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I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by d

I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs where the engine handled all but the content, and the barrier to entry of sharing personal details was lowered. Correspondingly, the depth of the material got more shallow, but the breadth of it got wider. This transition was happening as commercial ventures first moved beyond sites that were mere billboards, individuals began reading news portals and opening webmail accounts, and communities like phpBB and vBulletin forums flourished as pseudonymous, do-it-yourself takes on newsgroups of old. Aggressive moderation typically kept the conversation in check. There were corners of the web where moderation was shallow, and some of these places achieved notoriety for being cesspits of depravity, and eventually, hate. The depravity was authentic. But there was an air of privileged bravado about the hate, where its expression was used as a shibboleth to an in-group more so than an authentic expression of beliefs. If you were a true hater, finding other true haters was not a trivial task. Early social networks were pseudonymous. It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Ten years of Facebook moved the Overton window quite a bit, and now there's a set of people who aren't afraid to bare their cards, or of doxxing and reprisal. And now, they too have tools to build online communities of their own and find like-minded people on the web rather than in person, regardless of the popularity and acceptance of the views they hold. Meanwhile, e-commerce is now everywhere, and so is content and services that can be consumed with no upfront cost. Both of these are supplemented by adtech-like schemes that harvest and correlate user behavior. Despite real harm having occurred from these practices, jurisdictions have been slow to regulate them for many reasons: ineptitude, lobbying, corruption, and ineffectiveness in enforcing regulations in a global, dynamic, resilient system. Shady, underground actors and mainstream actors alike will continue these practices until widespread, debilitating user backlash, or widespread regulation puts and end to them. If they are regulated, only ruthless actors will engage in this behavior: trolls, stalkers, profiteers, and intelligence services.

adventured 8y ago
> I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs... The labor-of-love deep topic authors came to entirely dominate across the board. They sit at the top of every single search result, under the Wikipedia.org domain. They moved from writing in-depth on their personal blogs/sites, to writing epic volumes on a site like Wikipedia instead. A place where that vast glorious compilation of human knowledge can easily be shared with all in a quite friendly non-profit, non-soul-eating sort of way (ie the anti-Facebook sort of way). I don't have to get lucky browsing around or dig for hours to find their obscure topic content there, I just conveniently type words into a search box or click one page to the next. No filtering through tons of trash results or in-result ads on Google to find decent quality content.
- DuskStar 8y ago
  And then other people arrived on Wikipedia and decided that five-page articles on every single character in the Star Wars extended universe (pre-Disney) weren't desirable, and deleted them.
  - Joeri 8y ago
    This is a real problem for future historians. Prior ages kept records of what they deemed important, but failed to document the mundane, which makes it hard to reconstruct today how people lived back then. The same problem is posed by wikipedia. Some of the content being filtered out as irrelevant may prove important to understanding the flow of history in 500 years. We can’t know today what will be important and what won’t be. That’s why archive.org may be a far more useful compendium of human knowledge than wikipedia.
- droopyEyelids 8y ago
  You're reading a different wikipedia than I am. Or describing what you hope it could be? The Wikipedia I read is a collection of sentence fragments that sometimes contradict each other before the period, and the sentences often contradict each other within the paragraph. Then, that confused mix is filtered through an army of agenda based editors. The example of this that killed the joy I found in wikipedia was the Hookah page. My friends and I were smoking a lot of hookah in college, so I decided I wanted to learn more about it. The wikipdeia page was incredibly pro-hookah, and cited various stores that sold hookah equipment. When I researched it fully, I found the WHO did a study that showed hookah smoke contains a tremendous amount of tar, users hold the smoke in their lungs longer, absorbing more tar, and the 'shisha' (tobacco) is actually burned- not "roasted," which is the word hookah promonets use to dissemble. It was completely impossible to get that information onto the page, despite learning tons of wiki culture and really working at it for months. After that I noticed the same thing on a huge quantity of pages. Writing and organizing information is hard. It can't be done well by an unfocused committee of people, even if they care. Add in self-interested saboteurs, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
syshum 8y ago
>> It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Do you believe this is a good or bad trend. I personally see it has universally bad and is could directly be attributable toxicity of those communities, as the most extreme people, the people that either have nothing to lose, or do not fully understand the risk are the only ones that engage in any meaningful way, those groups then feed upon each other. Everyone else either leaves or self censors so the only remaining conversation is an extremely toxic one where people are talking past and over each other yelling into the void. There is no moderate middle as the moderate middle shuts up for fear of pissing off both extremes. Anonymity is a bed rock foundational element of free speech, even the founders of the US understood this which is why most of the Federalist papers, and many other pivotal writings in history were written under Pseudonym's. This idea that "real names" policies improve discourse is simply false and IMO lowers discourse

adventured 8y ago

> I grew up with a web where labor-of-love personal websites -- often about a deep topic the author was passionate about -- were slowly crowded out in number by dynamic blogs... The labor-of-love deep topic authors came to entirely dominate across the board. They sit at the top of every single search result, under the Wikipedia.org domain. They moved from writing in-depth on their personal blogs/sites, to writing epic volumes on a site like Wikipedia instead. A place where that vast glorious compilation of human knowledge can easily be shared with all in a quite friendly non-profit, non-soul-eating sort of way (ie the anti-Facebook sort of way). I don't have to get lucky browsing around or dig for hours to find their obscure topic content there, I just conveniently type words into a search box or click one page to the next. No filtering through tons of trash results or in-result ads on Google to find decent quality content.

DuskStar 8y ago
And then other people arrived on Wikipedia and decided that five-page articles on every single character in the Star Wars extended universe (pre-Disney) weren't desirable, and deleted them.
- Joeri 8y ago
  This is a real problem for future historians. Prior ages kept records of what they deemed important, but failed to document the mundane, which makes it hard to reconstruct today how people lived back then. The same problem is posed by wikipedia. Some of the content being filtered out as irrelevant may prove important to understanding the flow of history in 500 years. We can’t know today what will be important and what won’t be. That’s why archive.org may be a far more useful compendium of human knowledge than wikipedia.
droopyEyelids 8y ago
You're reading a different wikipedia than I am. Or describing what you hope it could be? The Wikipedia I read is a collection of sentence fragments that sometimes contradict each other before the period, and the sentences often contradict each other within the paragraph. Then, that confused mix is filtered through an army of agenda based editors. The example of this that killed the joy I found in wikipedia was the Hookah page. My friends and I were smoking a lot of hookah in college, so I decided I wanted to learn more about it. The wikipdeia page was incredibly pro-hookah, and cited various stores that sold hookah equipment. When I researched it fully, I found the WHO did a study that showed hookah smoke contains a tremendous amount of tar, users hold the smoke in their lungs longer, absorbing more tar, and the 'shisha' (tobacco) is actually burned- not "roasted," which is the word hookah promonets use to dissemble. It was completely impossible to get that information onto the page, despite learning tons of wiki culture and really working at it for months. After that I noticed the same thing on a huge quantity of pages. Writing and organizing information is hard. It can't be done well by an unfocused committee of people, even if they care. Add in self-interested saboteurs, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

syshum 8y ago

>> It wasn't until Facebook's meteoric rise that it became mainstream and commonplace to put one's real name next to one's off-the-cuff words online. Do you believe this is a good or bad trend. I personally see it has universally bad and is could directly be attributable toxicity of those communities, as the most extreme people, the people that either have nothing to lose, or do not fully understand the risk are the only ones that engage in any meaningful way, those groups then feed upon each other. Everyone else either leaves or self censors so the only remaining conversation is an extremely toxic one where people are talking past and over each other yelling into the void. There is no moderate middle as the moderate middle shuts up for fear of pissing off both extremes. Anonymity is a bed rock foundational element of free speech, even the founders of the US understood this which is why most of the Federalist papers, and many other pivotal writings in history were written under Pseudonym's. This idea that "real names" policies improve discourse is simply false and IMO lowers discourse