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That saying said, people often wrongly call technical problems social, being blind to obvious technical flaws that drive users into various directions. They att

by wruza 2y ago

That saying said, people often wrongly call technical problems social, being blind to obvious technical flaws that drive users into various directions. They attribute it to some inherent user property when in reality it’s a technical nuance of a system that does it. Most problems include a user behavior, but most user behaviors include the shape of some existing solution.

diggan 2y ago
I think I understand what you mean, but it would be really helpful to make sure I understand if you could make a practical and specific example of what you mean? Has there been a case with Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Community where this specifically has happen?
- wruza 2y ago
  I think this can only be seen by an insider-enough, and I am not that much of a wikipedia guy. An example that probably everyone can understand is youtube. Content creators are often begging for like/subscribe and even present graphs that show that only 10% of their regular viewers are subscribed. This seems like a social problem to some, but in reality it’s a technical problem because if you like/subscribe, your feed will drown in “similar” videos of much lower quality and that will haunt you for weeks. And there’s a whole set of other ui/ux issues even if you decide to subscribe. So many people avoid interacting with videos too much because of that. I know youtube is a beaten horse, but it is a textbook example of what I mean. I could theorize about what’s wrong with wikis, but wiki guys see it much better. My key thought here is “check twice that it’s not technical before calling it social”, but it may not be the case here.
  - bawolff 2y ago
    On the other hand, the entire reason that creators want you to like/subscribe is so you drown in their videos, so you watch more, so they get more ad $$$. If liking/subscribing didn't have that affect, they probably wouldn't beg you to do it. As an aside though, only 10% participating isn't very unique to youtube. Its a pretty common rule of thumb that 89% only lurk, 10% participate in some limited fashion, and 1% become super active, in any online community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
    - wruza 2y ago
      Their videos pop up in the feed by simply watching. That’s how 90% stays retained without an explicit connection. What happens after subscribing is two-fold: a subscribed viewer gets more “related” crap from other channels due to shown “interest”, and a channel gets more chances to get recommended to new people. So it’s a growth thing, but not directly linked. But I agree in general that a problem may be sort of recursive or self-supporting and not always technical. I just see people often enumerating simplest solutions and defeating them in the same comment, so that nothing gets done or even tried, when real-world systems are always complex and complexity is hard but at the same time has many potential tipping points. People build empires on default settings alone and lose businesses on a tiny but stable leak in the funnel. Thinking that there’s no such important and easily overlooked points in any non-trivial system, and it’s just all about users, is a mistake.
- wruza 2y ago
  This is another good example of people writing the problem off to social without even trying something more sophisticated than a counter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578134 The amount of trivial self-defeating ideas that for some unclear reason supposed to prove the absense of a solution - with the current solution being a dead stupid counter - is amazing.
- bawolff 2y ago
  I'm not sure if this is what the parent means, but i kind of feel like the tags vs categories debate. MediaWiki uses the term "category" for its system of tagging pages. This generally is used as a very complex system of hierarchy with many nested levels and prescribed "correct" categories. Some people think we should use "tags" instead (e.g. less nesting and more intersecting. Instead of a category "People in Belgium" use a tag "People" and a tag "Belgium" and apply both). On a technical level the feature requirements are basically the same, but the word tag and the word category have such strong connotations that the mere name strongly supports one social organization over another (imo)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- jjmarr 2y ago
  I would say the current lack of editors is a technical issue and not a social one. Most search engines and large-language models discourage readers from going to Wikipedia by hiding the source of the information. The actual technical means the Wikipedia community uses for social communication (IRC, email, Wikitext talk pages) are out of date as well. We definitely need an official Discord equivalent with wider adoption. I can't effectively use IRC on my phone and computer simultaneously. In terms of editor outreach, I don't have any easy answers. Wiki Education is very good at bringing in editors.

by wruza 2y ago

diggan 2y ago

I think I understand what you mean, but it would be really helpful to make sure I understand if you could make a practical and specific example of what you mean? Has there been a case with Wikipedia/the Wikimedia Community where this specifically has happen?

wruza 2y ago
I think this can only be seen by an insider-enough, and I am not that much of a wikipedia guy. An example that probably everyone can understand is youtube. Content creators are often begging for like/subscribe and even present graphs that show that only 10% of their regular viewers are subscribed. This seems like a social problem to some, but in reality it’s a technical problem because if you like/subscribe, your feed will drown in “similar” videos of much lower quality and that will haunt you for weeks. And there’s a whole set of other ui/ux issues even if you decide to subscribe. So many people avoid interacting with videos too much because of that. I know youtube is a beaten horse, but it is a textbook example of what I mean. I could theorize about what’s wrong with wikis, but wiki guys see it much better. My key thought here is “check twice that it’s not technical before calling it social”, but it may not be the case here.
- bawolff 2y ago
  On the other hand, the entire reason that creators want you to like/subscribe is so you drown in their videos, so you watch more, so they get more ad $$$. If liking/subscribing didn't have that affect, they probably wouldn't beg you to do it. As an aside though, only 10% participating isn't very unique to youtube. Its a pretty common rule of thumb that 89% only lurk, 10% participate in some limited fashion, and 1% become super active, in any online community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
  - wruza 2y ago
    Their videos pop up in the feed by simply watching. That’s how 90% stays retained without an explicit connection. What happens after subscribing is two-fold: a subscribed viewer gets more “related” crap from other channels due to shown “interest”, and a channel gets more chances to get recommended to new people. So it’s a growth thing, but not directly linked. But I agree in general that a problem may be sort of recursive or self-supporting and not always technical. I just see people often enumerating simplest solutions and defeating them in the same comment, so that nothing gets done or even tried, when real-world systems are always complex and complexity is hard but at the same time has many potential tipping points. People build empires on default settings alone and lose businesses on a tiny but stable leak in the funnel. Thinking that there’s no such important and easily overlooked points in any non-trivial system, and it’s just all about users, is a mistake.
wruza 2y ago
This is another good example of people writing the problem off to social without even trying something more sophisticated than a counter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578134 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42578134 The amount of trivial self-defeating ideas that for some unclear reason supposed to prove the absense of a solution - with the current solution being a dead stupid counter - is amazing.
bawolff 2y ago
I'm not sure if this is what the parent means, but i kind of feel like the tags vs categories debate. MediaWiki uses the term "category" for its system of tagging pages. This generally is used as a very complex system of hierarchy with many nested levels and prescribed "correct" categories. Some people think we should use "tags" instead (e.g. less nesting and more intersecting. Instead of a category "People in Belgium" use a tag "People" and a tag "Belgium" and apply both). On a technical level the feature requirements are basically the same, but the word tag and the word category have such strong connotations that the mere name strongly supports one social organization over another (imo)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jjmarr 2y ago
I would say the current lack of editors is a technical issue and not a social one. Most search engines and large-language models discourage readers from going to Wikipedia by hiding the source of the information. The actual technical means the Wikipedia community uses for social communication (IRC, email, Wikitext talk pages) are out of date as well. We definitely need an official Discord equivalent with wider adoption. I can't effectively use IRC on my phone and computer simultaneously. In terms of editor outreach, I don't have any easy answers. Wiki Education is very good at bringing in editors.