective at preventing severe illness, the ability of vaccinated individuals to transmit the virus, particularly the delta variant, was still under study. Vaccinated people could carry viral loads similar to unvaccinated individuals, but these would diminish quickly. The CDC differentiated between "breakthrough infections" (vaccinated people testing positive) and "breakthrough disease" (symptomatic cases), noting that both were uncommon. However, exact rates were unclear, leading to updated guidance for vaccinated individuals to be tested and mask up after exposure, especially in high-transmission areas. CDC's program focused on real-world vaccine effectiveness, including against variants and over time
Edit:
I also checked if ChatGPT knows if Fauci ever stated that vaccine would prevent transmission, this is what it had to say:
> Dr. Anthony Fauci initially stated on February 4, 2021, that there was insufficient data to confidently claim that vaccines prevent the transmission of COVID-19. However, by February 17, 2021, he referenced new studies indicating that vaccines might reduce transmission. Fauci cited research showing that vaccinated individuals had significantly reduced viral loads, suggesting a lower likelihood of transmission. Studies supported the idea that the lower the viral load, the lower the chance of virus spread. Fauci highlighted the public health implications, suggesting that vaccination could diminish the outbreak's dynamics
Do with that as you will, it's ChatGPT, not a thorough research into the historical archives, but its better than nothing.
Well you seem to have pasted about 600 words in two responses to my single comment. Interesting.
Let me ask you this Mr didibus, why the attempted mandate then? What does your little bullshit generator say the reason for the covid vaccine mandates were?
I feel you're not enjoying looking for evidence of your claims as much as I am.
But sure, it says:
> Vaccine mandates were primarily advocated to decrease severe COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations, protect healthcare systems, ensure safer public spaces, and aim for herd immunity. This approach was favored even when the effect of vaccines on transmission was not fully known, as the overall public health benefits were clear.
I also explicitly challenged it and asked what's the point of mandating healthy individuals to get vaccinated if they weren't sure it would reduce transmission and it said:
> 1. Prevent severe disease: Even healthy individuals can suffer severe effects from COVID-19, although the risk is lower.
> 2. Reduce the burden on healthcare: Preventing illness in healthy individuals helps maintain healthcare capacity for all.
> 3. Mitigate the risk of variants: High vaccination rates can reduce the chance of new, potentially more dangerous variants.
> These benefits were considered to outweigh the uncertainties regarding transmission at the time mandates were discussed.
Please paste snippets and links to archives or other indicators that may show that when vaccines first arrived expert said it would prevent transmision without any basis for their claims. I'm totally willing to believe it, and I'm sure some did, but it also looks like there were experts and official sources that explicitly said that wasn't a sure thing. So at least I know I'm not crazy for having had that impression.
And you have to recognize, there's a lot of revisionist history and false representation going around too. I'm sure some people would have told others that experts and officials said something and they actually never said that. This probably happened a lot, which can make it feel to people experts and officials said something even when they never did.
Also, if it helps you swallow what I'm saying, I want to point out that I'm not a fan of vaccine mandates for the same reasons that I'm pro-choice. I believe people should have autonomy over their bodies.
I gotta be honest. Trying to discuss something with someone who is just pasting word calculator responses is not actually getting either of us anywhere.
There is no truth to your word calculator copy pasta. It’s in total bullshit and anyone who has used any of these “ai” tools for any length of time for anything important knows how poor the responses really are.
I’m not trying to convince any one of anything. If you process the same information that I did and come to the conclusion you should boooooost then go for it.
> I have a hard time believing you somehow missed fauci or Walenski or ALL of the mainstream media going on for months about the vaccine preventing transmission
I guess I did. Axios has been my primary news source, along with New York Times and The Guardian/Wapo once in a while. Most of the time I just Google my way to the information I'm looking for. I don't consume any TV based news, or Twitter based news or any other such social media news, appart for HackerNews. I also generally went directly to the CDC website, and didn't use retellings from other publications or press conference.
John Hopkins FAQ on the vaccine at the time. It states:
> Although the phase 3 clinical trials are designed to determine whether vaccinated individuals are protected against disease, it will also be important to understand whether vaccinated individuals are less likely to transmit the virus. This is likely but not ensured.
So that's at least one expert source corroborating my impression. I can't remember where I landed when I would have looked this up in 2020, but John Hopkins is a likely place I might have found.
> They had no science backing those claims
While I don't know why I didn't get the impression any official expert source told me it would prevent transmission and you feel many of them did tell you it would. I do still feel I need to make a correction on what you're saying. There's definitely science backing up the idea that vaccines can reduce transmission. It's based on historically observed outcomes from prior vaccines for other diseases, as well as on transmission models around herd immunity.
The idea that the mRna vaccines would for sure prevent transmission had no evidence, but there was scientific based prior for thinking it might at least reduce transmission, specifically of the exact strain it targets.
He's claiming that the vaccines weren't tested on whether they reduced transmission or not, but that we were told they would be super effective at reducing transmission (since the bureaucrats' only concern was to get as many people jabbed as possible, so they snake oil sold the vaccines as far more effective than they were).
He's not claiming that the vaccines don't reduce transmission at all, as best as I can tell.
But we decided on one singular truth and literally censored/banned and/or publically shamed all other variants.
You get vaccinated, you won't get ill, won't spread the virus, herd immunity, end of covid. At a time, this was the one and only acceptable truth, and everything else, from low efficiency of vaccine, sideffects, "you'll nfect grandma, even if you're vaccinated", "there will never be herd immunity" was considered a fringe conspiracy theory.
Choosing and promoting ideas is different from straight up censorship, shaming and worse.
Each time when I hear a phrase starting with "we ..." I feel a bit offended. Who is this "we" you use in the phrase? Does it include me? Because I am pretty sure I did not publicized that much what I decided on various topics.
If you would say "some people decided on one singular truth ...", then I will answer "maybe you should complain to them" (and I would find this positive). I found discussion during covid between such people (that have decided on a singular truth, either side) completely pointless. For me it was always a question of "what to do at that moment in time based on the known information", so more like "what did you found out last", not about "what is THE truth".
Of course the contrarian will only defend the "fringe voices" up to the point that he agrees with. Once it goes into 5G-activated magnetic microchip implants, the contrarian will defer to experts without the quotes.
> Time and time again, from the lockdowns/restrictions to the forced masking to the forced shots to the censorship to pretty much everything in between, the "expert consensus" from the medical, political, and mass media communities was wrong
If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off.
And you'll find that a lot of more "official" claims were right.
It leaves us with some of the outliers, where fringe claims were right and "official" claims were wrong.
Now someone would need to tally them up and all to actually see how often. But that impression you have seems to be misjudging this.
The other issue in your judgement in my opinion is that you're focusing entirely on this particular event. But the expert process was being interfered with, due to the extensively political nature of it, and the strong pressures from everyone else to get answers before it's possible to do so with high confidence.
And finally, the only basis we're even using to assess which ones were "right" or "wrong" after the fact is a form of consensus, and primarily an "expert consensus" that has simply had more time to settle.
> If you take all fringe hypothesis and claims posted online, you'll find time and time again that so many of them are wrong, and not just by a margin, but often times ridiculously far off.
This isn't something you should do, because it is not sensible. If you ask 10,000 people what two plus two equals, then write out a list of all of the unique answers you get, 99% of them will be wrong.
Yes, that's my point. So if you need to predict which conclusion is more likely the actual reality, picking the one made by more experienced individuals on the subject, who have spent more time studying, experimenting and observing the matter, and for which a multitude of those individuals all independently arrive at a similar conclusion, and where they provide extensive rationale through published papers for why and how they arrive at that conclusion (expert consensus), is more sensible, than trying to randomly pick from all the fringe conclusions posted online, or even from picking to the one that went the most "viral" and got reposted most.
Even if, much later, those same experts realize they were wrong, and it turned out one of those fringe conclusions online was actually right.
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 finished, how high you jumped etc) where males don't outperform at every level by a significant degree. For instance, high school boy records beat pretty much all female world records in track [0]. And this is fine. We adapt societally by having women's leagues. And every scientist would admit this up until maybe 5 years ago. But now there is a growing "scientific consensus" that really it's some other societal effect.
Humans knew this to be true for thousands of years, but in the last 5 years we're beginning to upturn that for some reason. So maybe some deference to the past is warranted. If thousands of years from now the "consensus" still says sex doesn't really matter, then I'll grant you that. But for now the "scientific consensus" doesn't make something true
None of those articles argue that men and women are biologically equivalent in all things.
If I might summarize, they mostly argue that hormonal arguments towards unfair advantages in certain sports understate the already existing disparities in hormonal distribution in a given sex. That a given trans athlete might be less hormonally advantaged than a cis woman who competes uncontroversially.
The latter articles are even less supportive of your point, and mostly discuss the uncontroversial point that binary biological sex is an incomplete model of humanity as a whole.
These are reasonable and evidence-based discussions to have.
> the uncontroversial point that binary biological sex is an incomplete model of humanity as a whole.
Why does sex have to be a complete model of humanity? It's real and useful. For instance as a male I don't bother getting mamograms. Sex tells you more about predisposition of health conditions than any other factor apart from maybe age and weight. Let's not pretend it doesn't exist
This is a common straw man. No trans advocate I've heard pretends that sex doesn't exist. Indeed, what would be the point of medically transitioning if one thought sex wasn't real? Instead it seems like trans opponents like to pretend that sex is the only thing that exists or that gender identity and expression do not exist.
Additionally, sex is more complicated than a binary m/f - the obvious examples of intersex individuals or androgen insensitivity[1] come to mind. So yes, sex exists, it's not a binary state, and it's connected to but not fully descriptive of gender identity.
"It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. "
"The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify."
etc.
If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?
It's also notable what a small number of people we're talking about. States have passed laws aimed at addressing this that affect literally a handful individuals living in that state. The amount of smoke this issue is generating is way out of proportion to its actual impact. Meanwhile, PED use among athletes and the general public is increasing[1][2] with little public pushback.
> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?
Athletes who dope don't always dominate, but it still gives them an unfair advantage. Same as when males compete in women's events.
That said, in some women's sporting leagues these males are actually dominating - see https://shewon.org for a list of the many hundreds of women who have been denied their place on the podium by trans-identifying male athletes.
> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?
Because there are fewer of them competing. Not every man is more athletic than every woman, but the most athletic men are more athletic than the most athletic women.
If me, as a man, tries competing in a women's weightlifting competition, I wouldnt do well, but I wouldn't do well in the male category either. But if you take competitive male athletes and have them compete against females, they will be incredibly competitive.
So trans women arent doing well vs other women because there are fewer of them competing, but also women arent doing well vs other men because there are fewer of them competing.
If your only issue is the potential that a person has based on their testosterone, then maybe we should have no gender division, but testosterone categories instead.
It seems it would make more sense than preventing both cis women and trans women from competing in a sport just because their hormone levels are too high (a trait we're apparently already directly pre selecting for)
Male performance advantage remains even for those males who choose to lower their testosterone levels; they retain muscle mass and strength above women, and their overall skeletal structure remains intact too: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7846503
In fact, the difference between male and female athletic performance is so stark that even the most elite female athletes are at a disadvantage compared to teenage boys: https://boysvswomen.com
> If trans people have such an obvious advantage why aren't they dominating every single category of every single strength-involving event?
Because there aren't that many trans women who compete in women's sports.
Neither of your quotes is close to a good argument. If you want to answer this question empirically, look at statistics (race times, lbs lifted, etc) and women's competitions where trans women competed.
I feel like we're just getting more precise. It's not actually true that all men are physically stronger than all women. Some men are physically stronger than some women, and some women are physically stronger than some men.
In the past, we were generalizing and that created falsehoods. Now we're able to be much more precise to the actual true reality.
It's also true that social factors play a role. We've never properly accounted for that, so it's much more true today to caveat with the fact that we don't know how much social factors play a role. It's probably not the most influential factor, but it's probably a part of the equation.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not science and an encyclopedia is not a collection of all human knowledge, it's not an archive. Fringe stuff goes out the same way page-for-every-pokemon-evolution goes out.
Wikipedia's goal isn't correctness, it is to aggregate the consensus of reliable sources. Wikipedia isn't reliable because it is agreed upon, it is reliable because determining truth values is outsourced to publishers who can mostly be depended on due to the value of reputation amongst experts in the information distribution sector. Publishers have their own biases which Wikipedia will aggregate. This is still, in my experience, a better bar than any others I've come across.
They mostly outsource to a large variety of very unreliable sources and then exclude others based purely on politics, to the extent that people can't even get false statements about themselves corrected, let alone false statements about other people or topics.
Some of the commenters under your comment shows that Hacker News is not a “good place”. Pseudoscience is strong here. At least we got answer to that, but not to your question.
So when a topic like the Hunter Biden laptop comes up right before an election, could clearly impact it and... the mainstream media just refuses to report, or uncritically calls it a hoax. Wikipedia claims NYPost is an unreliable source, and social media sites blackout the topic.
Turns out, "fringe" thing that was definitely not true was true. Was the consensus better? Doesn't seem so, and it's not an isolated instance.
One of the earliest to go was media fandom. The kind of stuff you find today on fandom.com used to happen on wikipedia, but then Jimmy Wales founded wikicities for that kind of thing because he did not like it being there.
Your local library probably has a magazine rack with some stupid shit in it but is it not stupid shit that patrons are interested in? Wikipedia ousted it for better or for worse.
In spite of the "wikimedia" name, it's wrong to think of Wikipedia in the same vein as the 24-hour news cycle. It's very good for an encyclopedia to have quality control and remove fringe content. It's meant to be an enduring repository of factual information that some form of widespread authoritative consensus exists on, not a place to hash out hot-topic culture war debates that nobody will remember or care about in 50 years, nor a place for alternative pseudoscience like all the guys who spam physics newsgroups claiming to have disproven special relativity or invented a perpetual motion machine.
Even if those things end up being correct, it's also not a place for original research because nobody who edits Wikipedia is qualified to make the kind of judgment on whether original research meets any meaningful quality standard. Submit to a journal if you think you have a worthwhile revolutionary idea. It'll make it to Wikipedia after it becomes generally accepted and that's fine. I don't think a single knowledge repository can realistically hope to be both a repository of trusted, accepted knowledge of the day and a place to hash out the ongoing debate about what should be accepted knowledge and where we might be wrong.
> everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds
This may be true in the US, I wouldn't know, but I work in media, and that hasn't been my experience at all.
There is no such thing as neutrality or unbiased views, we are humans, everything we do or say is filled with bias. Claiming for Wikipedia to "stay neutral" is a bias itself.
They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral.
Larry just comes across as pissed off. He complains that Obama's article doesn't discuss, or discuss enough for his liking, "Hilary's email servers".
He complains that it doesn't discuss Obamagate in any detail. Possibly because it was essentially a baseless accusation/conspiracy from Trump that when investigated, showed no evidence?
He complains that Trump's page contains too many "negative words", in sections like his "Public Profile" (and then complains that Obama doesn't have a section titled exactly the same, though he does have "Cultural and Political Image").
He complains that the article on abortion describes it as a very safe medical procedure, "a claim that is questionable on its face" - which is why the article links to citations, unlike Larry, who just rebuts with "conservatives don't think so".
He then goes on to claim that "Wikipedia holds positions that some scientific minorities reject" around concepts such as the MMR vaccine, global warning, chiropractic and homeopathy. That latter one is the easiest, as there is zero assertion based in physics that a substance can be imbued with the "essence" of something when diluted to the point where it would take multiple universes worth of molecules to get one original molecule in the final substance. Sanger wholly fails to give a valid reason why anyone should give homeopathic dilutions an equal weight to the rest of our body of work on medicine and physics other than "bias!"
> He complains that the article on abortion describes it as a very safe medical procedure, "a claim that is questionable on its face"
So far the only good argument I've seen for abortions being very unsafe from people ideologically opposed to them is that they're unsafe by definition because they lead to a person dying (in which case, yeah, but that's not what people normally mean by "safe").
Also, as with other culture war medical topics, the danger of the cure needs to be assessed relatively to the danger of the "disease". Pregnancies are not safe. Giving birth is extremely not safe, regardless of method. Heck, even menstrual cycles aren't safe. Even conception can lead to death in the case of ectopic pregnancies, not to mention the health risks of sexual intercourse itself (which is why it's called "safer sex", not "safe sex"). So we need to take those into account as a baseline when talking about the safety of medical procedures or drugs interfering with these. Those on the side that insists on making it a culture war topic usually deny or downplay that baseline risk while widely exaggerating the risk of the procedure.
This goes for abortions, hormone suppressors, vaccines, premarital sex and many more. But of course it isn't about the medical risk. They'd still be opposed even if it were perfectly 100% safe (which can't even be said about ordinary daily activities like using the toilet, walking or sitting). The main "risk" they are concerned about is moral, and that can't really be argued with.
> They do as good of a job as any of us in trying to stay neutral.
Not even close. Anything even close to political has a clear slant to it, from actual article wordings to allowed sources to build the articles off of.
Every bit of content has a POV, there is no getting around that. Neutral POV is the Wikipedia ideal - one they work towards but will never reach. They do as good a job as anybody at it.
Every bit of content has multiple POVs, and when you continuously present only the POVs associated with one part of the political spectrum, that's an avoidable bias.
> Actual encyclopedias do a much better job of it.
I can't validate that statement and neither can you. You didn't even say which one. Setting aside the fact that traditional encyclopedias aren't part of the internet that we are discussing in this thread, I will at least give you that the motivations of a traditional encyclopedia are more clear than the amorphous network of people who maintain Wikipedia.
I have a 1936 set of Encyclopedia Britannica on the shelf, you should read some of the articles in that.
Honestly I think it should be biased when it comes to politics. It should be unbiased in terms of evidence. If some narrative has no evidence, but a strong political following, that political following should contribute zero weight to the validity of the narrative. No evidence is no evidence.
There's certain "radioactive" topics on Wikipedia where it's almost impossible for contrarian views to get a fair hearing: evolution, vaccination, nationalism, etc.
Contrarian views on many topics are not backed by facts but by emotion. A collection of knowledge is not obligated to let contrarian viewpoints with no scientific basis share the same space as factual coverage of a topic.
This is the problem I see far too often with people who criticize Wikipedia for their NPOV policy.
Take this passage from the vaccination page for example:
> Some studies have claimed to show that current vaccine schedules increase infant mortality and hospitalization rates;[103][104] those studies, however, are correlational in nature and therefore cannot demonstrate causal effects, and the studies have also been criticized for cherry picking the comparisons they report, for ignoring historical trends that support an opposing conclusion, and for counting vaccines in a manner that is "completely arbitrary and riddled with mistakes".[105][106]
If you go to the vaccination page and look at the cited studies, you'll see they are peer-reviewed studies in real scientific journals. But a Wikipedia editor went in and modified the language to cast doubt on it (see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vaccination&diff=...).
All statistical analyses are "correlational in nature", so there's no reason why that should weaken the findings of this study, and the source used to accuse the study of "cherry-picking" is a blog post from 2011. In my estimation this kind of spin happens all the time on Wikipedia.
Goodness, are you not familiar with the phrase "correlation does not imply causation"?
There are ways to establish causal relationships, the gold standard of which is to conduct a double-blind controlled trial.
To claim as you have that a correlational study establishes a causal relationship is deeply misguided, irrespective of whether or not it is peer-reviewed.
Yes I am - you don't seem to know that all a double-blind controlled trial produces is (at best) a very strong correlation. I'm not claiming that a correlational study implies causation. I'm claiming that ALL statistical analyses can only prove correlation, and never causation. You're wrong about double-blind controlled trials proving causation.
You're confusing strong evidence for causality with establishment and absolute proof of causality. This is even discussed in the sources you've cited (second link). For example here is a quote from one of your sources about the necessity understanding the underlying mechanism before causality can be established:
> A causal mechanism is the process that creates the connection between the variation in an independent variable and the variation in the dependent variable that it is hypothesized to cause (Cook & Campbell, 1979:35; Marini & Singer, 1988). Many social scientists (and scientists in other fields) argue that no causal explanation is adequate until a mechanism is identified.
Political movements not garnering support from mainstream or left wing media... When you get to pick which sources you use you get to pick which views you will present...
This is a common complaint against many publications or resources that attempt unbiased coverage - they are are attacked by people on all sides as being biased against their side.
I'm not familiar with MSNBC and have never even heard of Mother Jones, but surely it's not controversial that Fox News is unreliable? They're an absolute punch line everywhere outside the US.
I'm guessing you must not be from the US, as MSNBC/Fox News both are on TV at all times in various public and private spaces. It depends on the content of course (political), but MSNBC is a left leaning version of Fox News - they are the same, just on the opposite sides of the spectrum. The fact that Wikipedia doesn't rank MSNBC the same as Fox News sends up some flags for me, but I could really care less at this point in my life. Both networks have that cancerous "create outrage for views" thing going on that has been nothing but detrimental to American society. Unfortunately it's just about impossible to get away from, as Americans nowadays seem to be addicted to the constant need for drama and outrage in their lives.
I'm not sure about Mother Jones, but the other two I would always take with a grain of salt.
Fox News goes well beyond having a lean, so far that they find themselves in legal hot water. And that's only when the pontificating on nonsense is so egregious that it's legally actionable...
I wish people would use their brains rather than seek out charlatans promising unbiased information.
To elaborate, I think that this obsession creates a few interesting scenarios. If people are flatly told/believe how a given media is biased then they don't have to read critically themselves. It can also be used to shut down discussion, your source is biased- I can ignore it.
Calling stuff biased is becoming a hell of a thought-stopper. That you say elsewhere,
> Yeah, everything is relative, truth doesn't exist, yadda-yadda.
strikes me as downright ironic. The routine and wholesale dismissal of sources because they don't tell the story with someone's preferred angle is amounting to a whole lot of yadda-yadda, I agree!
I'd totally settle for the Internet circa 2000-2005 in a box, with a
1990's Google search interface.
Gimme a VM, with maybe 20 or 50 TB compressed image of Wikipedia, all
of the early Stack Exchange and a few mailing lists or forum archives
for Tex, Lisp and whatnot... and I'd be happy on my porch, in my
rocking chair with a bottle of whiskey and a pipe to smoke.
Why do you kids have to keep meddlin' with things!
I suspect if you comment receives downvotes, it will be because it is verging on the incomprehensible. Seriously - I read it 3 times and I only have the haziest of ideas as to what you are trying to get at.
Concur. I'm likely sympathetic to whatever aakj is trying to get at, but the post could really, really use edits or a more coherently formatted repost.
Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview.
As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole culture war topics and politics can really lead you down a crappy path, and it doesn't really reflect most of reality.
thanks. there's plenty pro-constructivism in my humanist-marxist circles. They are either openly hypocrites or too young still (like utilitarianism, it is a good thing if possible after all)
But yeah, if you don't still agree it is fringe, and still think so after reading the only link on my comment, then you might as well downvote me. But that is one i'd take gladly.
it is just an intro though. my point is that they are posting several academic articles on that one wikipedia which hunt "succcess" story. and somehow i've seen all of them on the front page here.
Do you in general assume that to be a pro-constructivist or humanist-marxist, one has to be a hypocrite or too young still?
What in constructivism is bugging you? The basic idea is that concepts get their meaning through their relations to other concepts. I find that a very reasonable perspective.
What's the problem with constructivism? Should wikipedia be somehow restricted to e.g. positivist or objectivist or perhaps platonian views of knowledge?
There's plenty of criticism of identity politics in wikipedia (and from the left as well). Wikipedia's philosophical origins are objectivistic if something, but I don't think this shows either.
TL;DR: Parent is first asserting that “______ is just a construct” people are trying to make Wikipedia a “______ is just a construct”-opedia.
Then the rest seems just a construct-ed rant.
Where's this coming from?
The paper examines "institutional" change of Wikipedia, showing how its content transformed over time from lending credence to fringe theories to actively debunking them.
This transformation occurred due to the ambiguity of Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" (NPOV) guideline, which was open to different interpretations.
There were two camps of editors - the "Anti-Fringe" camp pushed for firmly anti-pseudoscience interpretations of NPOV, while the "Pro-Fringe" camp pushed for more neutrality towards fringe theories.
Early disputes over NPOV were frequently resolved in favor of the Anti-Fringe camp, empowering them while dem
The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.