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I was interested by the following part: >COWEN: Now, as you know, Wikipedia is open. It’s free. It doesn’t have ads. It’s a dream of the early tech utopians. W
by savanaly 6y ago
I was interested by the following part:
>COWEN: Now, as you know, Wikipedia is open. It’s free. It doesn’t have ads. It’s a dream of the early tech utopians. Why is it the only surviving dream of that kind that has persisted?
>WALES: Well, it’s an interesting thing, and I’m not sure it’s the only, but it’s certainly the most famous and the largest.
Can HN think of any other examples? Funny enough I immediately thought of HN itself, although it does have some ads and I'm not sure it qualifies as big enough for what Cowen had in mind.
- DarthGhandi 6y agoIt's comical to see someone thinking this place as some unbiased utopia. HN front page and the associated top comments are consistently wrong on so many issues daily, it's absurdly US centric and even then, completely SF tech bubble centric. The comparison is not apt in the slightest. This place has gone downhill for years and even PG laments it publicly. Please take a step back and try to look clearly.
- handmodel 6y agoOn the podcast he brought up Craigslist. It is still a huge marketplace with extremely minimal ads and still one of the biggest local marketplaces.
- Vinnl 6y agoOpenStreetMaps is a similarly wonderful project. The Internet Archive is mentioned every now and then as well.
- lapinot 6y agoMost F/LOSS projects would qualify: quite a lot of unix distributions are old, active, big; gnu packages too; programming languages. Maybe you meant kind of social platforms and not just software, but imho they are just like wikipedia since usually a free software project encompasses some mailing lists, wiki, collaboration.. More wikipedia-like: musicbrainz.
- jononor 6y agoStack Overflow, and the other Stack Exchange sites, could be another example. Content is licensed CC-BY-SA. Publically accessible, free as-in-beer. User moderated. There are some ads however, but quite minor in my opinion.
- onion2k 6y agoStack is just burning through a giant pile of VC money at the moment (latest round was an $85m Series E back in July). When that runs out they'll start to ramp up the adverts and the paid user features.
- mjgs 6y agoI totally focused in on the same bit. I reckon Wordpress has an earlyish web utopian vibe, or I guess technically it’s the parent company Automattic.