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I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wiki

I don't agree. First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy. Reddit is, meanwhile and example of a lot of things. The variety there makes it a good place for examples. But, Reddit was a commery startup that got bought many moons ago into a media conglomerate. It's not the examle of free.

mrguyorama 4y ago
Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!
- zamnos 4y ago
  I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment, you can just click the edit button and add stuff. Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
  - chris_wot 4y ago
    Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.
    - dalbasal 4y ago
      Look at the forest. Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc. But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality. It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform. Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's finances, moderation or anything... Wikipedia attract more need rage than any of them. Imo, this is the biggest barrier to freedom online. Freedom and transparency make people insanely critical and hostile.
      - chris_wot 4y ago
        Well, if it can’t be improved then it is stagnating at best, and degrading at worst. And it is definitely degrading.
chris_wot 4y ago
Dear god, you can’t use Wikipedia. The abusive moderation is incredible on that site. Not a project I’d ever recommend contributing to!
mschuster91 4y ago
> First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism right afterwards. > Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy. Most of Wikipedia's moderation is done by unpaid volunteers, sans legal issues which are handled by WMF via executive actions. They run a dead simple tech stack, with most being served out of highly optimized caches.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  It’s not the tech staff who are the problem. It’s the toxic community.
omoikane 4y ago
I am not sure Wikipedia is a social network, in the sense that most users aren't there to have discussions or earn followers or do other typical social network things. Also, Wikipedia is very much moderated. Wikipedia is unlike the original Wikiwiki Web (https://wiki.c2.com/ https://wiki.c2.com/) which had discussion threads on the same page as articles, and feels more like a social network. On this page: https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks it explains that things work because it's easy to roll back to the previous version, a feature that is shared by Wikipedia.

mrguyorama 4y ago

Lol what? Wikipedia has EXTREME moderation, from locking contentious articles, to hyper nerds spending all their free time browsing edit histories to revert dumb changes middle school kids made, to active efforts to undo the work that literal nation-state actors have done, to having to ban the offices of American politicians and political contractors who OFFER SERVICES TO REMOVE YOUR CONTENT FROM WIKIPEDIA It hasn't been "anyone can edit anything" since like 2008!

zamnos 4y ago
I mean if you want to say vaccines cause autism, yeah, you're going to get shut down by the moderators. But if you, as an "anyone" who is a railway engineer who's able to write effectively about electronically controlled pneumatic (ECP) brakes, or are a person living in, say, I don't know, East Palestine, Ohio, or now, Springfield, Ohio, and want to add things to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Ohio_train_derailment, you can just click the edit button and add stuff. Anyone with an Internet connection can go to their website or load up their app and hit [edit] and make changes, and it's been that way since 2001. There's not even a user account required for most. There are those that get caught up by wide IP-based blocks against middle schooler spam, and they do have to create a user account.
- chris_wot 4y ago
  Except you can’t. That stuff will often get reverted summarily. There are a group of abusive admins who will defend certain editors no matter how awful they are.
  - dalbasal 4y ago
    Look at the forest. Sure. It's an encyclopedia. It's heavily edited. Sometimes it's conflucted. There are cliques. Etc. But.. they produce an encyclopedia. It's actually free. It's transparent. It's very high quality. It's a working system. Whatever the fairness grievances people have with "censorship," on Wikipedia, they are nowhere near as bad as they are on any commery platform. Yet... whether it's Wikipedia's finances, moderation or anything... Wikipedia attract more need rage than any of them. Imo, this is the biggest barrier to freedom online. Freedom and transparency make people insanely critical and hostile.
    - chris_wot 4y ago
      Well, if it can’t be improved then it is stagnating at best, and degrading at worst. And it is definitely degrading.

chris_wot 4y ago

Dear god, you can’t use Wikipedia. The abusive moderation is incredible on that site. Not a project I’d ever recommend contributing to!

mschuster91 4y ago

> First recall all the crazy, dangerous stuff that spread on twitter/FB/yt/etc. ISIS, for example. Proud boys, other stuff. Islamist content gets rigorously moderated on all networks you mention, for years now. The far-right was similarly acted against, but at least in the case of Twitter Musk reversed a lot of their bans, with the expected result of people spreading Nazi vocabulary or Holocaust denialism right afterwards. > Second, consider Wikipedia. Freer than almost anything web, and THE juiciest target in narrative and informational war's. It's had far fewer major disasters than any of the major commercials. Held up very well. Runs on <1% of their budgets and is under constant criticism for being spendy. Most of Wikipedia's moderation is done by unpaid volunteers, sans legal issues which are handled by WMF via executive actions. They run a dead simple tech stack, with most being served out of highly optimized caches.

chris_wot 4y ago
It’s not the tech staff who are the problem. It’s the toxic community.

omoikane 4y ago

I am not sure Wikipedia is a social network, in the sense that most users aren't there to have discussions or earn followers or do other typical social network things. Also, Wikipedia is very much moderated. Wikipedia is unlike the original Wikiwiki Web (https://wiki.c2.com/ https://wiki.c2.com/) which had discussion threads on the same page as articles, and feels more like a social network. On this page: https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks https://wiki.c2.com/?WhyWikiWorks it explains that things work because it's easy to roll back to the previous version, a feature that is shared by Wikipedia.