10 ms·

Social Media Endangers Knowledge

147 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

eighthnate 9y ago
Does a day go by without the traditional media pushing an article about how bad social media is?
imran3740 9y ago
When it comes to articles like this, part of me agrees with the whole "attention economy" problem. Companies want to suck away our time, etc etc. But another part of me also realizes that this problem is going to be very, very hard to get rid of. As long as social media keeps feeding our brains with "things you might like" and endless junk notifications, it's going to be near impossible to stop.
- trophycase 9y ago
  Just stop using it. It's really not that difficult. Admit you're addicted and browse impulsively and then give it up.
  - abootstrapper 9y ago
    That's like saying, "just stop smoking" in 1960. Ok, there's a handful of us that recognize the danger here, and have ceased using social media, but what are we going to do to help everyone else?
    - KGIII 9y ago
      What are we going to do? Accept that it is not our job to stop people from doing things we don't like? I have no social media accounts, I never have, but I don't begrudge others their pacifiers. We all do harmful things to ourselves. I find it easier to accept if I just accept my own negative acts. It's easier, for me at least, to accept that other people enjoy different things. I'd probably make a piss poor evangelist, but the reward is I spend less time being unhappy with other people's choices.
      - intended 9y ago
        Information in minds is not the same as cigarettes. And that’s discounting the fact that cigarettes are highly taxed and banned now. So are opioids and hard drugs. Society has a tendency to install a floor under functions that have bad externalities and have no end state.
      - dredmorbius 9y ago
        The problem is that the dangers and impacts don't simply stop at individuals. "Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identity Resolution and Hyper-Personalization": The data I present here suggests that before we keep pointing fingers at specific countries and tweeting about companies “hacking the election,” as well as to solve the scourge of “fake news,” it might be good to look inward. By this, I mean we should start the quest for transparency in politics with a few firms based in New York City and Silicon Valley. The author is Jonathan Albright, Director of Research, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, School of Journalism, Columbia University. And ex-Googler. https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d4019f705f https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d401... The role of liberal democratic society is to identify the threats to itself and address those, when necessary. And it's now necessary.
      - venturis_voice 9y ago
        You have no social media accounts that must be liberating! I suppose you wouldn't know though as you haven't "been through the looking glass" as it were, the dark side of Facebook. I removed my accounts for a few months and whilst it was liberating it wasn't as life changing as I thought it would be. Horse for courses I suppose.
        KGIII 9y ago
        I've never had one. At least not one of the ones people consider social media. HN and Slashdot are both social media, but nobody seems to call them that. So, no Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc... G+ may have made me a profile. The others may have data about me, but they aren't my accounts. I never saw a need for one. If people want me, they know where to find me. It's not some secretive thing. It's just more inertia. I can't be bothered to make accounts and they'd just take away more of my time. I am not even all that private, people know who I am. I've had many, many Internet friends in my home. One stayed for about five years, as she and I decided to date. Similarly, I haven't ever used online dating sites. That just kind of happened.
    - lostbob 9y ago
      How about inviting others to what you do instead? Probably easier to replace then just remove the addiction.
- YouAreGreat 9y ago
  > very, very hard to get rid of Previous generations used taxes to manage business models that harmed many for the benefit of a few. But since these companies can buy and hack democracy, will we ever see the much needed advertising tax?
not-sbrin 9y ago
Social Media as an idea was great when it started. But like any idea, when taken to an extreme, it tends to do disservice to its many participants. It seems often some product ideas are just better when they are not scaled. Craigslist, HN news, Basecamp - are good examples.
- white-flame 9y ago
  I think you should replace "taken to an extreme" with "monetized in the pursuit of mythical unbounded growth". It's usually not the concept itself taken to the extreme, it's all the other crap bolted on because otherwise it's merely profitable, and that doesn't suffice anymore.
stanislavb 9y ago
It endangers not only knowledge by the mere sanity of many people...
nnfy 9y ago
I don't think the problem is with social media. I think the problem is the competence of the average person. How many communities start out full of reasonable, productive discourse, like HN, and then go downhill once they become popular? How many endless summers has the internet suffered? Mediocrity is the enemy of progress. Edit: I also take strong offense to the nonsense that the desire to aggregate knowledge began with the Islamic Golden Age. People have been centralizing knowledge for far longer than Islam has existed[1]. Frankly, the inclusion of Islam in this article comes off as forced and unnecessary. It doesn't surprise me that the author is from Iran, although his wikipedia page doesn't list any information regarding religion... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancie...
- rhizome 9y ago
  Look at public schooling in the US, how organizations are working to cut it down with charter school diversions, corrupting history and science textbooks with religious concepts, and forcing teachers to be parents, police, social workers, and underpaid teachers, and to do it with a smile on their face. Higher standards than police and politicians. Add all this up and you start to see the educational system looking like it's being sabotaged.
ACow_Adonis 9y ago
Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these phenomenon are really a problem. As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. Additionally, with the increase of the "great unwashed" online for lack of a better term, yes, the density of intellectual and worthwhile thought online goes down. But does that matter, or more accurately, is that cause for concern over and above the general phenomenon of an "appearance" focused culture? Does social media cause, or merely reflect the values of our underlying culture? What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. I can download Wikipedia. I have e readers. I don't even need to pay the university any more because I have so much access to libraries, knowledge and communication and computation. While I am of course concerned about our societies values and their consequences, it is hard for me to take seriously the concern on the face of it that social media is destroying knowledge, when it is available in amount, redundancy and accessibility in greater amounts than it ever has been before. Period. Perhaps there is also some anxiety on the separation of knowledge from the "appearance of knowledge" industry as well :p
- white-flame 9y ago
  What social media is destroying is the curation of accessed knowledge. I agree that that's not an assault on knowledge itself.
  - narag 9y ago
    In practice it could be the same. I believe that, at some point, more common knowledge about knowledge will reach the masses, making them less like "masses".
- bloaf 9y ago
  >As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. This is true, but I also believe Wikipedia is beset by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Over time, the meaning of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" has shifted from "you can just go and contribute what you know!" to "write what you want, but it'll just get removed unless you spend lots of time learning our rules."
carbor1 9y ago
Wow, this article's claim that text is what enables us to think is incredibly elitist. Are illiterate people incapable of rational thought? Oral traditions are deep wellsprings of human knowledge and culture.
- kurthr 9y ago
  Hmmm... do you mean written versions of oral traditions? We really don't know them past one generation since all of recorded history was literally written by the winners. How many truly illiterate people do you know? I suppose you could say that most 5 year olds are illiterate... are they capable of rational thought, perhaps... are they wellsprings of human knowledge and culture, I personally doubt.
  - carbor1 9y ago
    I do fieldwork on a lamguage that lacks a written form, so I actually know quite a lot of illiterate people, and they are quite capable of complex and rational thought. In a literate society like ours, we tend to equate language with writing, but they're not at all the same thing. I agree that language is necessary for complex thought, just not writing.
- Banthum 9y ago
  The historical record does seem to indicate, at least to my reading, that illiterate people are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to engaging in high-level rational thought. Writing things down doesn't just store and transmit information, it forces an author to crystallize and review their arguments. Writing certainly makes me more rational. Those societies that never developed writing did have oral traditions with lots of "human knowledge and culture" but neither of these things are rational thought. Most oral traditions are rich with culture, but shot through with extreme irrationalism, exaggeration, fabuluism. This applies as much to a tribal society as to the stories your friends tell at the bar.
  - thepompano 9y ago
    What exactly are you counting as high-level rational thought? If it's the ability to clamp down on "extreme irrationalism, exaggeration, and fabuluism", and Western societies are better at this, then I'd think Fox News wouldn't be a thing. ;)
adrianratnapala 9y ago
Ok, so the article lists a litany of things I personally don't like: videos, like buttons, facebook. But so what? I don't like them, so I avoid them. Other people are different. Why get upset about it? Why the urge to decide how other people spend their free time?
- lostbob 9y ago
  It is not about hobbies, it's about the addiction that so many are unable to leave because everyone they know also does it. Never leading to insight or realisation, but hate and depression from unrealistic expectations and stress to find the next thing and never reflect.
Alex3917 9y ago
There are hundreds if not thousands of social media platforms designed for learning and intellectual collaboration, many of which are as or more effective than universities. Wikipedia itself is a social media platform. I think there is some truth in what the author is saying, but it's also completely lacking in nuance.
- thundergolfer 9y ago
  Can you name a few of your favourites? I'm interested in participating and building communities like this. I feel like certain subreddits are as close as I've found.
  - Alex3917 9y ago
    So many/most professional associations have one, and they usually have pretty good mailing lists and often other functionality as well. So if you Google for whatever professional associations exist for your industry you will likely find some stuff. There are a lot of academia-related ones also, e.g. researchgate.
CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
If you want Wikipedia to have more contributors, maybe the editors ought to stop being so caustic toward new members? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CiPHPerCoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CiPHPerCoder Created an account, created a barebones skeleton user page just to make the red text link go away, immediately flagged for special deletion. Even when the person agreed with my point, their tone was mildly hostile and lectury. (Epilogue: I ended up not really contributing much since then simply because of how I was greeted.) Behavior like this drives new contributors away.
- omnifischer 9y ago
  Instead of putting link to your Twitter you could HV typed which articles you plan to edit. Editors need to be strict otherwise it is a slippery slope and will be ruined with pure junk. Do not take it personally, chill and contribute later.
  - DanBC 9y ago
    Instead of attacking a new user, wait for a couple of weeks to see if they're adding content before deciding to remove their user page.
- ahelwer 9y ago
  This drive-by criticism comes up every time Wikipedia is mentioned on HN. I've written a few articles on computer science topics and haven't been bothered at all by the roving gangs of bureaucrats. It's always a lovely experience. If you write quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to common knowledge and pop culture, your Wikipedia experience will be very pleasant. Since the HN readership is skews educated and technical, they are very well-equipped to write such articles.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    You shouldn't generalise from your experience. Im sure you had a good time. I tried improving some highly technical articles, which were significantly wrong, got into an edit war with someone who felt they "owned" the page, and got rules lawyered until I left.
jamesrcole 9y ago
This article portrays a very distorted view of the past vs the present. It portrays the push for encyclopedic collation of textual knowledge, in the past, and social media, in the present, as if they were complete, representative pictures of all the attitudes within societies towards information and knowledge in the respective time periods. As if low epistemic-quality discussions and communication mediums weren't widespread in the past, and as if there were no other ways that knowledge is treated these days.
acobster 9y ago
As much I think Debord's theory on the Society of the Spectacle [1] is as prescient as ever today, this article doesn't go far enough in making that case. It even casts Google as some great democratizing force: > Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text-based advertising model....They effectively democratized the ability to contribute to the global corpus of knowledge. Google completely changed how people access information, true, but they also did way more to centralize the web than almost any other company, ever. That's not the best news for objective knowledge. Yet they get a pass while "social media" gets indicted with an anecdote about narcissism on Instagram? At the time of this writing, searches related to The Walking Dead are the top trending ones. You need to present some much more compelling evidence that social media is behind this shift away from "knowledge," and that Google is somehow not, for me to believe they're not just as much part of the Spectacle. All that is to say that this article takes too narrow a focus, and misses the larger point because of it. The web isn't the solution or the response to the Spectacle: it's a natural extension of it. [1] The Spectacle is the idea that in popular culture people relate to each other not directly but indirectly, through the "images" presented by culture itself, i.e. "the Spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by images."
legel 9y ago
Having done a lot of data mining and analysis of Wikipedia (scanning its entire corpus several times, machine learning new representations, studying traffic and article growth stats, studying its ontological structure) I would like to make two suggestions: (1) In its current structure, Wikipedia is “almost complete”. For the way that articles are written, embellished with media, and organized there doesn’t appear to be much room for change to most of them. This should be concerning, because in reality Wikipedia is always only the tip of the iceberg for everything. (2) In order to inspire a new growth of editing and contributions to Wikipedia, which can expand the corpus by another order of magnitude, new systems for organizing and communicating knowledge need to be developed that can allow orders of magnitude more information to be elegantly incorporated into existing articles. If anyone is interested in pursuing this, I don’t suggest waiting for the bureaucracies and crowds to develop it (although would obviously be thrilled if they did); what’s in your power now is to fork the corpus yourself, and start a new open source initiative on its back. This is the classic case of how hard it is for big organizations to adapt in big ways (almost impossible), versus a small startup enterprise.
- guaka 9y ago
  Do you have links to your analytical work? Bonus for links to your thoughts on how to fork and expand another order of magnitude. This is something I'd love to work on at some point.
erikbye 9y ago
In every other sentence, the author proffers an unsubstantiated claim, and the article is premised on these.
jochung 9y ago
>You cannot think with images I disagree, and I think the way computers have made us regress to a purely textual interchange format as the common denominator is an unrecognized tragedy. My notes in school used to be richly layed out, mixing diagrams, symbols and formatting as needed, which was trivial on paper. Now I'm typing to you through a predictive text engine because tapping or swiping out words is itself too error prone on this device. We've created a massive gap between what can be produced and what can be consumed easily, information-wise. I think the GET/POST nature of the web is also responsible. Rather than make it easy to collaborate in a shared space, we all have to write on little immutable post its and paste them side by side.
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  Wittgenstein would have argued the precise opposite of the quoted point. Ideas are pictures in our minds. That particular point within the article is one of numerous specious and vapid objections it raises.
leroy_masochist 9y ago
I really like this article, especially its point about typographic vs. photographic information transfer and the mental pathways that are activated when we process each respective medium.
ddmma 9y ago
With all do respect there is no surprise (level of intellect and human sensitivity) that Mr. Trump is also president... because of social media. Almost nobody reads what they share and get only the title based on the sheep following model. Social media became a sense of belonging and replaces analog socializing.. we became more and more shallow and incapable of solving simple tasks while we delegate to externals, either a machine or other app, simple life tasks.
- siissussjskk 9y ago
  I'd be careful characterizing Trump as only being elected because of social media. Not everyone who disagrees with you are idiots. Misplaced hope and conscious bias against the "other" (aka non-whites; women) are as much factors to his success as memes. It's a fundamental problem (if you believe it's a problem) that will never be tackled if it's characterized as outright stupidity.
thepompano 9y ago
"[Online social networks] reduce our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences." I hate to defend the world's largest algorithmically-enforced echo chamber, but is this a really strong claim - is this seriously true? Like, a measurable reduction in curiosity across the board for Facebook users? What about if your friends are thoughtful and use Facebook primarily as a means of textual interchange? And if the inverse is true - that being shown what we do not want and do not think makes us more curious - how does the author explain polarization? And are those irrelevant Youtube ads supposed to make me more curious about the world?
abacate 9y ago
Social interaction endangers knowledge. Social media just exacerbates the problem further.
saurik 9y ago
> Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. Wikipedia is decidedly not "decentralized"; it is a centralized system that people are allowed to copy: that is not at all the same thing.

147 points by DiabloD3 9y ago

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

When it comes to articles like this, part of me agrees with the whole "attention economy" problem. Companies want to suck away our time, etc etc. But another part of me also realizes that this problem is going to be very, very hard to get rid of. As long as social media keeps feeding our brains with "things you might like" and endless junk notifications, it's going to be near impossible to stop.

trophycase 9y ago
Just stop using it. It's really not that difficult. Admit you're addicted and browse impulsively and then give it up.
- abootstrapper 9y ago
  That's like saying, "just stop smoking" in 1960. Ok, there's a handful of us that recognize the danger here, and have ceased using social media, but what are we going to do to help everyone else?
  - KGIII 9y ago
    What are we going to do? Accept that it is not our job to stop people from doing things we don't like? I have no social media accounts, I never have, but I don't begrudge others their pacifiers. We all do harmful things to ourselves. I find it easier to accept if I just accept my own negative acts. It's easier, for me at least, to accept that other people enjoy different things. I'd probably make a piss poor evangelist, but the reward is I spend less time being unhappy with other people's choices.
    - intended 9y ago
      Information in minds is not the same as cigarettes. And that’s discounting the fact that cigarettes are highly taxed and banned now. So are opioids and hard drugs. Society has a tendency to install a floor under functions that have bad externalities and have no end state.
    - dredmorbius 9y ago
      The problem is that the dangers and impacts don't simply stop at individuals. "Who Hacked the Election? Ad Tech did. Through “Fake News,” Identity Resolution and Hyper-Personalization": The data I present here suggests that before we keep pointing fingers at specific countries and tweeting about companies “hacking the election,” as well as to solve the scourge of “fake news,” it might be good to look inward. By this, I mean we should start the quest for transparency in politics with a few firms based in New York City and Silicon Valley. The author is Jonathan Albright, Director of Research, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, School of Journalism, Columbia University. And ex-Googler. https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d4019f705f https://medium.com/tow-center/who-hacked-the-election-43d401... The role of liberal democratic society is to identify the threats to itself and address those, when necessary. And it's now necessary.
    - venturis_voice 9y ago
      You have no social media accounts that must be liberating! I suppose you wouldn't know though as you haven't "been through the looking glass" as it were, the dark side of Facebook. I removed my accounts for a few months and whilst it was liberating it wasn't as life changing as I thought it would be. Horse for courses I suppose.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        I've never had one. At least not one of the ones people consider social media. HN and Slashdot are both social media, but nobody seems to call them that. So, no Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc... G+ may have made me a profile. The others may have data about me, but they aren't my accounts. I never saw a need for one. If people want me, they know where to find me. It's not some secretive thing. It's just more inertia. I can't be bothered to make accounts and they'd just take away more of my time. I am not even all that private, people know who I am. I've had many, many Internet friends in my home. One stayed for about five years, as she and I decided to date. Similarly, I haven't ever used online dating sites. That just kind of happened.
  - lostbob 9y ago
    How about inviting others to what you do instead? Probably easier to replace then just remove the addiction.
YouAreGreat 9y ago
> very, very hard to get rid of Previous generations used taxes to manage business models that harmed many for the benefit of a few. But since these companies can buy and hack democracy, will we ever see the much needed advertising tax?

not-sbrin 9y ago

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

white-flame 9y ago
I think you should replace "taken to an extreme" with "monetized in the pursuit of mythical unbounded growth". It's usually not the concept itself taken to the extreme, it's all the other crap bolted on because otherwise it's merely profitable, and that doesn't suffice anymore.

stanislavb 9y ago

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

nnfy 9y ago

I don't think the problem is with social media. I think the problem is the competence of the average person. How many communities start out full of reasonable, productive discourse, like HN, and then go downhill once they become popular? How many endless summers has the internet suffered? Mediocrity is the enemy of progress. Edit: I also take strong offense to the nonsense that the desire to aggregate knowledge began with the Islamic Golden Age. People have been centralizing knowledge for far longer than Islam has existed[1]. Frankly, the inclusion of Islam in this article comes off as forced and unnecessary. It doesn't surprise me that the author is from Iran, although his wikipedia page doesn't list any information regarding religion... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancient_world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_libraries_in_the_ancie...

rhizome 9y ago
Look at public schooling in the US, how organizations are working to cut it down with charter school diversions, corrupting history and science textbooks with religious concepts, and forcing teachers to be parents, police, social workers, and underpaid teachers, and to do it with a smile on their face. Higher standards than police and politicians. Add all this up and you start to see the educational system looking like it's being sabotaged.

ACow_Adonis 9y ago

Fundamentally though, the article fails to engage with whether these phenomenon are really a problem. As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. Additionally, with the increase of the "great unwashed" online for lack of a better term, yes, the density of intellectual and worthwhile thought online goes down. But does that matter, or more accurately, is that cause for concern over and above the general phenomenon of an "appearance" focused culture? Does social media cause, or merely reflect the values of our underlying culture? What I do know is that I have been born into a time where I have the most access to knowledge of any human civilization ever. I can download Wikipedia. I have e readers. I don't even need to pay the university any more because I have so much access to libraries, knowledge and communication and computation. While I am of course concerned about our societies values and their consequences, it is hard for me to take seriously the concern on the face of it that social media is destroying knowledge, when it is available in amount, redundancy and accessibility in greater amounts than it ever has been before. Period. Perhaps there is also some anxiety on the separation of knowledge from the "appearance of knowledge" industry as well :p

white-flame 9y ago
What social media is destroying is the curation of accessed knowledge. I agree that that's not an assault on knowledge itself.
- narag 9y ago
  In practice it could be the same. I believe that, at some point, more common knowledge about knowledge will reach the masses, making them less like "masses".
bloaf 9y ago
>As the number of contributors grow, and as Wikipedia progressively moves from a no information recorded, to a most information recorded state, we would actually expect contributor growth to fall. This is true, but I also believe Wikipedia is beset by the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Over time, the meaning of "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" has shifted from "you can just go and contribute what you know!" to "write what you want, but it'll just get removed unless you spend lots of time learning our rules."

carbor1 9y ago

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

kurthr 9y ago
Hmmm... do you mean written versions of oral traditions? We really don't know them past one generation since all of recorded history was literally written by the winners. How many truly illiterate people do you know? I suppose you could say that most 5 year olds are illiterate... are they capable of rational thought, perhaps... are they wellsprings of human knowledge and culture, I personally doubt.
- carbor1 9y ago
  I do fieldwork on a lamguage that lacks a written form, so I actually know quite a lot of illiterate people, and they are quite capable of complex and rational thought. In a literate society like ours, we tend to equate language with writing, but they're not at all the same thing. I agree that language is necessary for complex thought, just not writing.
Banthum 9y ago
The historical record does seem to indicate, at least to my reading, that illiterate people are at a significant disadvantage when it comes to engaging in high-level rational thought. Writing things down doesn't just store and transmit information, it forces an author to crystallize and review their arguments. Writing certainly makes me more rational. Those societies that never developed writing did have oral traditions with lots of "human knowledge and culture" but neither of these things are rational thought. Most oral traditions are rich with culture, but shot through with extreme irrationalism, exaggeration, fabuluism. This applies as much to a tribal society as to the stories your friends tell at the bar.
- thepompano 9y ago
  What exactly are you counting as high-level rational thought? If it's the ability to clamp down on "extreme irrationalism, exaggeration, and fabuluism", and Western societies are better at this, then I'd think Fox News wouldn't be a thing. ;)

adrianratnapala 9y ago

Ok, so the article lists a litany of things I personally don't like: videos, like buttons, facebook. But so what? I don't like them, so I avoid them. Other people are different. Why get upset about it? Why the urge to decide how other people spend their free time?

lostbob 9y ago
It is not about hobbies, it's about the addiction that so many are unable to leave because everyone they know also does it. Never leading to insight or realisation, but hate and depression from unrealistic expectations and stress to find the next thing and never reflect.

Alex3917 9y ago

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

thundergolfer 9y ago
Can you name a few of your favourites? I'm interested in participating and building communities like this. I feel like certain subreddits are as close as I've found.
- Alex3917 9y ago
  So many/most professional associations have one, and they usually have pretty good mailing lists and often other functionality as well. So if you Google for whatever professional associations exist for your industry you will likely find some stuff. There are a lot of academia-related ones also, e.g. researchgate.

CiPHPerCoder 9y ago

If you want Wikipedia to have more contributors, maybe the editors ought to stop being so caustic toward new members? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CiPHPerCoder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CiPHPerCoder Created an account, created a barebones skeleton user page just to make the red text link go away, immediately flagged for special deletion. Even when the person agreed with my point, their tone was mildly hostile and lectury. (Epilogue: I ended up not really contributing much since then simply because of how I was greeted.) Behavior like this drives new contributors away.

omnifischer 9y ago
Instead of putting link to your Twitter you could HV typed which articles you plan to edit. Editors need to be strict otherwise it is a slippery slope and will be ruined with pure junk. Do not take it personally, chill and contribute later.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Instead of attacking a new user, wait for a couple of weeks to see if they're adding content before deciding to remove their user page.
ahelwer 9y ago
This drive-by criticism comes up every time Wikipedia is mentioned on HN. I've written a few articles on computer science topics and haven't been bothered at all by the roving gangs of bureaucrats. It's always a lovely experience. If you write quality, researched articles on topics beyond those belonging to common knowledge and pop culture, your Wikipedia experience will be very pleasant. Since the HN readership is skews educated and technical, they are very well-equipped to write such articles.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  You shouldn't generalise from your experience. Im sure you had a good time. I tried improving some highly technical articles, which were significantly wrong, got into an edit war with someone who felt they "owned" the page, and got rules lawyered until I left.

jamesrcole 9y ago

This article portrays a very distorted view of the past vs the present. It portrays the push for encyclopedic collation of textual knowledge, in the past, and social media, in the present, as if they were complete, representative pictures of all the attitudes within societies towards information and knowledge in the respective time periods. As if low epistemic-quality discussions and communication mediums weren't widespread in the past, and as if there were no other ways that knowledge is treated these days.

acobster 9y ago

As much I think Debord's theory on the Society of the Spectacle [1] is as prescient as ever today, this article doesn't go far enough in making that case. It even casts Google as some great democratizing force: > Wikipedia was a fruit of this garden. So was Google search and its text-based advertising model....They effectively democratized the ability to contribute to the global corpus of knowledge. Google completely changed how people access information, true, but they also did way more to centralize the web than almost any other company, ever. That's not the best news for objective knowledge. Yet they get a pass while "social media" gets indicted with an anecdote about narcissism on Instagram? At the time of this writing, searches related to The Walking Dead are the top trending ones. You need to present some much more compelling evidence that social media is behind this shift away from "knowledge," and that Google is somehow not, for me to believe they're not just as much part of the Spectacle. All that is to say that this article takes too narrow a focus, and misses the larger point because of it. The web isn't the solution or the response to the Spectacle: it's a natural extension of it. [1] The Spectacle is the idea that in popular culture people relate to each other not directly but indirectly, through the "images" presented by culture itself, i.e. "the Spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by images."

legel 9y ago

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

guaka 9y ago
Do you have links to your analytical work? Bonus for links to your thoughts on how to fork and expand another order of magnitude. This is something I'd love to work on at some point.

erikbye 9y ago

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

jochung 9y ago

>You cannot think with images I disagree, and I think the way computers have made us regress to a purely textual interchange format as the common denominator is an unrecognized tragedy. My notes in school used to be richly layed out, mixing diagrams, symbols and formatting as needed, which was trivial on paper. Now I'm typing to you through a predictive text engine because tapping or swiping out words is itself too error prone on this device. We've created a massive gap between what can be produced and what can be consumed easily, information-wise. I think the GET/POST nature of the web is also responsible. Rather than make it easy to collaborate in a shared space, we all have to write on little immutable post its and paste them side by side.

dredmorbius 9y ago
Wittgenstein would have argued the precise opposite of the quoted point. Ideas are pictures in our minds. That particular point within the article is one of numerous specious and vapid objections it raises.

leroy_masochist 9y ago

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

ddmma 9y ago

With all do respect there is no surprise (level of intellect and human sensitivity) that Mr. Trump is also president... because of social media. Almost nobody reads what they share and get only the title based on the sheep following model. Social media became a sense of belonging and replaces analog socializing.. we became more and more shallow and incapable of solving simple tasks while we delegate to externals, either a machine or other app, simple life tasks.

siissussjskk 9y ago
I'd be careful characterizing Trump as only being elected because of social media. Not everyone who disagrees with you are idiots. Misplaced hope and conscious bias against the "other" (aka non-whites; women) are as much factors to his success as memes. It's a fundamental problem (if you believe it's a problem) that will never be tackled if it's characterized as outright stupidity.

thepompano 9y ago

"[Online social networks] reduce our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences." I hate to defend the world's largest algorithmically-enforced echo chamber, but is this a really strong claim - is this seriously true? Like, a measurable reduction in curiosity across the board for Facebook users? What about if your friends are thoughtful and use Facebook primarily as a means of textual interchange? And if the inverse is true - that being shown what we do not want and do not think makes us more curious - how does the author explain polarization? And are those irrelevant Youtube ads supposed to make me more curious about the world?

abacate 9y ago

Social interaction endangers knowledge. Social media just exacerbates the problem further.

saurik 9y ago

> Wikipedia, one of the last remaining pillars of the open and decentralized web, is in existential crisis. Wikipedia is decidedly not "decentralized"; it is a centralized system that people are allowed to copy: that is not at all the same thing.