51 ms·

How Wikipedia became the last good place on the internet

• Andrew018 3y ago
  [dead]
• bad_alloc 3y ago
  People complain a lot about the internet getting worse and worse. We can fix it, if we put in the effort to rebuild it. * Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit. * Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net. * If you can, host your own instances and federate. * Look into alternative search engines like marginalia to find "small-web" content * Talk to your friends to also make the move or at least look at alternatives to the large sites. We can't just wait for the problem to fix itself, this is something where internet users have to become active. It won't solve itself. EDIT: Commenters here are rightly saying that discoverability is a problem. Again, relying on search engines is required for productivity, but when we consider browsing for research or leisure, don't underestimate manually curated link pages. Webrings were a thing we might wanna consider again.
  • WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
    I’ve been to fediverse. Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents as twitters, even more toxic at times because there are no moderators to shut them up.
    • ants_everywhere 3y ago
      This is true. Just from a technical perspective I think toxicity isn't an entirely intractable problem. The combination of moderator + tooling + AI should eventually get to acceptable levels where you can scale moderation acceptably on average for most users most of the time. But I do think there will be a cat and mouse game as tools to evade moderation also get more advanced and are perhaps only revealed when the moderation tools are needed most. That's where it's nice to have the resources of a large corporation to invest in being able to be proactive about threats.
      • tentacleuno 3y ago
        Agreed. Though I think an important point here is that moderation has the potential to be a lot more personal on Fediverse instances, as the ratio between moderators and users is a lot higher than traditional social media outlets (Facebook, Twitter). Maybe AI has a place in moderation? I've always wondered why it isn't used more; if you give it an adequate training phase (a year?), it may be able to quickly identify and flag malicious content -- of course, you wouldn't want to ban whoever the AI tells you to, just use it as one of the signals for whether content could potentially be harmful.
        • ants_everywhere 3y ago
          Yes I think that's exactly right. In the ideal case you would want to moderate with a personal touch at the start and the use automation to scale that personality as needed. I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. There is also the client side scanning stuff that Apple and others have experimented with. Basically try to warn users before they do something so that they're at least aware of the guidelines and leave it up to them whether they think they should proceed.
          • tentacleuno 3y ago
            > I was thinking of AI in moderation mainly as signals. Like looking for synchronized activity or standard canned tactics and just surface them as signals or alerts to be looked at by humans. Basically make it easier to combat coordination and scale that is hard for any one moderater to see. 100%. It would be great if that could become public, too -- perhaps moderators could contribute to the model, maybe even automatically, through the software. Though I'm unsure as to how you would prevent bias from entering the model. I feel like AI isn't used much in solutions such as these because you can't read what its been trained upon (e.g. if a right-leaning instance uses it, it may be biased against left-leaning content), and how the final model reacts to content. (Maybe there's a way to achieve this, not an AI expert by any means.) It seems like it would be less transparent than the (arguably not great) solution we have now: shared blocklists. Anyway, on the whole it would be great if we could take advantage of technology to reduce the administrative work required to host a public Mastodon / AP instance -- if we could achieve it, such work would most likely give way to more instances.
    • thih9 3y ago
      Anecdotally, I'm happy with my mastodon instance and its level of moderation. > Many mastodongs are just the same entitled first world outrage vents Calling others "mastodongs" is not exactly the opposite of an entitled first world outrage vent. Have you tried to solve the problem yourself, e.g. finding an instance that suits you better?
      • WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
        There’s this directory of mastodon instances one is invited to browse to pick one, and after sifting through an insane amount of instances that are no longer up, instances that highly favor furry anime erotica, instances that are inclusive of LGBT+ people to the point of exlusion of everyone else at all, instances that are full of left wing activists so peaceful and welcoming that they have users with nicknames like “Let’s dismember Scott Adams” and user avatars with the sickle and the hammer, I’ve come to a conclusion that it’s not an environment I’m going to enjoy much. Since “the federation” is actively nurturing the environment to be like that, my hopes are not high.
    • kalleboo 3y ago
      At least on federated services there are no algorithms pushing them in your face. Create your own instance, invite like-minded people. You can't do that on centralized services. The first time I heard about Mastodon was from conservative libertarian-type folk who disagreed with Twitter policy, several years ago. I disagree strongly with their politics but at least they decided to create something instead of just use it as victim politics like the mainstream politicians.
    • Zambyte 3y ago
      You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse. If you don't want to see those posts, stop looking for them. Join a moderated instance. Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore.
      • unpopularopp 3y ago
        >You only see posts that you look for on the Fediverse >Follow people you want to see posts from. Unfollow people you don't want to see posts from anymore But that's the same on Twitter or Reddit too. I only follow 20 people on Twitter and I only see their posts. I only read 10 reddit subs through RSS and I only see posts from those subs. To me there is no reason to switch to an alternative because what I want is not there.
    • serial_dev 3y ago
      Mastodon will never make it (e.g my parents, non tech siblings at least know what it is). My experience, too, wasn't positive, the only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter, it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices, and that whole fediverse stuff is confusing even as a software developer, imagine how nontech people would feel (they _would_ if they ever heard about Mastodon). It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me. It had its chance when Elon took over, but then people realized that federation will not make a good user experience and will not make a community. I see anyone who offers Mastodon as a solution to anything in 2023 as "too deep in their bubble". Stop trying to make Mastodon happen, it's not going to happen.
      • kalleboo 3y ago
        I agree that Mastodon's technical limitations will never make it the mainstream choice, although something like Threads actually going through with their threat of implementing ActivityPub may make AP that through user-friendly centralized services that Mastodon servers can interact with (like with google actually supported xmpp) But I disagree with some of your other comments > The only time there was meaningful activity there was when everyone said they hate Elon and Twitter The first few months after the "exodus" when Twitter was in chaos this was true, but after that I just muted the keywords "twitter" and "birdsite" and don't hear much about it anymore, even after the rebranding to X made it impossible to keyword filter people just don't talk about it. I hear more from IRL friends "they're removing likes!" (??? apparently?) than I've seen on Mastodon. > it's an echo chamber, no interesting voices For me I've found far more interesting voices on Mastodon than on Twitter now that I'm just seeing boosts by humans instead of whatever the algorithm deemed was viral. I was bored with Twitter before I switched since there wasn't anything going on but outrage (and I made a point of unfollowing Americans who retweeted political stuff to try to signal to the algorithm I want technical stuff) but now on Mastodon my feed is full of people making and doing things instead, it's far more interesting. > It might just be me, but I also hate the name. "Follow me on Mastodon" sounds like something that will get the cops called on me. The ridiculousness of "Twitter" and "tweeting" were literally daily jokes on late-night shows when Twitter was rising. Names mean nothing. And somehow "X" is still somehow even worse. It sounds like a porn site. > will not make a community If there's anything Mastodon has created, it's communities. I doubt it will create a "world's town square" like Twitter did, but it has created lots of interesting thriving communities. Similarly to how Usenet and IRC did, which both probably had far fewer users.
  • tusqasi 3y ago
    I think that is not how we can rebuild the internet. The majority don't even know what is wrong with the internet in the place, not everyone reads hnews(That is nichest of the communities), and most users aren't even using twitter for alternatives to have an impact. (I have zero idea about the actual numbers)
    • marginalia_nu 3y ago
      Does the majority need to be part of it? Since day one the web was always built by the oddball minorities. It's easy to forget how weird it was considered to spend any amount of time online in the pre-smartphone era.
      • tusqasi 3y ago
        Think of the numbers of tik-tok, youtube, facebook, instagram, snapchat, and all those Social media users. All these users are "normal" people nowadays. Maybe the effects habits of the minorities on the trajectories of "The Internet" are diminished. (Just thoughts. Not based on anything other my opinions)
        • marginalia_nu 3y ago
          There are still those weird spaces on the web where creative oddballs gather though. Have you checked out the Gemini protocol for example? It's a weird space for weird people, in the best way.
      • Grumbledour 3y ago
        I noticed a kind of sickness that seems to have taken hold of many people working in tech over the last 15 years. The belief, that nothing can be done unless you got dozens of people, millions of funding and years of time. Or maybe it's just more younger people in this space, who don't remember that we used to build social networks in our free time in our garages? Now, maybe it's mainly a hacker news problem, because you can find people out there who just build something without thinking to much about monetization and it seems many of them consciously avoid this site. But the willingness to be an active part in making something better seems to have dwindled and people project a powerlessness to change the status quo, when indeed it was in the past always the technical people who were forerunners with this kind of stuff (and consequently are also at least partly to blame for the things we have now). But these days, you can't even convince many techies to stop using chrome, even if they admit to hating it. I wonder how we get that back? How we can convince techies, that not only can they do it, but when they build it, they will come? Because they always do!
  • ants_everywhere 3y ago
    These are all great ideas, and I echo them. But I do feel like these sorts of collective problems are hard to solve by each person trying to do their own part working alone. One reason that corporate internet won is that money transfers to a single entity, and that pot of money can be used to coordinate action in some particular direction (for better or worse depending on your view). Without some coordination mechanism, it seems a a bit too divided. It's unclear to me what the appropriate mechanism is, but I think that's the right sort of way to frame the problem.
    • js8 3y ago
      I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership. I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)
      • wildrhythms 3y ago
        Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.
        • senortumnus 3y ago
          And government protections / mandates toward that end or masquerading as being toward that end
          • velcrovan 3y ago
            So what?
        • suoduandao3 3y ago
          The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy. We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the current owners.
  • CuriouslyC 3y ago
    SEO, content farms and click mills are the things ruining the internet. All of this is the result of advertising as a business model. For any content, the perverse incentive is to copy it repeatedly with slight variations then monetize the copies with ads and SEO your monetized version to the top of the search results. What we need is a social-first internet where every piece of content is associated with an actual human and people query for content through their social graph. This will be doubly important in the age of AI.
    • hliyan 3y ago
      Also, a pay-per-use Internet (where appropriate), where people will vote for content with their wallets, instead of having to purchase subscriptions whether they read an article or not. Just a few minutes ago, I wanted to read an NYT article but it asked me to buy a $1/mo subscription. Very cheap, but a) I don't read NYT that regularly and b) doing that with every news outlet I occasionally read, adds up. On the other hand, if it had asked for $0.25 to read just that article, I might have paid it. I would have been even more likely to pay if there had been some service, possibly provided by the ISP itself, where all such microtransactions of mine are aggregated and billed once for me at the end of the month.
      • sanex 3y ago
        I've been saying this for a while. It doesn't even need to be that expensive either. Pay a penny to watch a YouTube video type of deal. It can be done through lightning network to avoid per transaction credit card fees which would probably otherwise make it too expensive. My biggest hangup is paying for something that quickly turns out to be crap. I guess people would learn pretty quickly and hopefully the recommendation algorithm would start to favor just good content over clickbait sellout garbage.
        • gosub100 3y ago
          I would love that. just a tip jar button on my browser that I load up with a few bucks every month, and send to websites or commenters who made me laugh or got me thinking. Streamers have proven (albeit crudely) that viewers are more than willing to part with their money (if they have it). And I'm not just hinting at salacious young women (who probably receive the bulk of the dollar value). There's a streamer team who broadcast live at LAX and other airports and get excited about the various air traffic. It's fun watching their dedication and passion, their broadcasting skills grow, and how happy they are to do what they enjoy. I've donated probably $200-$300 over the years to them.
  • derelicta 3y ago
    What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.
    • toyg 3y ago
      We had that, when feeds and pingbacks were a thing. But the masses don't want to self-host, nor do they want to learn about web stuff. Hence Facebook.
      • derelicta 3y ago
        Well you can selfhost if you feel like it in such situation, otherwise you can rely on the good will of good folks to do the tough job for you :)
    • Grumbledour 3y ago
      But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services. How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint? I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.
      • kreeben 3y ago
        Someone, say Google, will index them thus make them discoverable?
      • derelicta 3y ago
        I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.
      • 3y ago
  • eloisant 3y ago
    The problem is that too many people don't go to website other than their usual social media sites.
  • linuxdeveloper 3y ago
    My pitch to the public: “Join the Fediverse and help build the weird new Internet.” The Epsilon galaxy is a friendly outpost of services in the brave new decentralized digital universe, now known as the Fediverse. (I coined the term Fediverse “galaxy” to refer to a cluster of federated services/nodes run by a single entity, and it’s gained some traction on Mastodon). My galaxy is completely bootstrapped, no VC investment: https://epsilon.lol https://epsilon.lol We even have our first paying customer (8 euro/ year)!
  • endisneigh 3y ago
    I find it very ironic that this is the top post given the centralized nature of this site.
  • chrsw 3y ago
    I don't know if it can be fixed. Maybe we can slow the deterioration but we might be beyond the tipping point. The internet I joined 25 years ago is long gone and it's never coming back. It's partly a technological problem and a resource problem but it's also larger scale problem with our values.
  • vasco 3y ago
    Taking a much higher level of perspective on the issue, I don't know if people complain in the way that it matters. I mean sure they complain, but internet usage globally is up by a lot and it keeps going up, even as we discover some issues with over-use on our health. So yeah people complain but the internet, even as it is today, is I think by any metric the most loved technology available worldwide. If the internet was getting way worse in practice wouldn't a bunch of people start using somethng else and new user rates decreasing? By all metrics the internet is the best it ever was and keeps being super useful for everyone.
  • lo_zamoyski 3y ago
    A path to some desired state requires an incentive and a reduction of friction (like cost). Absent those things, you will get nowhere.
  • unpopularopp 3y ago
    >or Mastodon and post a bit. Yet when I open the explore page on Mastodon I still see the same shit: politics. https://mastodon.social/explore https://mastodon.social/explore It's almost as if the whole point of Mastodon wasn't anything more than just to be another echo chamber. But hey no bad guys from "the other side" so guess we good. HN is still the best. We need more HN not Twitter or Mastodon.
    • ggpsv 3y ago
      The whole point of Mastodon/Fediverse is that mastodon.social is not your sole option. Unlike other platforms, you have a choice. You're in control of who to follow or block, and what to mute. There is no algorithmic timeline that surfaces unwanted content to you. You can hide the boosts (i.e retweets) of any account. You can simply default to follow accounts you're interested and rely entirely on your local timeline. There are many Mastodon servers that are more niche, or at least less akin to Twitter/Mastodon.social. I originally made my account in mastodon.social but I'm in the process of moving to another server where the server timeline aligns more with what I'm looking for (though I can migrate my followers/followings, yay!). This server is also run cooperatively, which further aligns the interests and motives of everyone involved. I'd say we need HN AND more Mastodon servers.
  • abetusk 3y ago
    In my opinion, a big part of the success of Wikipedia is that it offers its content under a libre/free license (CC-BY-SA). This specifically allows for commercial re-use and re-sale. The license provides a wide umbrella so that many different people and entities can use the content without worry. Contributions provide a fly-wheel of improvement. A lot of the current batch of internet companies provide walled gardens and eventually succumb to the trappings of monopolies. In some sense, I think it's survivorship bias. The only entities that stand the test of time are the ones that provide content under libre/free licensing. While I don't disagree with your list, I think a missing component is access to the commons. Without a rich commons, our society suffers as content sinks into a copyright quagmire.
  • OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Fediverse (in the sense of the major servers that federate) is an extreme echo chamber representative of mainly a certain sociopolitical wing and mainly from North America and Western Europe. Just look at mastodon.social/explore and consider that many founding activists of Mastodon have spoken about how they yearn to keep the community just like that even as it grows. Part of the early internet was about being able to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.
    • someuser2345 3y ago
      Isn't that how the first internet started? I assume most early adopters were also based in NA and Europe.
    • afavour 3y ago
      I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it wasn’t easily found, much like the fediverse today. Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet): > I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show" https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695 https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        [flagged]
        • nkozyra 3y ago
          > hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to. Well there were obviously good and bad things about it. Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations. We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.
  • afavour 3y ago
    IMO these are tech solutions to social problems. As engineers it’s perhaps only natural that we gravitate towards them but I think there’s real danger of counter-productivity. Lemmy and Mastodon are good examples of this. Federation is a PITA. I know people who tried to switch from Twitter to Mastodon and never succeeded, getting lost in the concept of different instances etc etc. Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run because the day to day operation of federation is way more complex than a centralised solution would be. There’s nothing wrong with centralised services and Wikipedia is a great example of one that works. You just need the right governance structure and an audience willing to chip in to cover costs. Federation is over complicated and often unnecessary.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      > Mastodon instances are relatively expensive to run Compared to a theoretic distributed alternative, yes. But the largest instance of Mastodon, with something around 1% of the users of Twitter costs around $700 a month.
  • datadeft 3y ago
    Think about with you mother in mind. The issue with thinking we can fix it is that you think about another HN reader in mind. Humanity's biggest issues are coming from concentration or centralisation. You can apply this pretty much to anything: wealth, population, corporations, etc. We create bubbles based on these. The solution is decentralisation. The question is how to get there?
    • esafak 3y ago
      Centralization is what made Wikipedia, Facebook, and other sites great before they deteriorated. You can go farther when united. Up or down.
  • marak830 3y ago
    I do not discount anything you posted. At all. * I don't use any social media except here. * I have nothing to say so don't host * Duck duck go? * I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. Just wish I knew a way to actually help.
    • bad_alloc 3y ago
      > I tell everyone to move to firefox, help them set it up and most are convinced. That already helps significantly. :) > I have nothing to say so don't host A fair point, probably only a small % of people on the internet need to actualyl host something. There is some middle ground with federated hosting like write.as , so hosting is not always needed.
    • yard2010 3y ago
      Vivaldi on mobile with builtin tracker and ads blocker. I'm not affiliated just a big fan.
  • dbingham 3y ago
    I think we're taking the wrong lesson here. Wikipedia is the "Last Good Place" on the internet - it's not decentralized or federated. It is governed by a non-profit and funded by donations. There are good reasons the fediverse hasn't caught on yet and it comes down to user experience. We haven't figured out how to build a federated service that truly coheres as a single platform, network, or community across the whole network. (Yes, individual instances act as coherent communities, but the links to other instances are weak.) And we haven't figured out how to reduce the cognitive load of joining a federated platform to the point where it's accessible to the average user . I think this is a big part of why Mastodon is still touting usage in the single digit millions while Threads and Bluesky grew several orders of magnitude more as Twitter melted down. Until we solve those problems - which by necessity includes solving the discovery problem - we're not going to be able to successfully decentralize the net. Those problems are a huge part of what lead the net to centralize into massive platforms in the first place, and we can't undo it with out resolving those factors. And solving coherence and discovery in federation is a multi-trillion dollar, decades and a research team, Very Hard Problem (tm). ...but we know how to build centralized platforms that are democratically governed by non-profits. Wikipedia showed us how, and there's a lot that could be improved upon to do even better in terms of transparency and governance. And yes, democracy is hard. It just is. Community is hard. Society is hard. It requires deliberation and compromise. And it will never be perfect (as Wikipedia is far from perfect). But it would sure as hell be better than what we've got. The main piece that's missing is startup funding. Non-profit funders mostly don't understand software. We need non-profit funders who are willing to fund the development of platforms until they gain the sorts of critical mass that would allow them to fund their operations through donations.
  • akudha 3y ago
    I’d add - pay for services when you can afford it. For example, encourage smaller search engines like Kagi. Maybe pay for email, instead of using gmail. Pay for smaller/local news orgs that do original and honest reporting. And so on. And donate to archive.org etc, even if it is only 5$ When we pay for services, we can fight spam/ad invested sites, at least to some extent
    • snorremd 3y ago
      This is my approach. I've almost completely de-Googled my private life. For email I use Fastmail. I've migrated most my mail over there, but some remains on my old Google address. So many accounts to port. For search I now mainly use Kagi. Sometimes I drop into Google if I can't find what I'm looking for on Kagi. The nice thing about Kagi is I can manually block or de-prioritize SEO spam domains so I get more relevant results. Takes a bit of time to build these lists, but it does work. I use primarily Firefox and Safari as browsers. I also support Mozilla via my Pocket subscription. Edit: I also have my own website where I post content without any ads or tracking. The content is even licensed under a CC attribute and share-alike license so people can re-post and remix my content as long as they give proper attribution.
      • akudha 3y ago
        Would you recommend fastmail? I am shopping for email service
        • snorremd 3y ago
          Yes. I've used them for a few years now and never had any serious issues. Their delivery rate seems good, I don't get much spam, and so far as I know I have not missed legitimate emails. They have a fast web client where you can perform actions on your entire inbox. So far as I remember gmail only allowed you to do actions on the current page of mails. If you don't want to use their official clients you can always connect via standard IMAP and SMTP. Also they support plus-addressing like gmail, but also subdomain addressing. I.e. instead of name+alias@yourdomain.com you can use alias@name.yourdomain.com. You can also set up nice email filters quite easily, and their server supports the JMAP protocol [1], which they made. So if you want to interface with your mailbox programmatically they have a more modern protocol to use. The years I've used them I only remember them having actual noticeable downtime once. Other than that rock solid. Their first line support isn't super technical, but I've only tried to contact them once. Edit: Essentially if you want good olf-fashioned mail, Fastmail is about as good as it gets. It does not have the smart inbox concepts that Google Mail and Hey do. And not so much in terms of other fancy stuff either. But it makes up for it by using open protocols for mail, calendar, and contact lists. So no danger of lock-in. [1] https://jmap.io/index.html https://jmap.io/index.html
  • jmyeet 3y ago
    I'm honestly shocked how often I still hear technical and educated people argue that the solution is federation. You know what services we have that are federated? Phone (POTS), SMS and email. You know what services have a massive problem with spam, fraud, false positives on detection of the aforementioned, ID spoofing, etc? The exact same services. People ignore the real reason Wikipedia is successful: ownership. It's also worth noting that Wikipedia isn't federated either. We have the same issue with ISPs in the US. The best Internet is municipal broadband. The national ISPs are pretty much universally despised. Again, what's the difference? Ownership. With municipal broadband, the residents own the broadband. National ISPs exist to extract wealth from customers while doing the least possible and lobbying for legal protections against competition. It's almost like the best results are achieved when the workers own the means of production. Someone should really look into that.
  • ravenstine 3y ago
    I can appreciate this kind of thinking as much as everyone else, but I think that the "fediverse" is too much of a distraction. Federation can be a great thing, but it's an adjunct to a solution, and not much of a large scale solution in and of itself. What the web needs is new layers to make what your suggestions much more practical. Creating a website was a nice idea back in 2003 when mostly geeks with skills were using the web. Today, most people don't want to put forth the effort of creating a website. Many geeks with skills that are still around today don't want to bother creating a website because few people will find it. If you make a website, at best only people who read websites will find it. A growing number of people today don't even know what a "website" is because they hardly live on the web proper. Free web hosting is generally bad news because the platform is far more likely to either shut down or provide zero support. So back to the thing I said about new layers to the web... If we're going to bring back websites, then we need to bring back the idea that sites will be hosted on many individual machines that aren't necessarily server infrastructure. With the bandwidth most ISPs and devices are capable of today, data isn't a limiting factor in terms of serving a standard website to even thousands of users. The web was meant to be closer to a peer-to-peer model, and it can be used peer-to-peer, but the layer just isn't there to make that model seamless. Most P2P protocols avoid fiddling with the actual network stack and do entirely their own thing; BitTorrent for the most part lives in their own client applications, as historically have many other P2P protocols. That was fine when geeks were using them, but this is insufficient for making the web itself P2P. The closest implementation to what I am describing here is Yggdrasil: https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ https://yggdrasil-network.github.io/ Yggdrasil implements P2P mesh networks by behaving like a VPN, assigning an IPv6 address to peers based on public keys. There's no one network, so people are free to create their own networks, and the same address can be used between networks. Although it has some similarities with anonymity networks like Tor, it is not designed for anonymity, which I think is a good thing because Yggdrasil should focus specifically on the networking aspect. Although it's technically in alpha status, I've already been using it to network devices together in my home office. I even have it installed in my car's Android head unit so I can SSH into it and do Linuxy things with it. The current issue I see with Yggdrasil is that it's not plug-n-play enough to become the de facto next generation layer of the web/internet. It still requires manually configuring a JSON file in order to join a network and so forth. Yggdrasil isn't difficult to install, but if the world wants to go with something like it as this next layer, we need to get it to a state where the user needs next to no knowledge to set it up. With this hypothetical layer, groups of people can form their own networks and exchange addresses. This is perfect if you want to have an application similar to WhatsApp or Signal that is mostly private and scoped to groups of people, but allows users to cross into multiple groups. In terms of websites, it's perfect because you get an IPv6 address that is publicly available to anyone on your network and with none of the hassle that's involved with getting a public IP address on the clearnet. It's all a matter of who is connected to the network. If you want anonymity, this layer can still work through another layer like Tor, or even live entirely within something like I2P. A benefit to using I2P here is that its design makes DDoS attacks more difficult, at least in theory. With such a layer, hosting sites can become much more trivial. For everyday people who are a little more technically savvy but don't want to be fussing with the command line, I picture simply downloading something like a Reddit clone that runs like any other app on Linux or MacOS and it runs with a neat little admin interface. Share the address (or the domain if a secondary DNS is used) and you're off to the races.
  • Semaphor 3y ago
    I was on the (Lemmy) fediverse for a few months, selfhosted instance, a lot of comments and post, kept one niche community from Reddit alive over there. It’s pretty much worse than Reddit in most ways. Most small communities don’t exist, small-ish communities get all the assholes big subs have on reddit, because so many people browse all instead of subscribed and post on anything (literally. I had a meta community on my single user instance where I’d just log some descisions and had people vote & comment on those). You have the power mods issue, only far worse, because they are vastly more powerful now that they control whole instances. Then you have all the fascists who claim they are leftists but are actually just "anything Anti-USA is amazing". They also run major instances. I ended up deleting my instance, returning to Reddit (and simply using it from desktop only, and regularly delete my content), and the quality of discourse is already so much better again. I did create an account on beehaw and treat it as unfederated (only subscribing to local communities), the people there can be a bit strange, and there’s not a huge amount of content, but at least they aren’t as bad as the rest of the Lemmy fediverse.
  • amelius 3y ago
    The main thing that should happen is that there is a threshold of effort before people can post things. Like before Eternal September, people had to learn stuff to do things on the internet.
    • pessimizer 3y ago
      That's just leaving the internet to the most insane. A tiny bit of effort to post cuts out 95% of participants, leaving mostly the obsessed, often with a specific axe to grind. Cutting by 95% again is distilling nuttiness. The thing that should happen is carefully cultivating closed memberships, and real tools for formal group decision-making. Mods are just benevolent dictators, and the debate that happens around mods with absolute power is essentially theater. Wikipedia barely hides this with its votes that anybody can show up to, and its code of rules being a arbitrary wise-sounding series of koan-shaped aphorisms. Wikipedia has been vulnerable to anybody with a few bucks and an issue that they're willing to camp on. The only reason one can't manipulate Wikipedia at will is because you may have some real life opposition who is also attacking the same articles you are. Instead of formalizing that competition between people of different opinions, Wikipedia has ultimately fallen into dictating who is correct based on the opinion of the highest ranked interested person, within an organization that survives on donations and on volunteer editors who get income from any number of sources. This can't stand up to the manipulation of someone invested in distorting the history of hard-shelled tacos, it certainly can't (and isn't) standing up to state-state level actors.
  • isk517 3y ago
    I'd also add try and give monetary support content creators that you enjoy. Consuming things for free then relying on ads to pay the people that make things is part of how we got to this point. Also in response to your edit, isn't the entire point of Hacker News about discovery? One thing we could do right here on is have a weekly thread for people to post general places on the internet they find interesting (webpages, services, communities) but perhaps don't feel like they constitute a unique thread of their own.
  • __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I love your attitude, and I agree that we should be trying to fix this, but the problem is not a lack of signal, it's an increase in noise. Fixing the web means changing it in fundamental ways. Suppose your webbable hobby is curating trustworthy product reviews. You're the hero that's going to fix the web AND capitalism. You can still do that, but you're going to help fewer people because you have to split your attention between you know, doing the thing, and doing the kind of marketing which helps people tell the difference between your thing and the ones that are secretly ads. Meanwhile, the bad guys can focus entirely on the latter. Sorry about the time you wanted to spend comparing blenders, your hobby is now competing with marketers... Or you have to make peace with either obscurity, or contributing to the thing you're trying to kill, because you know that the second you start making an impact somebody is going to rehost your site interleaved with misinformation. Yes, let's fix this thing but the answer is protocols with different inherent priorities. We can't shout over the noise, we need to build something less noisy. My personal view is that we should stop building trust around server names and implicitly trusting whatever those servers send us. In this model the non-content-generating work converges on systems to identify and remove malicious content (either from the server or from the browser screen). Instead we should be addressing content, and sourcing it from whatever device has a copy and is most near. Our browser should know which people we trust and should make it easy for us to lean on that trust such that we can propagate only the trusted bits in the first place. That is: stop identifying ads so that we can block them, start identifying trustworthy content so we can all participate in propagating it more efficiently and supporting it's creators. Or to put it differently: there needs to be no way to spend money to promote content. No third parties injecting bits anywhere. If you notice that kind of shit, you apply annotations which distinguish the signal from the noise and then you propagate only the signal. If people abuse this power, you revoke trust in them and move on. It'll require an awareness of information hygiene, which will be work to maintain, but all of the alternatives I can see involve tolerating life in a Skinner box
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • xnx 3y ago
    This will likely be an unpopular opinion, but TikTok has been a great place for me to learn about all kinds of unique and interesting things and hobbyist communities I'd never known about: homesteading, commercial plane transport, tether car racing, DIY halloween decorations, interpretive dance, and a lot more. Top comments tend to be funny (though often the same joke) and smart.
• mgamache 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • LastTrain 3y ago
    [flagged]
• gwd 3y ago
  I seem to remember a talk I heard a very long time ago, maybe by Joel Splosky? He was saying that he'd observed the "population change" effect in USENET; where argumentative jerks tended to stay and helpful people tended to be driven away; and in his mind the "reply in-line" mechanic specifically contributed to this. So the first-order goal he had when he built Stack Overflow was to build a system with mechanics which encouraged helpful people tended to stay and argumentative jerks to be frustrated and go elsewhere.
  • Ygg2 3y ago
    Didn't that backfire anyway? Jerks found other ways to be jerks?
    • phpisthebest 3y ago
      in SO cases they became moderators and/or worked their way into the company in paid positions of authority
    • aakjsdfajsdfh 3y ago
      Yes. The jerks found meta.stackoverflow.com and for a brief period started a campaign of what is off-topic in each very-specific forum in a effort to drive content to their very specific fiefdoms. basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."
    • boxed 3y ago
      No. Stackoverflow is, after Wikipedia, the most sane place on the internet. We have our gripes of course, but there really is no contest here.
    • bnralt 3y ago
      One of the fundamental problems with most things on the internet is that there’s unlimited output. A socially dysfunctional shut-in living on the internet is simply going to have a much larger output than someone with a healthy social life that only uses the internet in moderation. Someone who is judicious about their upvotes is going to have a much smaller impact than some who just reflexively upvotes or downvotes everything based on kneejerk reactions. This becomes even more prevalent when you add gatekeepers. Most people don’t have time to be volunteer editors or moderators. Or to park themselves in the new submissions section deciding what should make it to the front page and what should drop off. So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.
• Namari 3y ago
  It would be good if Wikipedia could stay neutral and not biased. It's not as good as it was.
  • Angostura 3y ago
    This is a common complaint against many publications or resources that attempt unbiased coverage - they are are attacked by people on all sides as being biased against their side.
    • veltas 3y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...
      • gunapologist99 3y ago
        MSNBC = reliable Mother Jones = reliable Fox News = unreliable
        • nvy 3y ago
          I'm not familiar with MSNBC and have never even heard of Mother Jones, but surely it's not controversial that Fox News is unreliable? They're an absolute punch line everywhere outside the US.
          • Shocka1 3y ago
            I'm guessing you must not be from the US, as MSNBC/Fox News both are on TV at all times in various public and private spaces. It depends on the content of course (political), but MSNBC is a left leaning version of Fox News - they are the same, just on the opposite sides of the spectrum. The fact that Wikipedia doesn't rank MSNBC the same as Fox News sends up some flags for me, but I could really care less at this point in my life. Both networks have that cancerous "create outrage for views" thing going on that has been nothing but detrimental to American society. Unfortunately it's just about impossible to get away from, as Americans nowadays seem to be addicted to the constant need for drama and outrage in their lives. I'm not sure about Mother Jones, but the other two I would always take with a grain of salt.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• marcodiego 3y ago
  Probably ignoring hacker news and neocities.
  • hnbad 3y ago
    What makes you think HN is a good place. What on Earth would make you think that.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• aakjsdfajsdfh 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • Angostura 3y ago
    I suspect if you comment receives downvotes, it will be because it is verging on the incomprehensible. Seriously - I read it 3 times and I only have the haziest of ideas as to what you are trying to get at.
    • soundnote 3y ago
      Concur. I'm likely sympathetic to whatever aakj is trying to get at, but the post could really, really use edits or a more coherently formatted repost.
  • 2mol 3y ago
    Maybe as a slight input to why your comment would get downvoted: You're expressing a few semi-related frustrations, but it reads pretty incoherent, since you seem to assume folks already know the concepts you're talking about and agree with that worldview. As such you're not really making sense, and human to human suggest the following: Try to get a different perspective and mingle more with offline people. The whole culture war topics and politics can really lead you down a crappy path, and it doesn't really reflect most of reality. I hope this comes across as compassionate.
    • aakjsdfajsdfh 3y ago
      thanks. there's plenty pro-constructivism in my humanist-marxist circles. They are either openly hypocrites or too young still (like utilitarianism, it is a good thing if possible after all) But yeah, if you don't still agree it is fringe, and still think so after reading the only link on my comment, then you might as well downvote me. But that is one i'd take gladly. it is just an intro though. my point is that they are posting several academic articles on that one wikipedia which hunt "succcess" story. and somehow i've seen all of them on the front page here.
• black_13 3y ago
  [dead]
• bko 3y ago
  > Over time, Wikipedians who supported fringe content departed or were ousted. Thus, population loss led to highly consequential institutional change. Is this a good thing? It seems like homogenous hive mind effects. Works in some instances but we should aim a little higher A big problem is homogeniety in media. For instance, everyone from every major newspaper more or less went to the same schools, has a similar world view, lives in the same metro and fraternizes with the same crowds. So you have every newspaper say something like X is a [y]ist, and Wikipedia states it as fact with a lot of sources [1][2][3]. But it's all the same people
  • jwestbury 3y ago
    Well, yes, when it comes to knowledge I'd say that it is a good thing to remove those supporting fringe content. Consensus amongst those who generally care about a topic is probably better for ensuring largely correct data than the alternative of a large number of voices, each with a questionable level of actual subject matter expertise.
    • synecdoche 3y ago
      Plenty of assumptions there. There is nothing to say that correctness is a function of size or homogeneity. The claim is cause for concern in itself.
      • stuartjohnson12 3y ago
        Wikipedia's goal isn't correctness, it is to aggregate the consensus of reliable sources. Wikipedia isn't reliable because it is agreed upon, it is reliable because determining truth values is outsourced to publishers who can mostly be depended on due to the value of reputation amongst experts in the information distribution sector. Publishers have their own biases which Wikipedia will aggregate. This is still, in my experience, a better bar than any others I've come across.
        • nvm0n2 3y ago
          They mostly outsource to a large variety of very unreliable sources and then exclude others based purely on politics, to the extent that people can't even get false statements about themselves corrected, let alone false statements about other people or topics.
• pard68 3y ago
  Wikipedia is good? I find it a mix of good info and blatantly slanted. Not even just in political articles. > cambridge.org Ah, say no more
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• spandextwins 3y ago
  [flagged]
• hliyan 3y ago
  To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.
  • matkoniecz 3y ago
    I would like to pitch OpenStreetMap as another example (to be clear there are also banners about donating, but it is smaller and not misleading one)
    • local_crmdgeon 3y ago
      Yes, but I have no idea how to participate in OSM and I'm a huge map nerd. Not true of Wiki
      • amiga386 3y ago
        This probably isn't the spirit, but the simplest thing is to right-click on the map and pick "Add note", that's definitely participating, although there's an "outsiderness" to it, you have to hope an "insider" (someone who has created an account) actually works on the map to address your note... someone unlike Wikipedia where both anonymous and logged-in users get direct editing access to the underlying data.
      • simbolit 3y ago
        Back when I used android devices, I used https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/ - great user interface, it directs you to a location and asks you simple questions.
      • UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        I only recently started editing in OpenStreetMap and its fun! The OSM has a wiki with lots of documentation, and there is page on how to get started here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Getting_Involved https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Getting_Involved I find working from a computer the most satisfying to contribute. I mostly just make updates on the map for my town, the places I really engage with. Biking is a new hobby of mine, so I've updated bicycle lanes and paths, as well as crosswalks that I come across. I also sometimes update local business information and such. As someone else noted, Andriod also has the StreetComplete app, which is great for making simple and fast edits. Sometimes when I take the bus or am riding in the passenger seat of a car, I'll use StreetComplete to update the bus stops or street info as I go by. I also use Komoot for planning cycling routes, which itself uses OpenStreetMap. It's nice to see my edits show up in other places, like Komoot
• dongping 3y ago
  Not that I don't agree. I would however rank Sci-Hub, Library Genesis and Anna's Archive higher than Wikipedia. And don't forget about Internet Archive and Arxiv. This vast amount of high quality human knowledge was not available in the good old internet 20 years ago.
  • 1970-01-01 3y ago
    The irony is wonderful. 'Last' is a relative term, and was poorly chosen as an attention grabbing headline. Also worth mentioning is the Internet is not the WWW, and content is so often conflated with the network that it overflows into 'academic' papers.
• yason 3y ago
  All places ever deemed 'good' have had sufficient technological or financial, and above all intellectual barriers of entry that filter out regular joes. BBS's in the 80's. Usenet till the early 90's. WWW till the late 90's. IRC till early 00's. Forums replaced usenet groups but have been in decline for years. Once those barriers are broken and the masses flood in then the supply side will emerge and takes over with services designed for masses, to be used by the masses. This will drown all the interesting bits that used to be visible earlier. The direction of development suggests that these 'good places' will be more and more scarce in the future. Further, (curiously both) privacy and surveillance laws are slowly creeping in and making it harder to freely offer services similar to those that have already died once. This further levels the playground for bigger players.
  • HPsquared 3y ago
    Maybe a blockchain-based chat protocol, where there is a cost to posting? That's a pretty steep barrier to entry.
    • supriyo-biswas 3y ago
      That's effectively what ads are, but without the blockchain part of it.
    • ruune 3y ago
      The idea and sentence work just as well if you remove "blockchain-based" part. Where is the advantage using complicated things when easy things work just as well?
  • dm319 3y ago
    Hackernews is another example.
  • yard2010 3y ago
    Fwiw I'm still using usenet in 2023. It's great alternative to torrents :)
    • 3y ago
• imadierich 3y ago
  "good" is a point of view anakin. that place is absolutely one sided and toxic
• pcf 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • jlund-molfese 3y ago
    Don’t do this! AI-generated responses increase the noise:signal ratio and are banned on HN [1] They tend to take up a massive amount of space in the discussion, obscuring more insightful human-generated comments. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33950747
• xacky 3y ago
  Wikipedia has become the worst place on the internet for me, it's so addictive that I've been on it for decades despite being banned from editing because I vandalized it years ago. If you look at the list of "long term abuse" on Wikipedia you see a lot of addicted people taking out their frustration on Wikipedia. There is not much true difference between an admin and a vandal, in fact a lot of admins became vandals themselves, including one this month. The deletionists are the worst of all, the digital version of book burners.
  • robjan 3y ago
    What part do you find addictive? Is it the endless depth of links or the ability to search for anything you think of or something else?
    • xacky 3y ago
      It's basically like a endless library but with big gaps missing on the shelves, and you know that the books that are missing there were destroyed intentionally, and attempts to bring new books to the library are sabotaged. I hate parts of Wikipedia like articles for deletion, where endless debates around notability are held. The fact other sites monetize Wikipedia's rejected content infuriates me too.
  • 101011 3y ago
    If I may ask, how did you 'vandalize' it? It sounds like the definition of this word has some additional connotation within Wikipedia.
    • arrowsmith 3y ago
      "Vandalizing" in the Wikipedia context means editing pages to add stupid, offensive, trollish, or deliberately incorrect content. It happens all the time, which is why some pages (mainly those about controversial topics) have additional protections to make it harder for untrusted people to edit them.
      • 3y ago
• z7 3y ago
  >Whereas Wikipedia used to normalize and lend credence to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and fringe rhetoric, it has over time become firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theories. Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth.
  • vasco 3y ago
    Wikipedia's articles can be updated along with scientific progress. Wikipedia would only be in trouble if they held articles back compared to contemporaneous scientific knowledge. Not sure what your point is other than that scientific progress is a thing and consensus on how things work evolves over time as we figure things out.
  • altcognito 3y ago
    > Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. So just throw all theory/hypothesis in the same bucket because one might be true? You can't cherry pick one thing that happened to be true and say "it is wrong to label that pseudoscience" There are a lot of bad theories and hypothesis out there. Clathrate gun hypothesis is just that, and should be labeled as such.
  • bigger_inside 3y ago
    and this, exactly, is why I scoffed when I read the headline touting wikipedia as the "last good place" on the internet. It's become a defender of hegemonic status quo narratives. I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in. But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.
    • drawkward 3y ago
• throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  This isn't really controversial. People create institutions, so people leaving or joining can create institutional change. What's weird is that they frame leaving as a force for good, when this is the exception, not the rule. Usually when people are running away from an institution it doesn't get better.
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
  It is- that's why it's often attacked. It's not perfect but Wikipedia is an accomplishment and treasure compared to all the walled gardens and extractive BS everywhere.
• WhyOhWhyQ 3y ago
  What's wrong with Stack Exchange? I'm a Math Stack Exchange user and I think it's absolutely amazing for the knowledge seeker. It's a repository of high quality questions and answers that you're not going to answer yourself. You can instantly access hundreds of the smartest people in the world. You can spend a week thinking about something difficult and frequently get it answered in under an hour, sometimes 10 minutes. It's truly amazing.
  • sasaf5 3y ago
    > What's wrong with Stack Exchange? Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites... I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?
    • hospitalJail 3y ago
      Yeah as much as 'blogs' used to have a bad reputation, they are basically the only place worth visiting that isnt a social media site.
    • WhyOhWhyQ 3y ago
      I like the AskHistorians subreddit, but I haven't found much else. I think AskHistorians and Stack Exchange have a somewhat high "barrier to entry" for actually answering questions, which might be part of it. (I mean this in the sense that you're going to get down-voted to hell if you don't really know what you're doing on Stack Exchange, and I think you actually have to be a historian to answer on AskHistorians.) HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.
      • some_random 3y ago
        The difference is that the answers to history related questions don't change with nearly the same frequency that tech related answers change, and even still r/askhistorians doesn't just lock "duplicate" questions so answers that are new or subtly different can still be submitted. Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.
• eimrine 3y ago
  You are wrong, Wikipedia is too being influent from US govt. Torrents are the last good place.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• js8 3y ago
  Yanis Varoufakis had some interesting talks about techno-feudalism. He argues that if the big cloud and platform companies control the platform, it's not really a free market capitalism anymore. I used to be skeptical, because I believe for such transformation to take hold completely, a supporting ideology has to be developed, but maybe it's just too early for that yet and some ideology will appear. Varoufakis is also talking about this geopolitical context, where only US and China control these companies, and EU for instance has total dependency on them. Anyway, one way to counteract it would be to start conceptualizing cyberspace as a public space. Many countries developed public radio and TV broadcasts as a way to counteract private mass media. Maybe we should have cloud (and communication, payment, digital goods) platforms that are operated as a public service.
  • anononaut 3y ago
    I want to discuss online my burnin disdain for governments. I'm certain likeminded people would not be allowed to on a platform operated as a public service. For true freedom of expression, it's a nonstarter.
    • js8 3y ago
      I think you're wrong, there were plenty of anti-government people appearing in public TV back in the 60s, 70s, 80s.. The government doesn't really care as much as you think it does.
      • anononaut 3y ago
        The world is radically different now than it was back then.
• kayxspre 3y ago
  I have since distanced myself from Wikipedia as I feel I was increasingly pushed out of the "Cabal" (a term used to describe editors with aligned interest who usually worked together to set standards others must follow) who vigorously enforced the policy without considering the experience of, and willingness to engage with, new editors. I would rather have them create their own world while I move on to contribute to other communities more willing to welcome me.
  • mikhailfranco 3y ago
    Agree, I had one very bad experience on Wikipedia. It was not a controversial or political subject area. I reverted ~30 bland look-at-me copy pasta contributions that might have belonged on the category page, but certainly not on every instance page. Obviously the right thing to do. Not controversial - or so I thought... Some jumped-up self-appointed 'editor' appeared as-if-by-magic, made an obviously stupid decision to keep all the copy pasta, backed it up with a kangaroo court of 1 or 2 buddies weighing in on the Talk page, and that was that - 30 polluted pages.
    • denton-scratch 3y ago
      > and that was that - 30 polluted pages. This happens. Unless you're heavily-invested in the subject of an article, you can just shrug and move on, no? There's over a million articles you can choose to edit. And by the way, when you made your edits, were you appointed to the position of editor, or were you a " jumped-up self-appointed 'editor'" as well?
      • mikhailfranco 3y ago
        I moved on, it was many years ago. But now that you mention it ... :) No, I was doing everyday wikigardening of pages that were well-known to me. The 'editor' was jumped-up and self-appointed in the sense that: they were not the original poster of the copy pasta; they had no previous record of creating or editing those pages; they had a bezillion WP edits (indicating an almost full-time obsession with editing random pages); and they had no rational argument against my common-sense application of normal WP rules & style guidelines.
• gosub100 3y ago
  One band-aid that would help (but not fix) the internet is a revolt or at least a separation between web2.0 and web1.0. There should be organized, easy ways to consume and switch between 2.0 and 1.0, and while I know this already exists to some extent, I am referring to a social movement on top of the technical differences. Publishers should be pressured to offer web 1.0 (or at least know that a sizeable subset of viewers only consumes 1.0). Next, there should be a market for re-publishing web2.0 into 1.0. For instance, if a news article is posted on a major outlet, services (people, bots, whatever) should crawl it and strip the content and pictures and re-serve it as web 1.0 content. Then, a browser add-on or internet service should allow you to enter the URL to the main article, but then switch to the 1.0 version (thanks to someone who already translated it). This is NOT the same as "disable javascript in your browser". If you do that, many sites will turn you away. I'm proposing a translation layer of a rendered webpage back to 1999 style, then sharing that document in p2p network. This would take the edge off one major form of enshittification of the web, make your mobile page load faster, eliminate tracking, and so forth. Although it wouldn't solve the deeper issues of click-bait infotainment and misinformation.
  • fyokdrigd 3y ago
    disable JavaScript. internet becomes beautiful. it's one click away with uBlockOrigin. disable for all and enable per domain as they deserve it. hit a link that don't load? hit back and try another. it's not like there's no alternatives for everything.
  • extraduder_ire 3y ago
    I thought the main distinction between web 1.0 and 2.0 was that 1.0 sites are operated and created (content written by) by the same people, whereas 2.0 sites are mostly content from the users of a site. (I know the name is a bit of a retrofit from after O'Reilly decided to host a web 2.0 conference. Back when it was meaningless.)
    • gosub100 3y ago
      I was mainly going after javascript and the notion of interactive pages and styling. I might be using the name web2.0 incorrectly, if so my apologies. Chrome had "reader view", not sure if that's still around.
• KingLancelot 3y ago
  [dead]
• nonrandomstring 3y ago
  I'd totally settle for the Internet circa 2000-2005 in a box, with a 1990's Google search interface. Gimme a VM, with maybe 20 or 50 TB compressed image of Wikipedia, all of the early Stack Exchange and a few mailing lists or forum archives for Tex, Lisp and whatnot... and I'd be happy on my porch, in my rocking chair with a bottle of whiskey and a pipe to smoke. Why do you kids have to keep meddlin' with things!
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    > with a 1990's Google search interface. Well, Google didn't exist until 1998, and hadn't made much impact until about 2002.
  • bawolff 3y ago
    Have you seen https://kiwix.org/en/ https://kiwix.org/en/
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• elzbardico 3y ago
  I wonder how the internet would look today if we didn't had to have NAT. Would everyone have their own servers without even realizing that most of time, would federation and peer to peer be the defaults?
• sproketboy 3y ago
  [dead]
• replete 3y ago
  Download as many old books as you can.
• matkoniecz 3y ago
  I like to think that OpenStreetMap is also a nice project.
  • ThinkingGuy 3y ago
    Also: Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders https://gutenberg.net https://gutenberg.net https://www.pgdp.net https://www.pgdp.net
• whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  Can't really trust an academic on this matter, Wikipedia is like academia it's a closed system where a small group get to decide what opinions are correct, what facts get a mention and what are worth looking at with a feedback loop to itself that is used to control facts by deciding what sources are valid. Really the open decentralized internet is the antithesis of academia. Not to say its all bad but reading wikipedia you have to be aware of that it's an opinionated lens of viewing the world, and by not realizing you're viewing through a lens is why over the past decade people keep getting blindsided when reality doesn't play out how their bubble told them it would. Honestly I feel a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses would be much more useful for actually making sense of the world we have today.
  • slfnflctd 3y ago
    > a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses I love this idea. Not likely to happen with Wikipedia as it currently exists, but could possibly be built with a Wikipedia article as one of many links listed for a particular subject. Slight tangent, but this is why I go to All Sides News when I feel I need more varied perspective on an issue. I don't use it a lot, but when I do I'm super glad it exists.
  • carimura 3y ago
    > Wikipedia is like academia it's a closed system where a small group get to decide what opinions are correct, what facts get a mention and what are worth looking at with a feedback loop to itself that is used to control facts by deciding what sources are valid Came here to say this. 98% of the content is perfectly fine. Searching for "lemurs" in any search engine returns a perfectly trustworthy (calling all lemur experts!) wikipedia page. But, look for anything divisive, political, cultural, etc., and I've increasingly noticed the articles take clear positions.
    • Swenrekcah 3y ago
      I'm actually very curios about this. Can you link to an example of a clear position? I ask because I'm thinking it may be that, as political discourse becomes more polarized, it is conceivable that a mostly neutral article is perceived as biased in the wrong direction by both camps. So if you can find a good example of what you have in mind, it would be really helpful to examine it and see what might be going on.
• gwbas1c 3y ago
  > the Last Good Place on the Internet Wait, I thought Hacker News was "the Last Good Place on the Internet" (Thanks Deng!)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• ivanhoe 3y ago
  My (admittedly personal & anecdotal) impression of Wikipedia is that the objectivity of the content highly depends on the subject - particularly anything that touches on more recent historical events and public/political figures continues to be of the debatable objectivity (at least on the subjects that I'm familiar with enough to notice the problem).
  • soundnote 3y ago
    Yes. There are some remarkably high-quality articles on somewhat esoteric topics that don't directly touch on politics that I'd definitely recommend, but if it touches on politics, it's highly likely to be tainted and editorialized.
  • braiamp 3y ago
    I would argue the opposite. There's no way to have a nuanced and constructive topic if it ever touches, either by implicit or explicit association, other sensitive topics. Example, create a list of the qualities that a country must fulfill to be socialist, compare that list with the characteristics of countries that are considered socialist, and find examples of countries that fit those characteristics and ask yourself why they are not considered socialist. At the end of the argument you notice that there are no country totally socialist, capitalist, communist or any other economic theory. Every country is a piecemeal of different concepts and policies that may or may not make sense in conjunction to everything else. But socialism/communism bad.
  • Rebelgecko 3y ago
    Someone recently pointed out the incongruity between the English wikipedia article about the "Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion" and the Arabic Wikipedia article about the "مجزرة مستشفى المعمداني" (Baptist hospital massacre). Without sidelining the thread discussion with unproductive arguments about the conflict, I found it really fascinating how the two articles can paint such different pictures, just by picking different sources or in some cases even using the same sources but organizing the information differently (eg which disputed facts get to be in the article's infobox)
    • 3y ago
• zare_st 3y ago
  It's also worth to mention that Wikipedia is absolutely not a good source for contemporary events. These use artificially constructed validity when it comes to primary news sources. While certain media outlets are known to be state propaganda, many accepted outlets are propaganda too and do not deserve to be sourced. However this issue is not unique to Wikipedia.
  • ZeroGravitas 3y ago
    I find it a good source just for the non-political reason that the "news" is obsessed with "what just happened" and "what's about to happen (maybe)" and Wikipedia is more of a summary of the whole topic.
• 6510 3y ago
  Bookmarks and history are still terribly primitive. (Mosaic had full text history search.) Imagine something like automatic archiving everything one visits with tools to prune the data, some granular scoring based on number of visits with automatic [intelligent] organization in a folder tree/web directory. A slider that on the left only shows the tree of bookmarks somewhat to the right everything ever visited, further to the right the rest of the www starting with the largest websites. Have both a fixed tree and a dynamic one. Bookmarks visited often gradually migrate to the root. Less often is moved into appropriately named folders. Different bookmark buttons for different projects. (say, start with work/recreation/administration) Do paid listings, say 5 euro per year per domain. Have additional hosts to subscribe to that expand your index with free listings. Just a rough idea, others can no doubt do better.
• trash_cat 3y ago
  It is very good that the internal and political inner dynamics or wikipedia or pointed out. People should be aware of them. However, judging wikipedia´s place in the internet or the internet in general is an normative judgement that has nothing to do with Wikipedia´s internal dynamics.
• xeckr 3y ago
  I love Wikipedia. It's my favourite website of all time. However, to say that "fringe" editors were largely driven out is false. In many places, "fringe" editors co-operate to win edit wars and form secret voting blocks in community decisions in an attempt to push their misshapen ideas into the mainstream.
• carapace 3y ago
  As an aside, > This had meaningful consequences, turning an organization that used to lend credence and false balance to pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, and extremism into a proactive debunker, fact-checker and identifier of fringe discourse. This isn't a good thing. Wikipedia is supposed to be a source of knowledge, not a arbiter of reality. From Information Theory we have the result that the unpredictability of a message is a measure of its information content. Ergo, deleting unpredictable ("fringe") information makes you stupid. Also, consider that we need to learn to deal with ambiguous and false information to be able to learn to discern true information in the first place. (E.g. just like a profanity filter needs to have a list of profanities to work, eh?) Then there is the simple truth that things that are crazy "conspiracy" nonsense sometimes turn out to be true! Cosby is a rapist. Epstein ran a resort for pedos. Crypto AG was a CIA front. Something called MK Ultra really happened. I could go on all day. E.g. over half of the regime changes in the Twentieth Century were the result of coups, aka conspiracies. In re: pseudoscience, there are several healing modalities that I have personal experience with, that are outside the mainstream, and all of them are decried as pseudoscience. Just because something hasn't yet been systematized by mainstream science doesn't make it not exist. I know of a prominent author who had his article in WP deleted by deletionist activists calling themselves the "Guerrilla Skeptics"! It's a kind of culture war: norm core skeptics vs. the weird. Anyway, my point is that as an encyclopedia WP is weakened, not strengthened, by making it into a cultural conformity center that omits whole dimensions of human experience.
• oliveiracwb 3y ago
  The problem of cyberspace and the real world has the same root: advertising (in all its forms) generally stimulating consumption (or selling ideas). The real world would also be a nicer place with less advertising. Somehow they discovered that controlling the form, manner and timing of advertisements is a great power. And they are fighting to take this power from the big networks.
• OhNoNotAgain_99 3y ago
  [dead]
• slibhb 3y ago
  With "fringe editors" forced out from wikipedia, the people who forced them out have become more and more political. Instead of arguing about homeopathy and astrology, hot topics now include trans issues and covid. The former situation was preferable. The basic problem is that, once you win your battle, you ought to pack up and go home. In practice this rarely happens; success leads to triumphalism and excess.
• user3939382 3y ago
  I've soured on Wikipedia. You can't make edits without turning Wikipedia internal politics into your full-time hobby because you run into people who have. That doesn't mean their opinions are more or less correct, yet they count for more. Any political or politically controversial topic you basically get the US State Dept.-approved official/propaganda narrative on the topic with 0 room for other views. To actually get the full view of these topics that should be in the article, you instead have to refer to the dozens-of-pages-long Talk pages to see all the non-corporate-media viewpoints being squashed and silenced. These in turn aren't readily available in mobile format. I recently was researching a news outlet blacklisted as a source from Wikipedia, which is known for being very pro-Palestinian. When I googled the very first username for the vote on Wikipedia to ban them, it belonged to a pro-Israeli think tank writer in DC. How interesting it would be to unmask the rest of the votes. So my trust in Wikipedia on the issues where you need trust is basically 0.
  • renewiltord 3y ago
    Wikipedia doesn't cover politically charged topics very well. I mostly edit topics which don't have such a problem. Even so, I've managed to edit the Derek Chauvin article without any trouble. There's a certain shape of controversy that's painful to get involved with. Usually it's matters of nationalism. For instance, anything with respect to India is a complicated thing to act on.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • fossislife 3y ago
    > To actually get the full view of these topics that should be in the article, you instead have to refer to the dozens-of-pages-long Talk pages to see all the non-corporate-media viewpoints being squashed and silenced. This is exactly what I do. When I visit articles about politically discussed topics I often read the Talk pages. I usually find important and (regularly) well-sourced information on there that, for some reason, do not make it into the article.
• ZeroGravitas 3y ago
  I wonder how much the open content had an effect here, there were several fork attempts when communities weren't being heard and so rather than stay and fight they set up outside the system and fizzled away.
• bebop404 3y ago
  One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all. The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
  • aidenn0 3y ago
    Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources. When a source is not freely available online that often involves going to the library and looking things up; there are people who spend many hours a week doing this, unpaid as a hobby.
    • kulahan 3y ago
      This really isn't true. There are references hidden around Wikipedia which link to a report for proof, but the report was actually linking to the Wiki page to begin with. It becomes circular proof, and it's pretty tough to spot.
    • rewmie 3y ago
      > Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources. There's an insidious aspect to Wikipedia's reliance on verifiability: any wild claim can be posted, repeated by third parties, and afterwards have Wikipedia refer to those third parties as sources. I know this to be a fact because I read a Wikipedia article on the subject. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesi...
  • baja_blast 3y ago
    So when the sources contain inaccurate information then Wikipedia does so as well. I don't see how that is a good thing people view Wikipedia as the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica which was curated by experts. Wikipedia should strive for the truth since finding truthful and factual information is becoming increasingly more difficult online.
• amriksohata 3y ago
  I disagree, I have read a lot of articles on wikipedia and whilst they are factual and tell the truth, they don't always tell the other side which can still be truthful. I am not talking about the most popular topics but more so around niche areas of politics.
• hallarempt 3y ago
  I think my blog is also a pretty good place, albeit probably uninteresting to most if not all people. But it's my place, and nobody else influences me.
• skymast 3y ago
  [dead]
• alkonaut 3y ago
  I just want to be the lone comment that says I do not see any annoying bias or editorializing on Wikipedia. Not even on sensitive or political subjects. But that’s of course my subjective view of it. Judging the number of times I see that complaint here, I’m starting to think that commenters here have a different political midpoint than the one of the people editing the English Wikipedia? Are HN readers more American, for example? (the usual complaint for some reason tends to be that Wikipedia has a progressive bias, that could perhaps be explained by editors being more international).
  • mckn1ght 3y ago
    Have you ever read the edit history of a page on a topic you know to be controversial in society? The constant back and forth is something to behold. And for people who think Wikipedia is just a static unchanging webpage, they’ll never realize that depending on the minute that you read an article, it could be very biased in one direction or the other versus what your grandma saw when she read it an hour ago and posted a link on facebook.
    • epgui 3y ago
      > on a topic you know to be controversial in society What else could you reasonably expect? Unanimity without discussion?
      • mckn1ght 3y ago
        GP: “I do not see any annoying bias or editorializing on Wikipedia. Not even on sensitive or political subjects” (emphasis theirs) There is no unanimity being arrived at, it’s simply whomever has made the latest edit by the time a given person arrives at the page. Many people can read the “same” article and if they take it at face value, arrive at different conclusions. I didn’t state my expectations about how WP should function. I pointed out why I think GP is wrong.
        • alkonaut 3y ago
          I see the edit wars. But I don’t see the suffering quality. A lot of posts on controversial topics quickly get locked down so the wars slow down too.
• z3ncyberpunk 3y ago
  Yes, let's all start trusting the opinion of Cambridge -_-
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  it may not be along the lines of the article's point, but using wikipedia can often not be the most ideal. i understand how they have managed to stay autonomous, but the banners to raise funds get worse every time they have a new campaign. it is almost one step away from finding a ublock filter for those banners. (also see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33174533) combined with some editorial decisions it takes (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32303279 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32303279) and potential state-level involvement (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21200121) in some cases, it is not always the ideal source, but the best available for us for non-critical scenarios.
• Mr_Minderbinder 3y ago
  Has anyone else noticed how the articles for certain topics are written in a different style from how they once were? For example while reading about the Russian Civil War I came upon the article for the "Jewish Bolshevism" conspiracy theory, which was in vogue amongst the White movement. The current article now says explicitly that it is false, whereas older versions (pre-2018) just described what the theory was. I also see this a lot on political articles, you will now read "x falsely claimed y" or "x falsely accused y". The same articles written in the old style, if they exist, always omit the "falsely", they never make a truth judgement within the article body. I for one do not appreciate being preached to in such an awkward and heavy handed way especially in politically fraught and controversial topics where the basis of this judgement is often nothing better than a news report. As for the conspiracy theories, Wikipedia is feigning knowledge and authority it does not possess, as it is in fact more difficult and often impossible to disprove such theories than it would be to do the contrary. I often find that Encyclopaedia Britannica handles these topics more elegantly, they simply say what it is and leave it at that.
  • gunsle 3y ago
    100%. I have noticed this in a ton of contested topics. It will often make some kind of judgement on the topic nowadays, which is not what I want out of Wikipedia. It’s my biggest issue with mainstream media as well. I don’t need your opinion on what happened, just give me the facts. But at least articles in the NYT or other media outlets are attributed to the author. With Wikipedia, there is no author to attribute the opinion/bias to, which makes it far more nefarious in my opinion. For the longest time, Wikipedia simply presented facts, with sources, and allowed the user to make their own judgments. Nowadays, many pages are so heavily and obviously biased in one direction. A personal example I noticed is when I did research on Intelligent Design. The page for it is so heavily biased in one direction, the idea that it’s completely BS “pseudoscience.” That may be the case, but how about you let me read the article and come to that conclusion myself, rather than poison the well from the start, by attempting to bias me in one direction before I’ve even read anything beyond the summary.
• devilsAdv0cate 3y ago
  [dead]