7 ms·

Show HN: Wikipedia as a doomscrollable social media feed

441 points by rebane2001 8mo ago

pedrozieg 8mo ago
[dead]
esperent 8mo ago
> Xikipedia is loading... (3% of 40MB loaded) I gave up after about a minute.
mathieudombrock 8mo ago
This is unfortunately loading very, very slowly for me.
strich 8mo ago
I was genuinely excited to try this and it sounded in theory like a lot of fun! Unfortunately yeah too slow to load.
pinkmuffinere 8mo ago
Please fix the loading issue and I’ll return! I think you don’t need to pull all the data at initialization, you could lazily grab a couple from each category and just keep doing it as people scroll.
- rebane2001 8mo ago
  The loading issue is just a hug of death, the site's currently getting multiple visitors per second, and that requires more than a gigabit of bandwidth to handle. I sort of need to pull all the data at the initialization because I need to map out how every post affects every other - the links between posts are what take up majority of the storage, not the text inside the posts. It's also kind of the only way to preserve privacy.
  - goodmythical 8mo ago
    I feel very strongly that you should be able to serve hundreds or thousands of requests at gbps speeds. Why are you serving so much data personally instead of just reformatting theirs? Even if you're serving it locally...I mean a regular 100mbit line should easily support tens or hundreds of text users... What am I missing?
    - rebane2001 8mo ago
      > Why are you serving so much data personally instead of just reformatting theirs? Because then you only need to download 40MB of data and do minimal processing. If you were to take the dumps off of Wikimedia, you would need to download 400MB of data and do processing on that data that would take minutes of time. And also it's kind of rude to hotlink a half a gig of data on someone else's site. > What am I missing? 40MB per second is 320mbps, so even 3 visitors per second maxes out a gigabit connection.
      - lazide 8mo ago
        Why not…. Load it on demand?
        goodmythical 8mo ago
        That's my point. So confused. Got a ton of users clicking off because of this.
        fgfarben 8mo ago
        The point you're missing is that this website is actually a submarine ad for the domain, xikipedia.org, which the owner is probably trying to sell.
        rebane2001 8mo ago
        That's a very silly claim considering I bought the domain the same day I released the project. I'm sure whoever would've been interested in buying the domain could've already swept it up for 10 bucks before me.
  - jedberg 8mo ago
    I think I'm missing something, but does every user get the same 40MB? If so, can you just dump the file on a CDN?
hamburglar 8mo ago
Took several minutes to load for me, and when my download got to 100%, the browser (safari on ios) refreshed the page and started at 0% again.
RiceNBananas 8mo ago
[flagged]
with 8mo ago
It's ironic that doomscrollable social media feeds are built for low attention spans, because this website is the opposite. Gave up after 20 seconds.
barcodehorse 8mo ago
An issue I have with these apps that claim to be for doomscrolling is that you don't open apps like Instagram or Facebook to doomscroll, you open them to check messages or stories. The doomscrolling is an afterthought. These things assume you can realize you're doomscrolling and not only break out of it, but choose to hypnotize yourself in their app.
- forgetbook 8mo ago
  This could be a product. I'd pay for an app that fwd'd messages from other apps and gave me a wikipedia feed to scroll on the elevator / other places where the phone is a social respite
kachapopopow 8mo ago
surprisingly... boring?
singpolyma3 8mo ago
Please only continue if you are an adult? You realize Wikipedia has no age restrictions right...
reader9274 8mo ago
Man wikipedia is full of trash
- senectus1 8mo ago
  human history*
sputknick 8mo ago
If you load it in Chrome, it loads MUCH faster
abhinai 8mo ago
This is a very neat idea. I am not sure why the page needs to load 40mb of data and make me wait 5 mins before the first view. I'd probably also add some ranking criteria to surface good quality articles that maximize the "I learnt something new today" factor. Overall kudos to the developer for original thinking.
- sampli 8mo ago
  Yeah. Should be able to load in the background once you start scrolling
- rwl 8mo ago
  Presumably the 40mb of data is not from Wikipedia, but the Javascript tracking code bundle needed to turn it into a doomscrollable social media feed. ;) By those standards, I think it’s pretty lightweight! For comparison, the Instagram iOS app is 468.9mb, more than ten times the size…
  - repeekad 8mo ago
    Now imagine how big the builds are for Instagram's server side doomscrollable feed algorithm, given their inverse incentives to this project.
  - isqueiros 8mo ago
    40mb is way too much for a JS bundle... Even with a framework you could do this with 5mb or less.
    - embedding-shape 8mo ago
      > you could do this with 5mb or less How quick the times change... Back in my days, we put the limit on bundles being maximum 1MB, and it felt large even then.
      - isqueiros 8mo ago
        Don't get me wrong. 5mb is a lot for this, yes. This app, coded with love and interest could easily be made under 1mb.
Der_Einzige 8mo ago
I am so lucky to be basically immune to short form video garbage like TikTok, but I am not immune to Wikipedia's allure. I easily have over 100 tabs of wikipedia open at any one time, reading about the most random stuff ever. I'm the guy who will unironically look up the food I'm eating on wikipedia while I'm eating it. No need to try to make it "doomscrollable" when it's already got me by the balls.
closetkantian 8mo ago
I like the concept, but I'm not going to be reading Simple English Wikipedia.
joeyguerra 8mo ago
I wonder if this would be a "better" way to build this thing: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/duckdb-iceberg-browser-s3/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/duckdb-iceberg-browser-s3... DuckDB loaded in the browser via WebAssembly and Parquet files in S3.
its_ubuntu 8mo ago
[dead]
kurtis_reed 8mo ago
It took forever to load
glenstein 8mo ago
Love the concept. Wikitok also exists [1] but the recommendation aspect that you're bringing you the table is a very intriguing original spin on it. I would be fascinated to see what a smart algorithm could discover on my behalf on Wikipedia given enough time. I think it would be nice if you could do a non simple English version but nevertheless happy with what you've put together, and I've added a shortcut to my phone. Please don't let the negativity stop you from continuing to work on it. 1. https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/
- noonething 8mo ago
  First thing I see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esophageal_cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esophageal_cancer Thank you.
  - aizk 8mo ago
    Dev here: Unfortunately, that was one thing I never managed to figure out with WikiTok - content filtering. Wikipedia has no categorization of whether or not their articles are NSFW (imagine how much debate that would require for millions of different articles), nor something I could use in their API. That said, anecdotally, I have found the percentage of rather NSFW articles to be quite low all things considered so it's been mostly fine. I think the best option would be to have a quick disclaimer before your scroll, but nobody has seriously asked me for that.
- themikesanto 8mo ago
  Clicked into an article about nuclear weapons and was thinking "wow, the quality of this article is horrible" before I realized it was Simple English Wikipedia. I didn't even know that was a thing.
  - glenstein 8mo ago
    I think it's based on the idea of English becoming a de facto global language, which I think was more popular in the late 90s early 00s
wraptile 8mo ago
This would actually be really fun if built around social feature like curators who could quote-repost the posts, popular/trending sorting and a threaded comment system.
- energy123 8mo ago
  Can you not?
nxobject 8mo ago
Reminds one of Sesame Street - let’s put educational content in this new hyponotic medium!
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
ryan_j_naughton 8mo ago
How does it actually work? Can you add an "about" page that goes into the algo? Or can you add more info on the readme on github? I'd love to learn more.
- rebane2001 8mo ago
  I might add a proper explanation at some point, but for now you can view-source the page and read the code, there really isn't that much of it.
  - synctext 8mo ago
    Impressive! We're a university lab and published recommendation algorithms. Never knew that doomscrolling could be this addictive this fast, thnx! Please consider taking an hour and push this to a Github with quick readme. Scientists and developers would get it. We have been building a torrent-based alternative to Youtube for a few years. Not many knowledge out there around operational frontpage algorithm. Edit: https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia
    - rebane2001 8mo ago
      I've now added the algorithm explanation to the GitHub README.
orionfollett 8mo ago
This is really cool. And in only 500 lines of code is really impressive. I would have thought this was much more.
icameron 8mo ago
Page crashed after downloading and extracting. On safari iPhone that’s a few years old, latest iOS. I was really interested in trying / why I waited Ed: tried again it crashed at 66% loading (after 100% loading)
drivers99 8mo ago
I ran across a grammar mistake in one of the entries and clicked into the actual wikipedia entry to fix it. That was satisfying. Imagine being able to do that on social media.
- dhosek 8mo ago
  Oh man, there are so many times I find myself wanting to click the edit button on websites that aren’t wikipedia to fix typos or other minor errors.
- rebane2001 8mo ago
  that's really cool!!
0xE1337DAD 8mo ago
I love the concept. But the long load at startup really kills it. Even clicking off the site and reloading makes me have to go through the download all over again.
baxtr 8mo ago
TIL: The United States Virgin Islands are a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. They are currently owned and under the authority of the United States Government. They used to be owned by Denmark (and called Danish West Indies). They were sold to the U.S. on January 17, 1917, because of fear that the Germans would capture them and use them as a submarine base in World War I. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Virgin_Islands https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Virgin_Islan...
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  Yes. The sale has been in the news lately because in that agreement the US formally agreed to cede its interest in Greenland.
eccentricdz 8mo ago
Built something similar for research papers: https://www.producthunt.com/products/soch https://www.producthunt.com/products/soch
efilife 8mo ago
all images overflow for me
upstreamutopia 8mo ago
You know, I enjoyed this, it's nice to get some random, interesting stuff to browse on occasion.
adifi000 8mo ago
Nice loading indicator! People just don't know how to make those anymore. I think you mistitled your submission, though?
hargup 8mo ago
I've been meaning to do something like this for the books I want to read, and things I want to learn.
gkoenig 8mo ago
Man, this is the greatest thing I have seen on the internet.
ricardo81 8mo ago
Did you write your own summary parser for this? I wrote one in the past and found the wiki markup quirky to deal with. The wiki dumps do provide summaries but they seem to suffer similar issues.
wgx 8mo ago
See also: https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/ And a plug for my own (fiendishly difficult) Wikipedia-based game: https://studiowgx.willgrant.org/wikipedia-golf/ https://studiowgx.willgrant.org/wikipedia-golf/
gregjw 8mo ago
why does everyone keep making this exact same thing again and again
dboreham 8mo ago
You can do this manually, obviously. The key is the starting point. The design of thermonuclear weapons is always a good place to begin.
fowlie 8mo ago
How cool is that! Feature request: Let the user select another language than English.
hggh 8mo ago
> you will likely see NSFW content. Please only continue if you're an adult. Should be: Please only continue if you're not at work.
- rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
  Not everyone works for Valley Virgins
- abnry 8mo ago
  The NSFW content is a big bummer for me. I can't let a kid go to Wikipedia unsupervised because of this.
- zxcvasd 8mo ago
  [dead]
potatomaseat9 8mo ago
Great idea, i find this is better than just doom scrolling X or Instagram
bonnaf 8mo ago
Is it down ? I can't access it right now
phn 8mo ago
Very small suggestion: Can you make the entries actual links/anchor tags so that it is possible to copy link, middle-click to open in a new tab, and so on?
brikym 8mo ago
It took a while to load but once I was in I found it like reading a magazine. I was expecting it to be more of a Tiktok UX. It's kind of like the opposite to my Wikipedia project Redactle.net which takes a lot of effort. OP, since you're encountering load issues I would suggest narrowing your corpus to Wikipedia vital level 3 and caching all the content since it's only 1000 articles.
qznc 8mo ago
With that domain name, I expected to see this Grok-based mutation of Wikipedia. I guess, the "x" just has a negative association with me now.
- worldsavior 8mo ago
  That's incredible.
- Kodiack 8mo ago
  I was thinking the same, and read it as “Xi”kipedia. Then sure enough, one of the articles that it immediately showed when it loaded was for “General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party”, or Xi Jinping. Coincidence?! Yeah, probably.
kykeonaut 8mo ago
I think what is interesting is that it is not necessarily the content of the brainrot that makes us underperform, but the act of swiping [0] and the context switching [1]. These attempts to make educational short form content still suffer from the same drawbacks, so I wonder how effective they truly are. [0] https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099 https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099 [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.2521076?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed#abstract https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...
- dvh 8mo ago
  I think it's "this one is good but if I swipe the next one can be even better", i.e. classic dopamine addiction. Stop digging!
  - cynicalpeace 8mo ago
    A slot machine affect. Viewing our society as an addicted one clarifies most of our social ills.
  - wmeredith 8mo ago
    This is it. Modern social media is a Skinner box. The context switching is a feature (short term dopamine hit in exchange for deep learning).
  - order-matters 8mo ago
    i would place my money on the vast gap between effort and reward. you dont even need to think "if i swipe..." because the thought takes longer than the action. So why would you stop to consider what you might have to gain by swiping when you can literally swipe and find out faster than you can think about it? Then you go about your regular day and suddenly everything feels harder in comparison. You have to think about what youre doing, you have to coordinate or plan your actions, you have to put work in. The swiping rots your ability to maintain and coordinate your chain of actions. it weakens your ability to have intent.
tomashubelbauer 8mo ago
> It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content. Yeah, it got really sticky real fast. From the random (?) selection it starts off where I couldn't recognize anything but popular TV shows, it immediately over-indexed on that content and I had to fight for my life to see anything else in the feed that I would recognize and consider a good algorithmic pick for my interests. Which is brilliant, because Instagram has the same issue for me - absolute metric tons of garbage and whenever there is a gem in that landfill of a feed that I interact with positively, it's nothing but more of that on my feed for weeks until I grow sick of that given thing. In conclusion, Instagram could have used this 30 line algorithm and I'd have the same exact experience when using it. Algorithmic feeds are obviously problematic for turning several generations into lobotomized zombies, but they are also just not very good at nuance, so it is not even a case of something that's bad for you but it just feels so good. It's just something that's bad, but is able to penetrate the very low defenses in human psychology for resisting addiction and short-term gratification and there is no incentive to improve them for the sake of the user as long as they work for the advertisers.
shiandow 8mo ago
I don't get it, it keeps showing me completely random articles.
dnpls 8mo ago
Funny that I selected some subjects such as art, technology and human sexuality, and after a bit of scrolling, I get an article on Technosexuality. TIL.
stck 8mo ago
I don't get it. It shows the intro paragraph of some articles in card list and that's it? Clicking the card takes you away from the feed, instead of creating e.g. some kind of a path of interest.
- KolmogorovComp 8mo ago
  > instead of creating e.g. some kind of a path of interest. You need to like them to update the weights of the algo, it works well
  - gpvos 8mo ago
    Ooh, it's indeed fascinating how quickly you can end up with a focus on a singular subject.
  - dwringer 8mo ago
    I just kept scrolling, hoping it would learn from how long I paused over content to read it the way FB's seems to, but it seems you're right, in this case "likes" are required.
sebastiennight 8mo ago
I've been waiting for someone to implement this well! I think in the future we might even have tiktok-style influencer videos generated from wikipedia content, who knows. I've been swiping a lot for the last 10 minutes and I'm not sure how much it's learning. I have some feedback. - I have never liked or clicked a biography but it keeps suggesting vast amounts of those - It does not seem to update the score based on clicking vs liking vs doing both. I would assume clicking is a solid form of engagement that should be taken into consideration - It would be interesting to see some stats. I have no idea how many articles i've scrolled through or the actual time spent on liked vs disliked article previews. If you can add such insight it would be interesting - A negative feedback mechanism would be interesting as well. There is no way to signal whether I'm just neutral towards something (and swipe through) or actively negative about it (which is a form of engagement the doomscroll would actually use to show me such content once in a while) - since this website has already shown me multiple pages about things I'm learning about thanks through it, it might benefit from a "share" button (another engagement signal) as HN folks are likely to want to share on HN things they've just learned - Would you be willing to make the experiment open source?
- Gander5739 8mo ago
  It's opensource insofar that the javascript is not minified or obfuscated. You can see it at https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia too.
  - sebastiennight 8mo ago
    Perfect! Thanks for clarification. I thought there was server-side preparation of the content, but it seems from the other posts that it's all local, and I commend you for that.
  - sebastiennight 8mo ago
    I want to try reimplementing it for Wikipedia in another language, would you mind sharing how you went from the 400MB Wikipedia export to the .1x (40MB) file that is downloaded here?
eimrine 8mo ago
Everything is unclickable on the first page for me, the word "Estonia" is typed in grey font on the dark-gray layout, I can not do anything except of selecting text.
freak42 8mo ago
I'm sorry but starting a 40MB download unprompted on a website is a bit rude, people roaming abroad might have half their data used up in 5 minutes or pay loads for this.
- ulrikrasmussen 8mo ago
  This is not a lot compared to how much data the average website will download. I just clicked a wired.com link which is also on the frontpage of HN right now. In a Chromium browser with no adblock, the network tab says 12 MB transferred. The difference is just that this web page shows you how much data it transfers instead of doing it in the background.
renegat0x0 8mo ago
- https://wikispeedruns.com/ https://wikispeedruns.com/ - https://sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ https://sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ - https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/
- sebastiennight 8mo ago
  I was not aware of WikiSpeedRuns, that's a fun one (and then the 2nd link you shared basically allows you to check how well you did)
- aizk 8mo ago
  Thanks for the shoutout :)
morgengold 8mo ago
I abadoned facebook since I couldnt stand the feed experience anymore. Recently learned about using https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr in combintation with extension https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/ which give me a chronological feed of groups and people i actually want to hear from. The most astonishing experience is how calm I feel consuming this cleaned up feed. Almost all negative emotions seem to stem from the uncontrollable feed experience.
captainbland 8mo ago
This is more like neat-scrolling, I like it
0xedd 8mo ago
[dead]
Alifatisk 8mo ago
I have been waiting for a project like this since last year when someone on Twitter mentioned it. I can finally doomscroll without my brain rotting. Update, it does not run properly in Firefox on iOS. After it has loaded to 100%, the site refreshes.
jordanb 8mo ago
Back when Wikipedia was new people had a tendency to spend all day in it clicking deeper and deeper. It was called "ratholing." It was timewasting or avoidant behavior for sure, and often described negatively. But at least you were learning something. Silicon Valley then spent the next few decades trying to understand that behavior so they could isolate it, strip all positive value out of it, and make it highly profitable.
throw4847285 8mo ago
I wonder what the cognitive difference is between the link to link addictive clicking on wikipedia and doomscrolling? I assume doomscrolling is even more pernicious because it's the lowest possible level of friction. I'm sure somebody has done studies.
Ir0nMan 8mo ago
Jeopardy training tool.
ada1981 8mo ago
Would be cool / horrific to do this, but then have AI influencer bots that teach you the things in influencer style click bait style videos.
- sebastiennight 8mo ago
  Wait for the API costs or open-source models to be cheap enough and we'll get there. I mean it's a guaranteed HN frontpage (and currently also a guaranteed epic credit card bill).
order-matters 8mo ago
The easiest way to break the mental barrier caused by short form content for me is to remind myself that knowing something is not the final product. The final product is trusting the knowledge and communicating that trust. Any information that finds itself to me without me asking for it is inherently less trustworthy and less communicable than information I hunted for with intention Short form content feeds are like unloading a dumptruck full of random items into your driveway. Is it actually better if all that stuff you didnt ask for is real information that needs to be organized and pieced together with what you already know without any of the associated context that helps you do that? Or is it better if you know 99% of it is trash and you dont need to remember any of it? I think a tool like this is great for people who want to use short form content intentionally, and personally that only happens when I am bored and in need of a new topic to research. I think of all short form content like marketing/ads, just showcasing something i might be interested to dig into on my own. It's how i used StumbleUpon website back in the day. But I have noticed I am rarely using short form content with intention. its because i want to check what my friends have posted, and then with the extra downtime i scroll a little bit, and sometimes get stuck
knorker 8mo ago
I assumed that obviously this is very clever performance art to show how even the healthiest food can be turned into brainrotting sludge. But then I look at the comments, and it really looks like some people want this. Now I'm depressed.
- rebane2001 8mo ago
  Yeah, that was the intention.
jackinthehat 8mo ago
so me some days. I do love a little perusal in the backend, adding missing commas and the odd correction
extraduder_ire 8mo ago
Is there a technical reason that you can't click on the filled heart icon again to undo your like? Is it just not implemented, or would it be too much effort to undo the effect on your weights from liking the article?
aizk 8mo ago
Wikitok lives again! :)
DCAlmond 8mo ago
Cool concept. I built something very similar [1] but as a native iOS app in an attempt to cut down on my doomscrolling, but it turns out it’s hard to get my brain to read plain text when there’s a plethora of dopamine overloading video apps available. 1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/egghead-scroll-learn/id6630364935 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/egghead-scroll-learn/id6630364...

441 points by rebane2001 8mo ago

pedrozieg 8mo ago

[dead]

esperent 8mo ago

> Xikipedia is loading... (3% of 40MB loaded) I gave up after about a minute.

mathieudombrock 8mo ago

This is unfortunately loading very, very slowly for me.

strich 8mo ago

I was genuinely excited to try this and it sounded in theory like a lot of fun! Unfortunately yeah too slow to load.

pinkmuffinere 8mo ago

Please fix the loading issue and I’ll return! I think you don’t need to pull all the data at initialization, you could lazily grab a couple from each category and just keep doing it as people scroll.

rebane2001 8mo ago
The loading issue is just a hug of death, the site's currently getting multiple visitors per second, and that requires more than a gigabit of bandwidth to handle. I sort of need to pull all the data at the initialization because I need to map out how every post affects every other - the links between posts are what take up majority of the storage, not the text inside the posts. It's also kind of the only way to preserve privacy.
- goodmythical 8mo ago
  I feel very strongly that you should be able to serve hundreds or thousands of requests at gbps speeds. Why are you serving so much data personally instead of just reformatting theirs? Even if you're serving it locally...I mean a regular 100mbit line should easily support tens or hundreds of text users... What am I missing?
  - rebane2001 8mo ago
    > Why are you serving so much data personally instead of just reformatting theirs? Because then you only need to download 40MB of data and do minimal processing. If you were to take the dumps off of Wikimedia, you would need to download 400MB of data and do processing on that data that would take minutes of time. And also it's kind of rude to hotlink a half a gig of data on someone else's site. > What am I missing? 40MB per second is 320mbps, so even 3 visitors per second maxes out a gigabit connection.
    - lazide 8mo ago
      Why not…. Load it on demand?
      - goodmythical 8mo ago
        That's my point. So confused. Got a ton of users clicking off because of this.
        fgfarben 8mo ago
        The point you're missing is that this website is actually a submarine ad for the domain, xikipedia.org, which the owner is probably trying to sell.
        rebane2001 8mo ago
        That's a very silly claim considering I bought the domain the same day I released the project. I'm sure whoever would've been interested in buying the domain could've already swept it up for 10 bucks before me.
- jedberg 8mo ago
  I think I'm missing something, but does every user get the same 40MB? If so, can you just dump the file on a CDN?

hamburglar 8mo ago

Took several minutes to load for me, and when my download got to 100%, the browser (safari on ios) refreshed the page and started at 0% again.

RiceNBananas 8mo ago

[flagged]

with 8mo ago

It's ironic that doomscrollable social media feeds are built for low attention spans, because this website is the opposite. Gave up after 20 seconds.

barcodehorse 8mo ago

An issue I have with these apps that claim to be for doomscrolling is that you don't open apps like Instagram or Facebook to doomscroll, you open them to check messages or stories. The doomscrolling is an afterthought. These things assume you can realize you're doomscrolling and not only break out of it, but choose to hypnotize yourself in their app.

forgetbook 8mo ago
This could be a product. I'd pay for an app that fwd'd messages from other apps and gave me a wikipedia feed to scroll on the elevator / other places where the phone is a social respite

kachapopopow 8mo ago

surprisingly... boring?

singpolyma3 8mo ago

Please only continue if you are an adult? You realize Wikipedia has no age restrictions right...

reader9274 8mo ago

Man wikipedia is full of trash

senectus1 8mo ago
human history*

sputknick 8mo ago

If you load it in Chrome, it loads MUCH faster

abhinai 8mo ago

This is a very neat idea. I am not sure why the page needs to load 40mb of data and make me wait 5 mins before the first view. I'd probably also add some ranking criteria to surface good quality articles that maximize the "I learnt something new today" factor. Overall kudos to the developer for original thinking.

sampli 8mo ago
Yeah. Should be able to load in the background once you start scrolling
rwl 8mo ago
Presumably the 40mb of data is not from Wikipedia, but the Javascript tracking code bundle needed to turn it into a doomscrollable social media feed. ;) By those standards, I think it’s pretty lightweight! For comparison, the Instagram iOS app is 468.9mb, more than ten times the size…
- repeekad 8mo ago
  Now imagine how big the builds are for Instagram's server side doomscrollable feed algorithm, given their inverse incentives to this project.
- isqueiros 8mo ago
  40mb is way too much for a JS bundle... Even with a framework you could do this with 5mb or less.
  - embedding-shape 8mo ago
    > you could do this with 5mb or less How quick the times change... Back in my days, we put the limit on bundles being maximum 1MB, and it felt large even then.
    - isqueiros 8mo ago
      Don't get me wrong. 5mb is a lot for this, yes. This app, coded with love and interest could easily be made under 1mb.

Der_Einzige 8mo ago

I am so lucky to be basically immune to short form video garbage like TikTok, but I am not immune to Wikipedia's allure. I easily have over 100 tabs of wikipedia open at any one time, reading about the most random stuff ever. I'm the guy who will unironically look up the food I'm eating on wikipedia while I'm eating it. No need to try to make it "doomscrollable" when it's already got me by the balls.

closetkantian 8mo ago

I like the concept, but I'm not going to be reading Simple English Wikipedia.

joeyguerra 8mo ago

I wonder if this would be a "better" way to build this thing: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/duckdb-iceberg-browser-s3/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/duckdb-iceberg-browser-s3... DuckDB loaded in the browser via WebAssembly and Parquet files in S3.

its_ubuntu 8mo ago

[dead]

kurtis_reed 8mo ago

It took forever to load

glenstein 8mo ago

Love the concept. Wikitok also exists [1] but the recommendation aspect that you're bringing you the table is a very intriguing original spin on it. I would be fascinated to see what a smart algorithm could discover on my behalf on Wikipedia given enough time. I think it would be nice if you could do a non simple English version but nevertheless happy with what you've put together, and I've added a shortcut to my phone. Please don't let the negativity stop you from continuing to work on it. 1. https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/

noonething 8mo ago
First thing I see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esophageal_cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esophageal_cancer Thank you.
- aizk 8mo ago
  Dev here: Unfortunately, that was one thing I never managed to figure out with WikiTok - content filtering. Wikipedia has no categorization of whether or not their articles are NSFW (imagine how much debate that would require for millions of different articles), nor something I could use in their API. That said, anecdotally, I have found the percentage of rather NSFW articles to be quite low all things considered so it's been mostly fine. I think the best option would be to have a quick disclaimer before your scroll, but nobody has seriously asked me for that.
themikesanto 8mo ago
Clicked into an article about nuclear weapons and was thinking "wow, the quality of this article is horrible" before I realized it was Simple English Wikipedia. I didn't even know that was a thing.
- glenstein 8mo ago
  I think it's based on the idea of English becoming a de facto global language, which I think was more popular in the late 90s early 00s

wraptile 8mo ago

This would actually be really fun if built around social feature like curators who could quote-repost the posts, popular/trending sorting and a threaded comment system.

energy123 8mo ago
Can you not?

nxobject 8mo ago

Reminds one of Sesame Street - let’s put educational content in this new hyponotic medium!

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

ryan_j_naughton 8mo ago

How does it actually work? Can you add an "about" page that goes into the algo? Or can you add more info on the readme on github? I'd love to learn more.

rebane2001 8mo ago
I might add a proper explanation at some point, but for now you can view-source the page and read the code, there really isn't that much of it.
- synctext 8mo ago
  Impressive! We're a university lab and published recommendation algorithms. Never knew that doomscrolling could be this addictive this fast, thnx! Please consider taking an hour and push this to a Github with quick readme. Scientists and developers would get it. We have been building a torrent-based alternative to Youtube for a few years. Not many knowledge out there around operational frontpage algorithm. Edit: https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia
  - rebane2001 8mo ago
    I've now added the algorithm explanation to the GitHub README.

orionfollett 8mo ago

This is really cool. And in only 500 lines of code is really impressive. I would have thought this was much more.

icameron 8mo ago

Page crashed after downloading and extracting. On safari iPhone that’s a few years old, latest iOS. I was really interested in trying / why I waited Ed: tried again it crashed at 66% loading (after 100% loading)

drivers99 8mo ago

I ran across a grammar mistake in one of the entries and clicked into the actual wikipedia entry to fix it. That was satisfying. Imagine being able to do that on social media.

dhosek 8mo ago
Oh man, there are so many times I find myself wanting to click the edit button on websites that aren’t wikipedia to fix typos or other minor errors.
rebane2001 8mo ago
that's really cool!!

0xE1337DAD 8mo ago

I love the concept. But the long load at startup really kills it. Even clicking off the site and reloading makes me have to go through the download all over again.

baxtr 8mo ago

TIL: The United States Virgin Islands are a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. They are currently owned and under the authority of the United States Government. They used to be owned by Denmark (and called Danish West Indies). They were sold to the U.S. on January 17, 1917, because of fear that the Germans would capture them and use them as a submarine base in World War I. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Virgin_Islands https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Virgin_Islan...

Sharlin 8mo ago
Yes. The sale has been in the news lately because in that agreement the US formally agreed to cede its interest in Greenland.

eccentricdz 8mo ago

Built something similar for research papers: https://www.producthunt.com/products/soch https://www.producthunt.com/products/soch

efilife 8mo ago

all images overflow for me

upstreamutopia 8mo ago

You know, I enjoyed this, it's nice to get some random, interesting stuff to browse on occasion.

adifi000 8mo ago

Nice loading indicator! People just don't know how to make those anymore. I think you mistitled your submission, though?

hargup 8mo ago

I've been meaning to do something like this for the books I want to read, and things I want to learn.

gkoenig 8mo ago

Man, this is the greatest thing I have seen on the internet.

ricardo81 8mo ago

Did you write your own summary parser for this? I wrote one in the past and found the wiki markup quirky to deal with. The wiki dumps do provide summaries but they seem to suffer similar issues.

wgx 8mo ago

See also: https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/ And a plug for my own (fiendishly difficult) Wikipedia-based game: https://studiowgx.willgrant.org/wikipedia-golf/ https://studiowgx.willgrant.org/wikipedia-golf/

gregjw 8mo ago

why does everyone keep making this exact same thing again and again

dboreham 8mo ago

You can do this manually, obviously. The key is the starting point. The design of thermonuclear weapons is always a good place to begin.

fowlie 8mo ago

How cool is that! Feature request: Let the user select another language than English.

hggh 8mo ago

> you will likely see NSFW content. Please only continue if you're an adult. Should be: Please only continue if you're not at work.

rrr_oh_man 8mo ago
Not everyone works for Valley Virgins
abnry 8mo ago
The NSFW content is a big bummer for me. I can't let a kid go to Wikipedia unsupervised because of this.
zxcvasd 8mo ago
[dead]

potatomaseat9 8mo ago

Great idea, i find this is better than just doom scrolling X or Instagram

bonnaf 8mo ago

Is it down ? I can't access it right now

phn 8mo ago

Very small suggestion: Can you make the entries actual links/anchor tags so that it is possible to copy link, middle-click to open in a new tab, and so on?

brikym 8mo ago

It took a while to load but once I was in I found it like reading a magazine. I was expecting it to be more of a Tiktok UX. It's kind of like the opposite to my Wikipedia project Redactle.net which takes a lot of effort. OP, since you're encountering load issues I would suggest narrowing your corpus to Wikipedia vital level 3 and caching all the content since it's only 1000 articles.

qznc 8mo ago

With that domain name, I expected to see this Grok-based mutation of Wikipedia. I guess, the "x" just has a negative association with me now.

worldsavior 8mo ago
That's incredible.
Kodiack 8mo ago
I was thinking the same, and read it as “Xi”kipedia. Then sure enough, one of the articles that it immediately showed when it loaded was for “General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party”, or Xi Jinping. Coincidence?! Yeah, probably.

kykeonaut 8mo ago

I think what is interesting is that it is not necessarily the content of the brainrot that makes us underperform, but the act of swiping [0] and the context switching [1]. These attempts to make educational short form content still suffer from the same drawbacks, so I wonder how effective they truly are. [0] https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099 https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099 [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.2521076?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed#abstract https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...

dvh 8mo ago
I think it's "this one is good but if I swipe the next one can be even better", i.e. classic dopamine addiction. Stop digging!
- cynicalpeace 8mo ago
  A slot machine affect. Viewing our society as an addicted one clarifies most of our social ills.
- wmeredith 8mo ago
  This is it. Modern social media is a Skinner box. The context switching is a feature (short term dopamine hit in exchange for deep learning).
- order-matters 8mo ago
  i would place my money on the vast gap between effort and reward. you dont even need to think "if i swipe..." because the thought takes longer than the action. So why would you stop to consider what you might have to gain by swiping when you can literally swipe and find out faster than you can think about it? Then you go about your regular day and suddenly everything feels harder in comparison. You have to think about what youre doing, you have to coordinate or plan your actions, you have to put work in. The swiping rots your ability to maintain and coordinate your chain of actions. it weakens your ability to have intent.

tomashubelbauer 8mo ago

> It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content. Yeah, it got really sticky real fast. From the random (?) selection it starts off where I couldn't recognize anything but popular TV shows, it immediately over-indexed on that content and I had to fight for my life to see anything else in the feed that I would recognize and consider a good algorithmic pick for my interests. Which is brilliant, because Instagram has the same issue for me - absolute metric tons of garbage and whenever there is a gem in that landfill of a feed that I interact with positively, it's nothing but more of that on my feed for weeks until I grow sick of that given thing. In conclusion, Instagram could have used this 30 line algorithm and I'd have the same exact experience when using it. Algorithmic feeds are obviously problematic for turning several generations into lobotomized zombies, but they are also just not very good at nuance, so it is not even a case of something that's bad for you but it just feels so good. It's just something that's bad, but is able to penetrate the very low defenses in human psychology for resisting addiction and short-term gratification and there is no incentive to improve them for the sake of the user as long as they work for the advertisers.

shiandow 8mo ago

I don't get it, it keeps showing me completely random articles.

dnpls 8mo ago

Funny that I selected some subjects such as art, technology and human sexuality, and after a bit of scrolling, I get an article on Technosexuality. TIL.

stck 8mo ago

I don't get it. It shows the intro paragraph of some articles in card list and that's it? Clicking the card takes you away from the feed, instead of creating e.g. some kind of a path of interest.

KolmogorovComp 8mo ago
> instead of creating e.g. some kind of a path of interest. You need to like them to update the weights of the algo, it works well
- gpvos 8mo ago
  Ooh, it's indeed fascinating how quickly you can end up with a focus on a singular subject.
- dwringer 8mo ago
  I just kept scrolling, hoping it would learn from how long I paused over content to read it the way FB's seems to, but it seems you're right, in this case "likes" are required.

sebastiennight 8mo ago

I've been waiting for someone to implement this well! I think in the future we might even have tiktok-style influencer videos generated from wikipedia content, who knows. I've been swiping a lot for the last 10 minutes and I'm not sure how much it's learning. I have some feedback. - I have never liked or clicked a biography but it keeps suggesting vast amounts of those - It does not seem to update the score based on clicking vs liking vs doing both. I would assume clicking is a solid form of engagement that should be taken into consideration - It would be interesting to see some stats. I have no idea how many articles i've scrolled through or the actual time spent on liked vs disliked article previews. If you can add such insight it would be interesting - A negative feedback mechanism would be interesting as well. There is no way to signal whether I'm just neutral towards something (and swipe through) or actively negative about it (which is a form of engagement the doomscroll would actually use to show me such content once in a while) - since this website has already shown me multiple pages about things I'm learning about thanks through it, it might benefit from a "share" button (another engagement signal) as HN folks are likely to want to share on HN things they've just learned - Would you be willing to make the experiment open source?

Gander5739 8mo ago
It's opensource insofar that the javascript is not minified or obfuscated. You can see it at https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia too.
- sebastiennight 8mo ago
  Perfect! Thanks for clarification. I thought there was server-side preparation of the content, but it seems from the other posts that it's all local, and I commend you for that.
- sebastiennight 8mo ago
  I want to try reimplementing it for Wikipedia in another language, would you mind sharing how you went from the 400MB Wikipedia export to the .1x (40MB) file that is downloaded here?

eimrine 8mo ago

Everything is unclickable on the first page for me, the word "Estonia" is typed in grey font on the dark-gray layout, I can not do anything except of selecting text.

freak42 8mo ago

I'm sorry but starting a 40MB download unprompted on a website is a bit rude, people roaming abroad might have half their data used up in 5 minutes or pay loads for this.

ulrikrasmussen 8mo ago
This is not a lot compared to how much data the average website will download. I just clicked a wired.com link which is also on the frontpage of HN right now. In a Chromium browser with no adblock, the network tab says 12 MB transferred. The difference is just that this web page shows you how much data it transfers instead of doing it in the background.

renegat0x0 8mo ago

- https://wikispeedruns.com/ https://wikispeedruns.com/ - https://sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ https://sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/ - https://www.wikitok.io/ https://www.wikitok.io/

sebastiennight 8mo ago
I was not aware of WikiSpeedRuns, that's a fun one (and then the 2nd link you shared basically allows you to check how well you did)
aizk 8mo ago
Thanks for the shoutout :)

morgengold 8mo ago

I abadoned facebook since I couldnt stand the feed experience anymore. Recently learned about using https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr in combintation with extension https://www.fbpurity.com/ https://www.fbpurity.com/ which give me a chronological feed of groups and people i actually want to hear from. The most astonishing experience is how calm I feel consuming this cleaned up feed. Almost all negative emotions seem to stem from the uncontrollable feed experience.

captainbland 8mo ago

This is more like neat-scrolling, I like it

0xedd 8mo ago

[dead]

Alifatisk 8mo ago

I have been waiting for a project like this since last year when someone on Twitter mentioned it. I can finally doomscroll without my brain rotting. Update, it does not run properly in Firefox on iOS. After it has loaded to 100%, the site refreshes.

jordanb 8mo ago

Back when Wikipedia was new people had a tendency to spend all day in it clicking deeper and deeper. It was called "ratholing." It was timewasting or avoidant behavior for sure, and often described negatively. But at least you were learning something. Silicon Valley then spent the next few decades trying to understand that behavior so they could isolate it, strip all positive value out of it, and make it highly profitable.

throw4847285 8mo ago

I wonder what the cognitive difference is between the link to link addictive clicking on wikipedia and doomscrolling? I assume doomscrolling is even more pernicious because it's the lowest possible level of friction. I'm sure somebody has done studies.

Ir0nMan 8mo ago

Jeopardy training tool.

ada1981 8mo ago

Would be cool / horrific to do this, but then have AI influencer bots that teach you the things in influencer style click bait style videos.

sebastiennight 8mo ago
Wait for the API costs or open-source models to be cheap enough and we'll get there. I mean it's a guaranteed HN frontpage (and currently also a guaranteed epic credit card bill).

order-matters 8mo ago

The easiest way to break the mental barrier caused by short form content for me is to remind myself that knowing something is not the final product. The final product is trusting the knowledge and communicating that trust. Any information that finds itself to me without me asking for it is inherently less trustworthy and less communicable than information I hunted for with intention Short form content feeds are like unloading a dumptruck full of random items into your driveway. Is it actually better if all that stuff you didnt ask for is real information that needs to be organized and pieced together with what you already know without any of the associated context that helps you do that? Or is it better if you know 99% of it is trash and you dont need to remember any of it? I think a tool like this is great for people who want to use short form content intentionally, and personally that only happens when I am bored and in need of a new topic to research. I think of all short form content like marketing/ads, just showcasing something i might be interested to dig into on my own. It's how i used StumbleUpon website back in the day. But I have noticed I am rarely using short form content with intention. its because i want to check what my friends have posted, and then with the extra downtime i scroll a little bit, and sometimes get stuck

knorker 8mo ago

I assumed that obviously this is very clever performance art to show how even the healthiest food can be turned into brainrotting sludge. But then I look at the comments, and it really looks like some people want this. Now I'm depressed.

rebane2001 8mo ago
Yeah, that was the intention.

jackinthehat 8mo ago

so me some days. I do love a little perusal in the backend, adding missing commas and the odd correction

extraduder_ire 8mo ago

Is there a technical reason that you can't click on the filled heart icon again to undo your like? Is it just not implemented, or would it be too much effort to undo the effect on your weights from liking the article?

aizk 8mo ago

Wikitok lives again! :)

DCAlmond 8mo ago

Cool concept. I built something very similar [1] but as a native iOS app in an attempt to cut down on my doomscrolling, but it turns out it’s hard to get my brain to read plain text when there’s a plethora of dopamine overloading video apps available. 1. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/egghead-scroll-learn/id6630364935 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/egghead-scroll-learn/id6630364...