6 ms·

Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (2019)

122 points by Tomte 2y ago

JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
The huge number of communities that have elected to move to Discord, an information black hole, seems like a strong counterargument to the generality of this claim.
- newsclues 2y ago
  OSINT communities use discord to communicate and discuss information from mostly twitter and telegram and organize and share the packaged information. Information organization is hard and lots of work. Not everyone (or every community) has the same need to organize information, and not everyone has the ability or inclination to do so. Information getting lost on discord is a problem, but that just means the useful stuff needs to be archived elsewhere, and frequently there is another distribution network involved.
  - InDubioProRubio 2y ago
    Accurate Problem description, which can easily be countered with .. [extra effort expended in idealized behaviours] .. [I could paste Lore Ipsum here everybody stopped reading at the idealization]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- pjc50 2y ago
  This seems to be a generational issue. It makes me sad, but I suspect it's because doing things "in public" on the Internet has become increasingly exhausting and people have retreated to gated communities. It's not a black hole, it's a "dark forest": you can't find their information because they're scared of you.
  - bonoboTP 2y ago
    It's not super new though, people had private forums in the phpbb era as well, which you could only read after login. Or think about IRC, private torrent trackers etc.
    - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
      I dunno if there were that many successful private forums; locking off access to unregistered users back then was a really good way of ensuring no new users finding the place back then. Very very possible I just wasn't aware of private forums enough though. Beyond that though, information was still neatly catalogued into small focused threads whereas Discord's biggest issue is that stuff just vanishes in a gigantic chain of messages. Was a bit late for IRC's heyday but am I right in thinking it wasn't guaranteed that all users would have access to the chat history? That would create an impetus to log the information elsewhere. Private trackers such as what.cd tended to attract people with strong archivist streaks which I think largely resolved the issue there. Oink could go down and you'd know that a huge chunk of its catalogue would appear on Waffles within a few months.
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        It was not just totally private forums but many big forums had private sections and subforums where the real meaty discussions occurred.
      - qingcharles 2y ago
        I ran a private business forum for online marketing. The locked door approach meant it developed a legendary reputation and meant many more people talked about it than they probably would have if it had been open. The mystery effect.
        JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
        This also happens with some private torrent trackers; the status of having an account means people put more effort into maintaining the place too. Online marketing feels like a field that would _need_ a private place to talk tbh; anything public would be a beacon for self-promotion efforts by people who are quite good (or at least relentless) at doing so.
Kinrany 2y ago
Archive Of Our Own is not just any group of fans of course, the very name of the website refers to them deciding to write a better version of fanfiction.net. The award reflects the main goal of the website, not something that happened by accident.
ziddoap 2y ago
>users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a general audience. But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor. I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags, as they do here.
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  Exactly that, it's labor intensive, while tech tries to reduce labor intensivity by using magic or rules or whatnot. Related and larger scale projects are sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes, although Wikipedia makes use of a lot of automation as well.
- jchw 2y ago
  It's mildly amusing that AO3 is considered more palatable than booru websites. Both AO3 and many of the boorus have content that would be hard for most folks to stomach. I guess AO3 has the advantage of being mostly text, (which seems to be generally less visceral to people,) but it is also nearly completely uncensored, since that's kind of the point of it.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    Yes, overall I wouldn't describe either of them as particularly palatable to a general audience, haha. Your hunch is the same as mine -- text has much less potential for instant shock. On AO3 you have to, sort of, go out of your way (by reading, or searching for specific tags, etc.) to hit the unsavory stuff.
    - 2y ago
CM30 2y ago
I mean it makes sense. The biggest problem with the internet today is that all the big tech companies want to automate as much as possible, and that necessarily means quality and organisation will take a massive hit. Google services, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media services, Amazon and other marketplaces, digital storefronts like Steam and the console download game shops... they're all terribly organised and flooded with garbage because no one's manually doing anything to fix it. Meanwhile, you've got fanwork sites like this one which have better quality and organisation standards than any large company site, simply because someone gives a toss about whether things are easy to find and of high quality.
0xCMP 2y ago
https://archive.today/Ho1dM https://archive.today/Ho1dM
datadrivenangel 2y ago
People who care deeply tend to do things better than people who don't care. Large organizations only organize information to the point of short term marginal profitability. If being better organized beyond a point doesn't get you more money in the next few months/years, it isn't worth it to most businesses. Likewise, being extremely organized personally is probably unnecessary, but to each their own.
- commandlinefan 2y ago
  > better than people who don't care IME it goes deeper than that: caring is ruthlessly stamped out by crushing bureaucratic processes. Results don't matter, what matters is never being responsible for a mistake. Fans can fix minor mistakes - in corporate America, even the smallest misjudgment is fatal. The only way to win is to never actually do anything, but keep up the appearance of being busy.
  - sumtechguy 2y ago
    I think it is more simple. They really do not care much about it. Lets say you sell a product. You have had 3 revisions of that product. Support on that item is very minimal. The current version is what you sell and that is it. The previous versions are just historical interesting things. Properly archiving it and cataloging it takes time and money. Does talking about your older items sell you more items? Maybe maybe not. It is just a thing you sell. Not any sort of historical artifact to be preserved. It is just how you make a living scraping the margin. But to a collector or 'fan'. All 3 hold importance to your collection. All of the details/metadata are mapped out so you know why v1 is worse/better/interesting from v2/v3. What is worse in many of the 'fan' cases is you find it is usually 1-2 people mapping that stuff out. They map out what they find interesting. Many also get heaps of verbal and legal abuse from both the companies and other people on the net. So they bail out and whatever 'fan' site came out of it, rots. Like one project I found a few months ago. Tons of stuff mapped out but some errors here and there, no big deal. I have a set of patches ready to go to fix it. But the orig author has ghosted. They got tired of tons of abuse from other 'fans'. Frankly what I see in the previous requests I want nothing to do with it. So I keep my stuff private.
cjs_ac 2y ago
This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again. Big tech simply isn't willing to engage with the detail, and increasingly expects the world to conform to its expectations. That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements.
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements. That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions. When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
  - hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    And that customization kills you over time. Heck, a big reason a lot of banks and other big enterprises eventually move over to one of the big vendors is because they've built up a hodgepodge of now unmaintainable crap that nobody can touch. This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
    - robocat 2y ago
      Customisation has other major costs. 1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly encourages customisation for this reason (and for other reasons that are mostly against a business' interests) 2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known payroll system versus custom. 3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised across many companies e.g. mobile app development in 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is painful). Another cost is that internal development teams are often shit and certainly can never compete with Darwinian best-available-on-market software. 4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the customisation provides business benefits but we have all worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits versus costs were slim. Two examples of bad customisation requests: A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want different things so developing common features is really hard. B) larger customers with demanding internal rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been hell. I think their internal software teams decided to build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).
esafak 2y ago
Sure, it works for your anime fan site, but what about when money is involved, like in a search engine? That attracts bad actors, who can use their power to abuse your site.
- AntiEgo 2y ago
  I noticed the article didn't speculate on why, but I think you nailed it. This system is probably incompatible with a commercial site. It requires too many volunteers.
- jjk166 2y ago
  Solvable with a combination of robustness and stochasticity. If you say need two randomly selected people to approve an edit, and you flag users who make too many attempts at making rejected edits (either one user, lots of bad edits or lots of users trying to make the same bad edit), the only way for a bad actor to reliably make undesirable edits would be to gain control of a very large number of potential approvers. More generally, if the cost to effectively manipulate the system is greater than the perceived reward from manipulating the system, bad actors aren't an issue.
empath75 2y ago
All of this is no longer true. A modern AI will still get tripped up on details sometimes, especially with recent fandoms, but it's not going to make mistakes about common fan fiction terms any more. > Another of the Tag Wrangling Chairs, Qem, also thinks that machine tag wrangling is unlikely, pointing to machine translation as a cautionary tale. “There are terms in fandom which, while commonly understood in context among fans, would not be when you take it out of the fandom context," Qem says. For example, seemingly innocuous words like "slash" and "lemon" do not refer to a punctuation mark or a citrus fruit in fannish contexts, and tag wranglers are already well aware that machine translation can only manage the literal, not the subcultural meanings
- ziddoap 2y ago
  The problem isn't just knowing the fan fiction terms, it's being able to alias the hundred different variations of those fan fiction terms correctly. AI sucks at this. It will alias incorrectly, it will alias when it shouldn't, it will create a new tag when it should be aliased, etc. There are several cases where the human reviewer needs the context of the story (or image, in case of boorus) to make the correct call on whether to create a new tag, alias a tag, recognize a misspelling of an existing tag, etc. AI is not a good fit (yet, at least).
xdavidliu 2y ago
> At a time when we're trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from. > AO3 (AO3, to its friends) What was that supposed to be? Is that a typo?
- pjc50 2y ago
  Somebody probably wrote it expanded (Archive of Our Own), but it got automatically shortened again by search and replace.
mrweasel 2y ago
The upsetting part isn't that fans are better at organising information, it's that companies and governments are so incredibly bad at it. Limiting this to "tech" isn't really fair, because most other organisations isn't doing much better. Right now the entire world is trying to avoid collecting, creating and organising information by feeding it through AIs, which pretty much depend on organisation having done exactly that in advance. There's a huge potential of business and organisations that will do the dirty work and focus on information creation, collection and organisation internally. Just think of customer service, when was the last time an FAQ or self service guide provided any value? It happens so rarely because business don't care to keep things updated or even spend money on good writing. Nope, better to invest in an AI chat bot than updating your website.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Businesses count on middle men to do all that, so that they can focus on the things they know how to do.
  - mrweasel 2y ago
    To me that sounds backwards. Who knows your business better than you and your staff? How would anyone from the outside be able to manage your internal information better? I mean based on experience I don't think your wrong. I've run into so many businesses who feel like they need to hire consultants and bring in outside help and products to get back on track because they honestly don't know how their own business work and don't have the skills to fix it. So on the surface they are "doing what they do best", but they're missing the middle part so they not actually doing their best.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      Customer service is a different set of skills. Anybody and everybody can learn customer service if they want to, and get rid off the middle men with some effort and some investments. But most companies simply don't want to invest in it and leave it to middle men instead. Also, most business owners do not have a clue of what they're doing. They inherited the business, or caught a ride on low interests etc. That's why there's still fierce competition and newcomers eating their lunch. I agree with you that it is completely backwards!
ks2048 2y ago
Reminds me of Google's old motto, "Organizing the World's information" (is it still?). Even at their best, Google was never really "organizing" as much as "making it searchable". e.g. YouTube - for a given band, why can't I browse a list of their past concerts (with dates and locations) and see all videos from each?
- Apocryphon 2y ago
  Funnily enough, that was the domain of Yahoo! with its directories.
  - esafak 2y ago
    And people realized it was easier to just search, just as they are now realizing it is easier to just ask, and have an LLM synthesize all the search results.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
Daniel_Van_Zant 2y ago
Is there any effort to organize scientific literature like this? I know journals often generate tags for papers but those can often be quite poor and restricted to the field The journal is in. I would happily join a volunteer effort to create tags and do some tag-wrangling for scientific literature in my research area.
kuharich 2y ago
Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20156791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20156791
fungiblecog 2y ago
No surprise here. People who care will always do a better job than people who are getting paid but don't care.
rfwhyte 2y ago
Of course anyone other than "Tech" (Corporations) is better at literally anything than "Tech." "Tech" doesn't care about providing utility to it's users, only extracting as much profit from them as possible, which is almost universally in opposition to the interests of users. People who build things because they care about them and want to maximize the utility they provide actually design systems that allow users to effectively and efficiently access information or complete tasks, "Tech" on the other hand designs systems full of anti-user dark patterns solely intended to force users to view as many ads as possible or buy whatever service "Tech" is selling.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
1970-01-01 2y ago
It's because fans actually care about the data! Corporations do not care about data. Corporations will never put in anything beyond minimum effort to get it right. Usually they won't go beyond a good guess. what.cd was another example of this. https://www.vice.com/en/article/remembering-whatcd-the-internets-greatest-music-archive/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/remembering-whatcd-the-inter...

122 points by Tomte 2y ago

The huge number of communities that have elected to move to Discord, an information black hole, seems like a strong counterargument to the generality of this claim.

newsclues 2y ago
OSINT communities use discord to communicate and discuss information from mostly twitter and telegram and organize and share the packaged information. Information organization is hard and lots of work. Not everyone (or every community) has the same need to organize information, and not everyone has the ability or inclination to do so. Information getting lost on discord is a problem, but that just means the useful stuff needs to be archived elsewhere, and frequently there is another distribution network involved.
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  Accurate Problem description, which can easily be countered with .. [extra effort expended in idealized behaviours] .. [I could paste Lore Ipsum here everybody stopped reading at the idealization]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
pjc50 2y ago
This seems to be a generational issue. It makes me sad, but I suspect it's because doing things "in public" on the Internet has become increasingly exhausting and people have retreated to gated communities. It's not a black hole, it's a "dark forest": you can't find their information because they're scared of you.
- bonoboTP 2y ago
  It's not super new though, people had private forums in the phpbb era as well, which you could only read after login. Or think about IRC, private torrent trackers etc.
  - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
    I dunno if there were that many successful private forums; locking off access to unregistered users back then was a really good way of ensuring no new users finding the place back then. Very very possible I just wasn't aware of private forums enough though. Beyond that though, information was still neatly catalogued into small focused threads whereas Discord's biggest issue is that stuff just vanishes in a gigantic chain of messages. Was a bit late for IRC's heyday but am I right in thinking it wasn't guaranteed that all users would have access to the chat history? That would create an impetus to log the information elsewhere. Private trackers such as what.cd tended to attract people with strong archivist streaks which I think largely resolved the issue there. Oink could go down and you'd know that a huge chunk of its catalogue would appear on Waffles within a few months.
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      It was not just totally private forums but many big forums had private sections and subforums where the real meaty discussions occurred.
    - qingcharles 2y ago
      I ran a private business forum for online marketing. The locked door approach meant it developed a legendary reputation and meant many more people talked about it than they probably would have if it had been open. The mystery effect.
      - JansjoFromIkea 2y ago
        This also happens with some private torrent trackers; the status of having an account means people put more effort into maintaining the place too. Online marketing feels like a field that would _need_ a private place to talk tbh; anything public would be a beacon for self-promotion efforts by people who are quite good (or at least relentless) at doing so.

Kinrany 2y ago

Archive Of Our Own is not just any group of fans of course, the very name of the website refers to them deciding to write a better version of fanfiction.net. The award reflects the main goal of the website, not something that happened by accident.

ziddoap 2y ago

>users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a general audience. But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor. I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags, as they do here.

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
Exactly that, it's labor intensive, while tech tries to reduce labor intensivity by using magic or rules or whatnot. Related and larger scale projects are sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes, although Wikipedia makes use of a lot of automation as well.
jchw 2y ago
It's mildly amusing that AO3 is considered more palatable than booru websites. Both AO3 and many of the boorus have content that would be hard for most folks to stomach. I guess AO3 has the advantage of being mostly text, (which seems to be generally less visceral to people,) but it is also nearly completely uncensored, since that's kind of the point of it.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Yes, overall I wouldn't describe either of them as particularly palatable to a general audience, haha. Your hunch is the same as mine -- text has much less potential for instant shock. On AO3 you have to, sort of, go out of your way (by reading, or searching for specific tags, etc.) to hit the unsavory stuff.
  - 2y ago

CM30 2y ago

I mean it makes sense. The biggest problem with the internet today is that all the big tech companies want to automate as much as possible, and that necessarily means quality and organisation will take a massive hit. Google services, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media services, Amazon and other marketplaces, digital storefronts like Steam and the console download game shops... they're all terribly organised and flooded with garbage because no one's manually doing anything to fix it. Meanwhile, you've got fanwork sites like this one which have better quality and organisation standards than any large company site, simply because someone gives a toss about whether things are easy to find and of high quality.

0xCMP 2y ago

https://archive.today/Ho1dM https://archive.today/Ho1dM

datadrivenangel 2y ago

People who care deeply tend to do things better than people who don't care. Large organizations only organize information to the point of short term marginal profitability. If being better organized beyond a point doesn't get you more money in the next few months/years, it isn't worth it to most businesses. Likewise, being extremely organized personally is probably unnecessary, but to each their own.

commandlinefan 2y ago
> better than people who don't care IME it goes deeper than that: caring is ruthlessly stamped out by crushing bureaucratic processes. Results don't matter, what matters is never being responsible for a mistake. Fans can fix minor mistakes - in corporate America, even the smallest misjudgment is fatal. The only way to win is to never actually do anything, but keep up the appearance of being busy.
- sumtechguy 2y ago
  I think it is more simple. They really do not care much about it. Lets say you sell a product. You have had 3 revisions of that product. Support on that item is very minimal. The current version is what you sell and that is it. The previous versions are just historical interesting things. Properly archiving it and cataloging it takes time and money. Does talking about your older items sell you more items? Maybe maybe not. It is just a thing you sell. Not any sort of historical artifact to be preserved. It is just how you make a living scraping the margin. But to a collector or 'fan'. All 3 hold importance to your collection. All of the details/metadata are mapped out so you know why v1 is worse/better/interesting from v2/v3. What is worse in many of the 'fan' cases is you find it is usually 1-2 people mapping that stuff out. They map out what they find interesting. Many also get heaps of verbal and legal abuse from both the companies and other people on the net. So they bail out and whatever 'fan' site came out of it, rots. Like one project I found a few months ago. Tons of stuff mapped out but some errors here and there, no big deal. I have a set of patches ready to go to fix it. But the orig author has ghosted. They got tired of tons of abuse from other 'fans'. Frankly what I see in the previous requests I want nothing to do with it. So I keep my stuff private.

cjs_ac 2y ago

This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail' phenomenon all over again. Big tech simply isn't willing to engage with the detail, and increasingly expects the world to conform to its expectations. That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements.

mschuster91 2y ago
> That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's requirements. That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief in SAP introductions. When working with large enterprise software, customization is your enemy - and every time you have to customize something there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever have considerably more experience than you.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  And that customization kills you over time. Heck, a big reason a lot of banks and other big enterprises eventually move over to one of the big vendors is because they've built up a hodgepodge of now unmaintainable crap that nobody can touch. This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce obviously supports customization but in a much more controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
  - robocat 2y ago
    Customisation has other major costs. 1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly encourages customisation for this reason (and for other reasons that are mostly against a business' interests) 2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known payroll system versus custom. 3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised across many companies e.g. mobile app development in 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is painful). Another cost is that internal development teams are often shit and certainly can never compete with Darwinian best-available-on-market software. 4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the customisation provides business benefits but we have all worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits versus costs were slim. Two examples of bad customisation requests: A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want different things so developing common features is really hard. B) larger customers with demanding internal rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been hell. I think their internal software teams decided to build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).

esafak 2y ago

Sure, it works for your anime fan site, but what about when money is involved, like in a search engine? That attracts bad actors, who can use their power to abuse your site.

AntiEgo 2y ago
I noticed the article didn't speculate on why, but I think you nailed it. This system is probably incompatible with a commercial site. It requires too many volunteers.
jjk166 2y ago
Solvable with a combination of robustness and stochasticity. If you say need two randomly selected people to approve an edit, and you flag users who make too many attempts at making rejected edits (either one user, lots of bad edits or lots of users trying to make the same bad edit), the only way for a bad actor to reliably make undesirable edits would be to gain control of a very large number of potential approvers. More generally, if the cost to effectively manipulate the system is greater than the perceived reward from manipulating the system, bad actors aren't an issue.

empath75 2y ago

All of this is no longer true. A modern AI will still get tripped up on details sometimes, especially with recent fandoms, but it's not going to make mistakes about common fan fiction terms any more. > Another of the Tag Wrangling Chairs, Qem, also thinks that machine tag wrangling is unlikely, pointing to machine translation as a cautionary tale. “There are terms in fandom which, while commonly understood in context among fans, would not be when you take it out of the fandom context," Qem says. For example, seemingly innocuous words like "slash" and "lemon" do not refer to a punctuation mark or a citrus fruit in fannish contexts, and tag wranglers are already well aware that machine translation can only manage the literal, not the subcultural meanings

ziddoap 2y ago
The problem isn't just knowing the fan fiction terms, it's being able to alias the hundred different variations of those fan fiction terms correctly. AI sucks at this. It will alias incorrectly, it will alias when it shouldn't, it will create a new tag when it should be aliased, etc. There are several cases where the human reviewer needs the context of the story (or image, in case of boorus) to make the correct call on whether to create a new tag, alias a tag, recognize a misspelling of an existing tag, etc. AI is not a good fit (yet, at least).

xdavidliu 2y ago

> At a time when we're trying to figure out how to make the internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest of tech could learn from. > AO3 (AO3, to its friends) What was that supposed to be? Is that a typo?

pjc50 2y ago
Somebody probably wrote it expanded (Archive of Our Own), but it got automatically shortened again by search and replace.

mrweasel 2y ago

The upsetting part isn't that fans are better at organising information, it's that companies and governments are so incredibly bad at it. Limiting this to "tech" isn't really fair, because most other organisations isn't doing much better. Right now the entire world is trying to avoid collecting, creating and organising information by feeding it through AIs, which pretty much depend on organisation having done exactly that in advance. There's a huge potential of business and organisations that will do the dirty work and focus on information creation, collection and organisation internally. Just think of customer service, when was the last time an FAQ or self service guide provided any value? It happens so rarely because business don't care to keep things updated or even spend money on good writing. Nope, better to invest in an AI chat bot than updating your website.

carlosjobim 2y ago
Businesses count on middle men to do all that, so that they can focus on the things they know how to do.
- mrweasel 2y ago
  To me that sounds backwards. Who knows your business better than you and your staff? How would anyone from the outside be able to manage your internal information better? I mean based on experience I don't think your wrong. I've run into so many businesses who feel like they need to hire consultants and bring in outside help and products to get back on track because they honestly don't know how their own business work and don't have the skills to fix it. So on the surface they are "doing what they do best", but they're missing the middle part so they not actually doing their best.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Customer service is a different set of skills. Anybody and everybody can learn customer service if they want to, and get rid off the middle men with some effort and some investments. But most companies simply don't want to invest in it and leave it to middle men instead. Also, most business owners do not have a clue of what they're doing. They inherited the business, or caught a ride on low interests etc. That's why there's still fierce competition and newcomers eating their lunch. I agree with you that it is completely backwards!

ks2048 2y ago

Reminds me of Google's old motto, "Organizing the World's information" (is it still?). Even at their best, Google was never really "organizing" as much as "making it searchable". e.g. YouTube - for a given band, why can't I browse a list of their past concerts (with dates and locations) and see all videos from each?

Apocryphon 2y ago
Funnily enough, that was the domain of Yahoo! with its directories.
- esafak 2y ago
  And people realized it was easier to just search, just as they are now realizing it is easier to just ask, and have an LLM synthesize all the search results.
- deleted 2y ago
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Daniel_Van_Zant 2y ago

Is there any effort to organize scientific literature like this? I know journals often generate tags for papers but those can often be quite poor and restricted to the field The journal is in. I would happily join a volunteer effort to create tags and do some tag-wrangling for scientific literature in my research area.

kuharich 2y ago

Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20156791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20156791

fungiblecog 2y ago

No surprise here. People who care will always do a better job than people who are getting paid but don't care.

rfwhyte 2y ago

Of course anyone other than "Tech" (Corporations) is better at literally anything than "Tech." "Tech" doesn't care about providing utility to it's users, only extracting as much profit from them as possible, which is almost universally in opposition to the interests of users. People who build things because they care about them and want to maximize the utility they provide actually design systems that allow users to effectively and efficiently access information or complete tasks, "Tech" on the other hand designs systems full of anti-user dark patterns solely intended to force users to view as many ads as possible or buy whatever service "Tech" is selling.

deleted 2y ago

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1970-01-01 2y ago

It's because fans actually care about the data! Corporations do not care about data. Corporations will never put in anything beyond minimum effort to get it right. Usually they won't go beyond a good guess. what.cd was another example of this. https://www.vice.com/en/article/remembering-whatcd-the-internets-greatest-music-archive/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/remembering-whatcd-the-inter...