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WT.Social
- londgine 4y ago> We’ve also repurposed the Wikipedia model of community editing, meaning if you see something dodgy or misleading on WT Social, you can go in and correct it yourself. Does that mean that if I make a post, some random other user can edit it?
- coffeeblack 4y agoThat’s how StackOverflow works too. Difference being that SO only allows very specific topics.
- koreanguy 4y ago
- threatofrain 4y agoAn interesting little experiment that never seemed to take off (joined since the early days).
- pfraze 4y agoYeah. UI is unrefined in a way that is kind of fun in a Craigslisty way but doesn’t totally land for me. The core ideas of a social wiki never seemed to reveal themselves to me in a super interesting way
- busymom0 4y agoWhat are a few things you would change? What do you look for in a social media?
- rglullis 4y agoAll I'd want from social media (actually, from all of the internet) is to remove the existing ad-based business model. When content publishers are paid by advertisers, their interests are no longer aligned with the interests of the consumers. Unfortunately, I think that people simply don't want to pay for anything. Two years ago I launched a (paid) service for social media and messaging (Mastodon/Matrix/XMPP) and I got barely a handful of paying users. People got so used to receiving things for free and apathetic about how their privacy is violated by Big Tech, it seems they can't even think of a different alternative anymore. People here love to shit on Brave because of crypto, but one of the reasons that I am so supportive of it is because I think that it is the first time where it flips the business model in order to get the users paid, who then get to choose who they can reward as their favorite creators and service providers. This, to me, is a model that creates a healthy market competition, and enables users to "vote with their wallets". Alas, turns out that most Brave users are doing just to be able to collect meager $3-8/month as "rewards", or to speculate on the price of the token. I thought that with 50+ million users and 8+ million users receiving the token rewards, I could get at least a tiny percentage of the users to be interested in paying for the service with the token... but no, you go to the BAT's subreddit and all you see is people involved in the pettiness of their rewards or trying to pump the token. I'm pivoting my service to host for companies. At least they understand the concept of a paid SaaS.
- koreanguy 4y ago
- al_borland 4y agoI signed up for App.net when it first launched. It was a paid social media service that promised to put the customer (the user) first. It started out with what was basically a Twitter clone, but they said the foundation of the service allowed nearly anything to be built on top of it, so it would evolve over time. Ultimately, it didn't take off and shut down some time later. YouTube offers both models to users. I'm curious how that works out. What percentage opt to pay to avoid ads? And how does the revenue break down for ads vs Premium on a per/user basis? The big issue with paid social media is that it's hard to get any traction to gain critical mass. A social media site that no one else is on is effectively useless. With something like a streaming service, which people pay for, a single user can get value on their own without needing to talk all their friends into also signing up.
- rvz 4y agoExactly. And now it is not early days. Twitter had 58 million users in 3 years after launch in 2009. This has only 450,000 and calls itself a Twitter alternative. I think I'd call WT.Social somewhat of a failure to catch on.
- JasonFruit 4y agoHalf a million people ought to be worth something.
- echelon 4y agoMy website picked up half a million registered users in the last three months, so it's not unheard of. Let's see if they can continue sigmoidal growth. Or raise funding.
- encryptluks2 4y agoYou know when you try to visit a site, and they tell you they value privacy and freedom—but then require that you register to view their site, they are a cult.
- lexx 4y agoIf they don't say they value privacy and freedom, what are they?
- wilg 4y agoHow does having a user account make you less free or infringe on your privacy?
- astrange 4y agoLetting them correlate your access patterns certainly does reduce privacy.
- bawolff 4y agoFun fact, you don't need user registration to do that.
- theamk 4y agoBut user registration makes it so much easier! Single identifier shared across all user's devices and browsers, and which survives reinstalls, cookie eraser plugins, and needa no GDPR notice - that's the best thing an advertizer can hope for.
- bawolff 4y agoSure, but its a bad metric to decide what sites to use. The evil ones will still track you regardless, the non-evil won't regardless.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
- lexx 4y agoThe interface and overall feeling reminded me of the internet 15 years ago. I like the vision, not the execution. What I didn't enjoy is that it's really slow. How is this concept different from reddit though?
- SoftTalker 4y ago> no ads, no paywalls, no sponsored content – just like Wikipedia. So nagging popups for donations, then?
- akolbe 4y agoSpeaking of the Wikipedia fundraising banners ... It's worth mentioning here that in 2020/2021, Wikimedia took about $90 million more than it spent – the Wikimedia Foundation's net assets increased by over $50 million to $230 million, and the completely separate Wikimedia Endowment (not included in the Wikimedia Foundation's assets as it's held by the Tides Foundation) from $62.9 million to over $100 million. Internet hosting, by comparison, cost them $2.4 million – that is less than the sum of what they pay their top-8 executives. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikimedia_Foundation_FY2020-2021_Audit_Report.pdf#page=5 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/1/1e/Wikim... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikimedia_Foundation_2020_Form_990.pdf#page=7 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/e/e4/Wikim... At this point, Wikipedia is basically being used as a cash cow. People are tricked into donating to Wikimedia by making them believe there is some kind of financial emergency, with donations needed to "keep Wikipedia online" or "protect Wikipedia's independence", when they are literally richer than ever. More sources here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31702595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31702595
- kukkeliskuu 4y agoHealthy culture does not come from opposition of something (advertising, toxic people etc.), but from a positive vision.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- CharlesW 4y agoYou seem to confusing the opposition of something with "negativity". Obviously, opposing human trafficking, racism, etc. is culturally healthy and completely consistent with a positive vision for culture and humanity.
- tomcatfish 4y agoI dunno, a social media platform with the mission statement "We're against human trafficking" would probably still suck.
- bawolff 4y agoSure, but i think there is some truth to defining yourself by your enemy as a failure mode. I obviously want my social media to be opposed to human traficking. However, if that is literally its only defining characteristic, it doesn't sound like a fun place to hang out.
- CharlesW 4y ago> Sure, but i think there is some truth to defining yourself by your enemy as a failure mode. Although I'd go further and add "only" before "defining yourself", I think there's wisdom in that statement. Some political parties have fallen into that trap, reactively opposing anything "the enemy" is for even at the cost of their constituents' health and happiness.
- kukkeliskuu 4y agoWhat makes you think I confuse those two? You can have for a while a group based on opposition of things that everybody agrees on. But even in such case, unless there is some shared vision on how to achieve that, there is soon infighting and thus an unhealthy culture develops. Downvoting for disagreement or if you don’t understand somebody does not contribute to a healthy culture here.
- al_borland 4y agoI signed up for WT.Social when it first launched. The interface was so bad I never wanted to use it, even if I did like their initial pitch. I have occasionally gone back to check it out to see if it improved, and the answer was always no. I've pretty much given up on it.
- tr1ll10nb1ll 4y agoPrivacy? Uh- they just had a tracker in their email from AWS. And my blocker already had awstrack in its blacklist so I had to temporarily disable that just so I could register.
- KrishnaShripad 4y ago[flagged]
- DoctorOW 4y agoPretty sketchy article there, bud.
- KrishnaShripad 4y agoWhat is sketchy about it? You mean to say Wikipedia Co-founder is lying?
- DoctorOW 4y agoI mean that he has very little evidence for his claims
- KrishnaShripad 4y ago[flagged]
- Angostura 4y agoLet's take a look through a US lens at. Do you agree that it is true by all realistic measures that Joe Biden won the last US presidential election fairly, and not through electoral fraud? Do you think that Covid-19 was a serious pandemic, effectively mitigated by vaccination - at least before omicron? Do you think it is fair that sources that consistently claim the opposite should be deprecated by a resource that espouses factual content? If so - that's most, if not all of the US source deprecations explained. Can you think of a similar non-factual conspiracy that has infected substantial numbers of left wing sources?
- KrishnaShripad 4y ago[flagged]
- zaik 4y agoSadly this doesn't seem to built on ActivityPub or any other kind of federated standard, so it's just another walled garden social media site.
- dzink 4y agoFeels like another reddit. Instead of doing another social media, why don’t you guys do social networking better. Social media is designed to be distracting, variable rewards addicting, and thus inherently monetizable by ads. Focus on the people and the relationships. Currently WT social is quickly filing up with affiliate spam links, climate change alarmism (even if we didn’t sign up for that category), and spammers. Hacker News is a lot better for news and better moderated.
- cies 4y agoWhy did they not start with Lemmy's code base? https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy
- antifa 4y agoThey might have started at the same time.
- cies 4y agoI cannot even find the source... It's said it was "soon to be FLOSSed" 3y ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/e4en47/wtsocial_will_soon_be_released_under_an_open/ https://www.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/e4en47/wtsocial...
- antifa 4y ago3 years ago is about the exact time lemmy was first announced. An early alpha of a rust + react new reddit clone with some weird custom websockets is probably the opposite of how they would have wanted to start their codebase.
- clement_b 4y agoI like how their register page starts with: "Login with Facebook", "Login with Twitter". Makes sense to transfer users from the bad guys to the good ones, but feels off to me. I would expect such initiative to be email registration only.
- heurisko 4y ago> (they/any) I wonder when the fad for putting pronouns after your name will die out. It feels a lot like the little 3rd person biographies people used to write about themselves in the 2000s.