8 ms·

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's grea

by nicbou 4y ago

It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's great. But there's also an army of content creators are there to teach you just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more to choose from. Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few minutes later I was watching a documentary about it, then a variety of videos about that man. My information binge extended to other African dictators, and will probably last a few days longer. If I'm curious about something, I can go really deep. I'm not constrained to a few paragraphs in whatever book my local library carries. You could argue that the web is in a sorry state, but if that's the cost of giving everyone, everywhere access to all this knowledge, then it's a deal worth making. This might be more obvious to someone who did not have access to a well-stocked library. The problem is not availability, but curation. The sum of all knowledge back then was a well-curated book. Now it's literally all of it, unfiltered.

imiric 4y ago
> It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the internet. Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. The one exception is Wikipedia, though it also struggles with keeping factual information, and has its own set of issues.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able to get itself well placed in search results, diluting information with real value. It's really irritating to start reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes incoherent nonsense.
- morpheos137 4y ago
  Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever is the conventions of the day.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of politics and history, and really any field where facts aren't settled and feelings are strong. Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g. read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon learn that some topic has been taken over by POV-pushers and is unreliable. Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Incidentally, I usually search using DDG. But DDG seems to hate Wikipedia; WP results usually don't show up on DDG until page 2. Google surfaces WP results on page 1, if not at the top of the resultset.
    - this2shallPass 4y ago
      > Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Is there good evidence for this claim? Evidence is useful, especially for these claims of general bias. On the contrary, in general Wikipedia's content is likely biased against Israel when considering its general overall political preferences / bias. > 5 Studies Find Wikipedia Bias > Five studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia: > * A Harvard study found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica. > * Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site. > * A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing. > * Another analysis using AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets. > * American academics found conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement. From: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
- naasking 4y ago
  > Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. I'm not particularly worried about disinformation or misinformation as long as good information is out there to improve the signal to noise ratio. But you've definitely hit a nail on the head here, good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. This is the real danger.
  - smolder 4y ago
    > good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. There's even an incentive there to pollute free sources of good information in order to devalue them relative to proprietary knowledgebases.
ricardobeat 4y ago
I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…
- pasc1878 4y ago
  Depends where you read. Also how do you read the news of 50 or 100 years ago - isn't that more difficult. I use UK news sites. BBC Guardian and Telegraph all have their old articles online
  - ricardobeat 4y ago
    One of the functions of public libraries is to archive the news. One could browse weekly papers going back decades, either as hard copies or microfilm. There's a good chance major city libraries still do that, or have digital scans. For example: https://www.chipublib.org/resources-types/newspaper/ https://www.chipublib.org/resources-types/newspaper/
    - b112 4y ago
      Even on Canada (only a few hundred years in the new world), we have microfiche going back hundreds of years in many libraries. Much has been digitized, I hope they kept the microfiche for longevity.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    BBC used to be an extensive and complicated site with non-news articles, study guides and curated collections. All of that was destroyed with a revamp. You can still read the news articles, but that's all that's left.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 4y ago
gsatic 4y ago
Curation won't solve the issues of the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis or the Information Defecit Model or the Digital Divide or Info Asymmetry. If we test people on where they went "deep" there is a good chance most will fail the test. We don't even know what we are trying to do with these networks.
lordnacho 4y ago
It's really the curation that needs to be taught to everyone. A big dose of critical thinking skills is what we all need, because in earlier times you could tell the crappy ideas by the way they were packaged: crazy guy at Hyde Park Corner, dude with a megaphone shouting out passages of the bible, crappy home-made flyers. You could work backwards from "nutter is probably wrong" to why he was wrong. Part of why this worked was because it cost something to publish stuff, and so publishers would have a think about what they wanted to spend their resources on. Nowadays everyone has figured out how to package the message, and it's super cheap to do so and get it out there. (Incidentally, actual packaging is the same now, crappy products used to come in crappy packages, but no more.) So now to pick apart an argument you have to be a bit more aware of the actual content, and it's a bit harder to get to the bottom of BS.
- hobs 4y ago
- hinkley 4y ago
  Curation is the first step, but we also need more organizations who take on the job of keeping some bits of the internet from going dark. Especially for things that were originally done for the common good. There's a local group here that basically specializes in devops for little public projects that have run their course. They even do a little bit of work trying to provide templates for new projects (eg, for a local hackathon), but I'd like to see them go farther. Bigger, more national or international groups that come up with recipes for projects where they say, "If you build your project on this structure, then we will be more likely to run it for you," I think is a reasonable logical next step for the Internet. Given the task of running 10 projects that 'need' 4 servers each, it would be very good if I could do it all with 20 servers, not 44 (40 + orchestration machines). We don't have a "PBS for the internet" but then PBS didn't always exist either. You need a beach head of some sort to even propose such a thing to government.
_Algernon_ 4y ago
It may never have been easier to share knowledge but it also hasn't ever been easier to share misinformation. It also hasn't gotten easier to find information. Search results are worse now than 10 years ago because of Search Engine "Optimization". Google search needs uBlocklist[1] with a steadily growing list of manually curated domains just to poorly approximate usability. Additionally, sites load slower every day. Why does every partial refresh of a site require 2 seconds, even though I'm on a decent computer? On phones sites are practically unusable. The benefits you're touting for the web could be accomplished with Web 1.0 level of tech or even simpler protocols such as Gopher[2] or Gemini[3]. Everything else is an overall decrease in accessibility, usability, user experience, and the ease of finding or sharing knowledge. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
- bombcar 4y ago
  I find that you used to find “silos” of information when searching - if you were looking for information on toilets say, you might end up on a love site [687] dedicated to plumbing, which would have a whole cornucopia of information and knowledgeable people. Now you’re less likely do find that kind of thing and more likely to find a video or a SEO optimized site - which can be much more difficult to parse for verifiability. [687] https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm
Melatonic 4y ago
Lets face it - early libraries probably sucked too. We will improve

by nicbou 4y ago

imiric 4y ago

> It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has never been a greater time to be curious. It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the internet. Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. The one exception is Wikipedia, though it also struggles with keeping factual information, and has its own set of issues.

kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able to get itself well placed in search results, diluting information with real value. It's really irritating to start reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes incoherent nonsense.
morpheos137 4y ago
Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever is the conventions of the day.
- denton-scratch 4y ago
  I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of politics and history, and really any field where facts aren't settled and feelings are strong. Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g. read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon learn that some topic has been taken over by POV-pushers and is unreliable. Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Incidentally, I usually search using DDG. But DDG seems to hate Wikipedia; WP results usually don't show up on DDG until page 2. Google surfaces WP results on page 1, if not at the top of the resultset.
  - this2shallPass 4y ago
    > Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web that search engines expose. Is there good evidence for this claim? Evidence is useful, especially for these claims of general bias. On the contrary, in general Wikipedia's content is likely biased against Israel when considering its general overall political preferences / bias. > 5 Studies Find Wikipedia Bias > Five studies, including two from Harvard researchers, have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia: > * A Harvard study found Wikipedia articles are more left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica. > * Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the site. > * A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on Wikipedia are mainly left-wing. > * Another analysis using AllSides Media Bias Ratings™ found that pages on American politicians cite mostly left-wing news outlets. > * American academics found conservative editors are 6 times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy enforcement. From: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
naasking 4y ago
> Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a needle in a haystack. I'm not particularly worried about disinformation or misinformation as long as good information is out there to improve the signal to noise ratio. But you've definitely hit a nail on the head here, good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. This is the real danger.
- smolder 4y ago
  > good information has value so there are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it. There's even an incentive there to pollute free sources of good information in order to devalue them relative to proprietary knowledgebases.

ricardobeat 4y ago

I’m not sure you and the author are talking about the same thing. He mentions the fact you can’t even read the news from 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of YouTube videos can replace that. The problem is not “everything, everywhere” or a lack of filters but the extreme commercialization of all content available, closed networks, the short life of URLs…

pasc1878 4y ago
Depends where you read. Also how do you read the news of 50 or 100 years ago - isn't that more difficult. I use UK news sites. BBC Guardian and Telegraph all have their old articles online
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  One of the functions of public libraries is to archive the news. One could browse weekly papers going back decades, either as hard copies or microfilm. There's a good chance major city libraries still do that, or have digital scans. For example: https://www.chipublib.org/resources-types/newspaper/ https://www.chipublib.org/resources-types/newspaper/
  - b112 4y ago
    Even on Canada (only a few hundred years in the new world), we have microfiche going back hundreds of years in many libraries. Much has been digitized, I hope they kept the microfiche for longevity.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  BBC used to be an extensive and complicated site with non-news articles, study guides and curated collections. All of that was destroyed with a revamp. You can still read the news articles, but that's all that's left.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
4y ago

gsatic 4y ago

Curation won't solve the issues of the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis or the Information Defecit Model or the Digital Divide or Info Asymmetry. If we test people on where they went "deep" there is a good chance most will fail the test. We don't even know what we are trying to do with these networks.

lordnacho 4y ago

It's really the curation that needs to be taught to everyone. A big dose of critical thinking skills is what we all need, because in earlier times you could tell the crappy ideas by the way they were packaged: crazy guy at Hyde Park Corner, dude with a megaphone shouting out passages of the bible, crappy home-made flyers. You could work backwards from "nutter is probably wrong" to why he was wrong. Part of why this worked was because it cost something to publish stuff, and so publishers would have a think about what they wanted to spend their resources on. Nowadays everyone has figured out how to package the message, and it's super cheap to do so and get it out there. (Incidentally, actual packaging is the same now, crappy products used to come in crappy packages, but no more.) So now to pick apart an argument you have to be a bit more aware of the actual content, and it's a bit harder to get to the bottom of BS.

hobs 4y ago
hinkley 4y ago
Curation is the first step, but we also need more organizations who take on the job of keeping some bits of the internet from going dark. Especially for things that were originally done for the common good. There's a local group here that basically specializes in devops for little public projects that have run their course. They even do a little bit of work trying to provide templates for new projects (eg, for a local hackathon), but I'd like to see them go farther. Bigger, more national or international groups that come up with recipes for projects where they say, "If you build your project on this structure, then we will be more likely to run it for you," I think is a reasonable logical next step for the Internet. Given the task of running 10 projects that 'need' 4 servers each, it would be very good if I could do it all with 20 servers, not 44 (40 + orchestration machines). We don't have a "PBS for the internet" but then PBS didn't always exist either. You need a beach head of some sort to even propose such a thing to government.

_Algernon_ 4y ago

It may never have been easier to share knowledge but it also hasn't ever been easier to share misinformation. It also hasn't gotten easier to find information. Search results are worse now than 10 years ago because of Search Engine "Optimization". Google search needs uBlocklist[1] with a steadily growing list of manually curated domains just to poorly approximate usability. Additionally, sites load slower every day. Why does every partial refresh of a site require 2 seconds, even though I'm on a decent computer? On phones sites are practically unusable. The benefits you're touting for the web could be accomplished with Web 1.0 level of tech or even simpler protocols such as Gopher[2] or Gemini[3]. Everything else is an overall decrease in accessibility, usability, user experience, and the ease of finding or sharing knowledge. [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)

bombcar 4y ago
I find that you used to find “silos” of information when searching - if you were looking for information on toilets say, you might end up on a love site [687] dedicated to plumbing, which would have a whole cornucopia of information and knowledgeable people. Now you’re less likely do find that kind of thing and more likely to find a video or a SEO optimized site - which can be much more difficult to parse for verifiability. [687] https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm

Melatonic 4y ago

Lets face it - early libraries probably sucked too. We will improve