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I mostly agree with you, but it's not all bad. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a tremendous repository of knowledge, so are its sister projects. Project Gutenb
by krylon 5y ago
I mostly agree with you, but it's not all bad. Wikipedia, for all its flaws, is a tremendous repository of knowledge, so are its sister projects. Project Gutenberg stores vast amounts of literature. archive.org preserves literature, video, software, audio data. Librivox offers audio book recordings of public domain literature. And last but not least, free/open source software puts mountains of software for nearly every purpose I could imagine at one's fingertips.
All of these are free for anyone to access and contribute.
- zozbot234 5y agoMany of these projects got started in the late 1990s or early 2000s, with the 1996 'Declaration' as a key rallying point. The social-media dominated Internet of today is the polar opposite; it's very explicitly trying to make cyberspace as thin a layer as possible onto ordinary meatspace, because this is how large social media firms can maximize short-term "growth", "engagement" and advertising profits. This could even be acceptable on its own terms, but these large social media sites tend to be sources of spillover that affects even the formerly more independent Internet, and reduces its effectiveness quite a lot compared to what it could be.