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It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long shift in the Internet's center of mas

by evouga 5y ago

It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long shift in the Internet's center of mass away from browsers and towards centralized and commercialized apps---from personal web pages to LinkedIn/GitHub/Twitter handles, from the ubiquitous WordPress blogs to YouTube videos and Medium posts, and from forums to Tweets and subreddits. The useful information on the Web is now concentrated in a few places---Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. When I want reasonable search results, I search there instead of the Web as a whole. (And even many of these services are in the late stages of the Silicon Valley life cycle---desperate monetization and engagement-increasing gimmicks---with uncertain futures.) Wikipedia, bless its heart, lurches on as a cathedral to early Web's dream of information democratization. It stands as a wonder of the ancient world: incomplete, built from technology few now understand, and reflecting values and priorities that no longer quite align with contemporary culture. But it persists thanks to its inertia and the undeniable sense of awe it invokes even today.

topspin 5y ago
Discord is another tarpit into which a lot of otherwise indexable content is sinking.
- visarga 5y ago
  And Slack. Can't ever find what I want in it.
  - cgearhart 5y ago
    Entertainingly, the backronym for Slack is “searchable log of all communication and knowledge”—I kid you not: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/875547942454689794?s=21 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/875547942454689794?s=21
  - topspin 5y ago
    Agreed; Slack search is next to useless for me as well. However, what is meant here is that content in Discord isn't reachable via search engines such as Google. Whole communities are invisible to traditional search indexing and only reachable through either a special client or an API, both of which require an account and empower gatekeepers.
fallous 5y ago
Wikipedia is also suffering under the issues of "moderation." The original web was based on the idea of "throw your crap up, if people like it they do if not they don't." Evaluation both the content and the credibility of content on the net was up to the viewer. Adding moderators apart from the original authors and viewers, especially when those moderators are at an integration level (be it wikipedia, twitter, google, etc) is in direct opposition to that original ethos.
- xiphias2 5y ago
  I read this quite often on HN, but my experience is quite different: English Wikipedia pages are amazing for learning about some scientific or historical thing or when I want to understand something. Even with political things it tries to describe the controversies without being too judgemental (which is really hard to balance out).
  - Gareth321 5y ago
    It depends heavily on the page. I can personally provide an example of the "Men's rights movement" page. I used to be heavily involved in the movement with regards to parental custody. At least a decade ago, ideological moderators began applying extremely high standards for the page. Whole sections were removed and re-written. Their argument was that "these are the rules," and while technically true, the rules are diverse and opaque. They can be applied in many ways, depending on one's ideological alignment. I encourage you to take a look at the above page, and then contrast it with "Feminism." You'll notice a distinct difference to the breadth of content, the standard for citation, and especially the tone. For example, in the second paragraph on the "Men's rights movement" introduction, moderators have added an entire paragraph of criticism. You'll see no comparable criticism on the "Feminism" page in the introduction. More recently they added a "Not to be confused with the pro-feminist Men's liberation movement" at the very tippy top of the page to try to move traffic towards a feminist friendly page. No such suggestion appears on the "Feminism" page. I could provide endless commentary on this example, but suffice it to say, it is very difficult to look at this comparison and rationally argue no moderation bias exists. Now consider that this is just one tiny corner of the site. This is happening to millions of pages. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder, has been very vocal about its political bias. I, for one, believe him.
feupan 5y ago
> built from technology few now understand, Now you’re just being dramatic. I’d review the whole comment and de-dramatize it. Yes the web has changed and most Forums are dead, but it doesn’t mean change is not possible. Blogs are still a thing, even if you get to them through Twitter. The issue stems from Google rewarding junk and people wanting to monetize their content. Couple the two and you have lengthy BS lost in ads, while short clean content is lost on page 59 – but it’s there.
- egKYzyXeIL 5y ago
  Maybe it's just me and my English comprehension, but way too often I am left thinking comments on HN have become a sport of dramatization and usage of thesaurus
  - noobermin 5y ago
    It isn't. I admit in the past I've taken time to write comments.
- aluminussoma 5y ago
  It got a chuckle out of me. I went through the Wikimedia source to track down a bug and I can agree with the sentiment. I guess most technologies are like that. Once it is written, once the major bugs are caught, few revisit the code anymore.
- evouga 5y ago
  Back in the day I both edited Wikipedia and helped maintain a MediaWiki installation. I found learning wiki markup (and the subtleties of the template engine in particular) quite challenging on the frontend, and the backend was even worse. The inaccessibility of the software is (was?) widely acknowledged as a significant barrier to new contributors by the project itself. I didn’t think this was especially dramatic or controversial.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
mikewarot 5y ago
Wikipedia went down quite a few notches in my world view a few days ago, when I went to find out how old Lex Fridman was from his wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexFridman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexFridman Only to find he's not notable enough for an entry. There isn't an article in a "reliable" source about him, so he doesn't exist as far as the club that now manages Wikipedia is concerned. I wasted about an hour seeing if there was something applicable I could add, but to no avail, as Google failed me.
- glenneroo 5y ago
- BridgetJones 5y ago
  I'm curious if the fault is Google's, Wikipedia's or "the Web's"?
- edgyquant 5y ago
  This is hilariously pedantic. For one thing it would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Fridman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Fridman and this person isn’t all that popular. If you think he deserves a page create one
  - SixDouble5321 5y ago
    I am glad you posted this, I wholeheartedly agree. "Someone should have made this page about [some obscure thing]." Followed by "I did a bunch of research" without a "so I created an entry" SMH
    - mikewarot 5y ago
      There is a "draft" entry, that looks ready to use, except the gatekeepers won't let it get published.

by evouga 5y ago

topspin 5y ago

Discord is another tarpit into which a lot of otherwise indexable content is sinking.

visarga 5y ago
And Slack. Can't ever find what I want in it.
- cgearhart 5y ago
  Entertainingly, the backronym for Slack is “searchable log of all communication and knowledge”—I kid you not: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/875547942454689794?s=21 https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/875547942454689794?s=21
- topspin 5y ago
  Agreed; Slack search is next to useless for me as well. However, what is meant here is that content in Discord isn't reachable via search engines such as Google. Whole communities are invisible to traditional search indexing and only reachable through either a special client or an API, both of which require an account and empower gatekeepers.

fallous 5y ago

Wikipedia is also suffering under the issues of "moderation." The original web was based on the idea of "throw your crap up, if people like it they do if not they don't." Evaluation both the content and the credibility of content on the net was up to the viewer. Adding moderators apart from the original authors and viewers, especially when those moderators are at an integration level (be it wikipedia, twitter, google, etc) is in direct opposition to that original ethos.

xiphias2 5y ago
I read this quite often on HN, but my experience is quite different: English Wikipedia pages are amazing for learning about some scientific or historical thing or when I want to understand something. Even with political things it tries to describe the controversies without being too judgemental (which is really hard to balance out).
- Gareth321 5y ago
  It depends heavily on the page. I can personally provide an example of the "Men's rights movement" page. I used to be heavily involved in the movement with regards to parental custody. At least a decade ago, ideological moderators began applying extremely high standards for the page. Whole sections were removed and re-written. Their argument was that "these are the rules," and while technically true, the rules are diverse and opaque. They can be applied in many ways, depending on one's ideological alignment. I encourage you to take a look at the above page, and then contrast it with "Feminism." You'll notice a distinct difference to the breadth of content, the standard for citation, and especially the tone. For example, in the second paragraph on the "Men's rights movement" introduction, moderators have added an entire paragraph of criticism. You'll see no comparable criticism on the "Feminism" page in the introduction. More recently they added a "Not to be confused with the pro-feminist Men's liberation movement" at the very tippy top of the page to try to move traffic towards a feminist friendly page. No such suggestion appears on the "Feminism" page. I could provide endless commentary on this example, but suffice it to say, it is very difficult to look at this comparison and rationally argue no moderation bias exists. Now consider that this is just one tiny corner of the site. This is happening to millions of pages. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder, has been very vocal about its political bias. I, for one, believe him.

feupan 5y ago

> built from technology few now understand, Now you’re just being dramatic. I’d review the whole comment and de-dramatize it. Yes the web has changed and most Forums are dead, but it doesn’t mean change is not possible. Blogs are still a thing, even if you get to them through Twitter. The issue stems from Google rewarding junk and people wanting to monetize their content. Couple the two and you have lengthy BS lost in ads, while short clean content is lost on page 59 – but it’s there.

egKYzyXeIL 5y ago
Maybe it's just me and my English comprehension, but way too often I am left thinking comments on HN have become a sport of dramatization and usage of thesaurus
- noobermin 5y ago
  It isn't. I admit in the past I've taken time to write comments.
aluminussoma 5y ago
It got a chuckle out of me. I went through the Wikimedia source to track down a bug and I can agree with the sentiment. I guess most technologies are like that. Once it is written, once the major bugs are caught, few revisit the code anymore.
evouga 5y ago
Back in the day I both edited Wikipedia and helped maintain a MediaWiki installation. I found learning wiki markup (and the subtleties of the template engine in particular) quite challenging on the frontend, and the backend was even worse. The inaccessibility of the software is (was?) widely acknowledged as a significant barrier to new contributors by the project itself. I didn’t think this was especially dramatic or controversial.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

mikewarot 5y ago

Wikipedia went down quite a few notches in my world view a few days ago, when I went to find out how old Lex Fridman was from his wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexFridman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexFridman Only to find he's not notable enough for an entry. There isn't an article in a "reliable" source about him, so he doesn't exist as far as the club that now manages Wikipedia is concerned. I wasted about an hour seeing if there was something applicable I could add, but to no avail, as Google failed me.

glenneroo 5y ago
BridgetJones 5y ago
I'm curious if the fault is Google's, Wikipedia's or "the Web's"?
edgyquant 5y ago
This is hilariously pedantic. For one thing it would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Fridman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Fridman and this person isn’t all that popular. If you think he deserves a page create one
- SixDouble5321 5y ago
  I am glad you posted this, I wholeheartedly agree. "Someone should have made this page about [some obscure thing]." Followed by "I did a bunch of research" without a "so I created an entry" SMH
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    There is a "draft" entry, that looks ready to use, except the gatekeepers won't let it get published.