Most of What We Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People
reddit.com
reddit.com
The OP uses the word "insane", not outlier. It's clickbaity, and used in jest, but I think it better captures a subtlety of this phenomenon: The prolific commenters are molding every discussion in their image. They might have an interesting angle on the story, or they might just be saying trivial things with beautiful prose. In any case, there is a lack of diversity in general -- discussions are driven by the worldview of a few.
That would be an argument for lurkers to make an effort, even if, like this comment, it's just a barely-formed idea.
Edit: "molding the discussion" -> "molding every discussion"
i started getting downvoted a lot. since then, i've become much more of a lurker and have remained logged-out.
to me it's obvious, and necessarily the case, that the conversation happening is not representative of my views because i'm not sharing them. it's not worth it to me to contribute to the conversation, and get embroiled in an accidental dispute.
my views are my own, and i don't need to spend a lot of time sharing them at other people in order to live a satisfied life.
the internet, like the real world before it, is not my own space... and to the extent that i exist in it, i'm happier going my own way and not encountering lame-o jerks.
But even without voting mechanisms, nasty replies are just as bad or worse, so the general trend of chasing off the people who see things a little differently seems pretty universal to me.
Every once in a while I imagine something anxiety inducing about them, or catch a glimpse(and more often than not a positive one) in the automatic reply emails Reddit likes to send me. Sometimes I will look back at the thread, if I really want to know.
But I don't use these platforms to converse, even though I will happily make a reply to an existing thread. They are both too fast and too slow to be conversational. I use comment threads as a writing prompt instead, and by ignoring external feedback I don't experience pain from them, even though some of the time this might result in someone asking me something and never hearing a reply. If my idea is good, someone copies it and I see it in a later thread.
In terms of fostering discussion, the comment voting is a silent killer.
The most interesting point to me in TFA was the 99.8 - 0.2 - 0.0003 rate of lurkers, commenters, and prolific commenters. It's the 0.0003% who obsessively comment (or edit or play games or whatever) all day on anything and everything that I don't understand. I actually think 'insane' is not an unfair commentary on their behavior. They very often drown out the 0.2% who participate but not obsessively, and are often rewarded with special recognition and even 'untouchable' status on various sites.
One of the examples in the post, Ninja, reportedly earns $500,000 per month for that twelve hours a day of streaming. So.
It's tough to get lurkers (like me) to speak up and shift the discussion when the emotional cost of doing so - arguing, being downvoted, getting defensive, being ridiculed - seems to make the effort simply not worthwhile for the individual. Not only on the web, but also in the office, at Thanksgiving dinner, at a cookout, etc.
Indeed it does. And the "insane" label to the engaged is even more apt there.
the 98% works in that case too: there are many people who might benefit from your comments but don't interact in any way, so you sometimes may deem the costs worth it (like now).
In more controlled, personal settings my favorite response along that vein is "what factors did you consider that led to your conclusion?" It's a less offensive, more roundabout way of telling someone that their assertion is questionable that also betrays their thought process.
Are you saying that internet commenters have a monolith "worldview" that could be referred to as "the worldview of a few"? I'm not saying you're saying this, but that's what I read.
No. I'm saying that each person has a worldview, which is the aggregate of their life experience. If a small set of people drive most discussions, then the discussions are (mostly) a reflection of their perspective only. Maybe these perspectives are diverse enough, but it's hard to know.
Inequality comes from nature, wether it's wealth or contribution on Reddit like sites.
some people (1) have a compulsion to speak, (2) don't feel as much cost from (online) admonishment, and (3) have enough wherewithal to experiment with ideas and presentational approaches. (i'm sure there are other qualities, but these are some).
on another tangent, social cohesion requires that a certain number of people incur the social costs of calling out bad behavior. that seemingly tends to be power law too, since the number of people who don't mind the social costs are quite low. even many law enforcement officers (whose very job it is) care a lot about what other people think and won't always act against self interests when necessary.
In other words, we only hear and watch stories from those people who chose storytelling as their career, and if you assume we are inevitably influenced by their views then we're effectively taking advice from them. This means entertainment shapes the viewer-listener's interpretation of reality to better fit the model of reality to which storytellers subscribe, but I'm pretty sure that's not a desirable outcome in the long run.
In a recent interview, Michelle Obama said we only ever tell young people about the good parts of marriage. We hardly ever explain to them that it has its ups and downs, that it isn't "broken" if suddenly the lust isn't there like it was in the beginning. She presented the argument in a much more cogent manner, but in any case, if you believe her to be right, then this seems like a specific (important!) example of this broader trend.
There are countless others out there who go on to live perfectly happy lives with perhaps much more useful advice to us, and who would arguably be a better influence overall – you just don't hear about them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/12/03/weve-...
We have some of the sexyist media around telling us we should all be sleeping around and yet apparently sex is down too.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...
Are we sure it's any different for other topics?
Also, as for media and marriage I feel like more media is about bad marriages than good ones. A common theme might be falling in love and getting married but a movie about people already married seems rarely about things going well. Or maybe I just have a selective memory.
There are lot of confounding variables, though. Sex could be down because both men and women have to join the workforce, people live with {their parents for longer, with roommates} because rent is expensive, technology lets parents keep tabs on kids better, etc.
EDIT (to reflect your edit, I believe):
> Also, as for media and marriage I feel like more media is about bad marriages than good ones.
I think that's exactly her point. We only ever talk about "falling in love" and "break up". How many songs can you think of that talk about a resilient relationship? Better yet, how many songs can you think of that talk about a relationship in the past tense and say it was great?
I was thinking about this yesterday. An interesting project would be to filter every top 100 song in the past century for love songs, then look at how many stories are predominantly in the past vs. future tense, and then how many of those say good vs. bad things about the other person in the relationship. My hypothesis is there's most forward-looking of those songs talk about the wonders of love, and the past-looking songs talk about how shitty the relationship was and how they're glad it's over.
Extra credits for whoever buckets the data by decade to see if the trend has shifted.
Really? I'd guess that most past-looking songs take a more mournful angle than an angry one (especially in the past century, what with the various wars), although that could just have to do with my sampling bias.
This has not been my observation, at all.
That’s why if you want to be informed about the world you shouldn’t watch the news and just read books.
???
This is the thing though, books are media too.
Also published for clickbait-y reasons.
It sounds like everyone's out suggesting methods for people to avoid using their critical thinking skills. There's no way around it, if you consume media, ANY media, you have to consume it with an almost deeply skeptical eye nowadays. It's just the world we live in, everything from music to books, and from video games to news paper articles, is riddled with bias. Using your head in such an environment is unavoidable, assuming you wish to take wise and measured actions based on the state of the world around you. If wisdom is the goal, reading books, or watching Al Jazeera is just no substitute for exercising your brain cells.
"Riddled with bias" doesn't make sense to me. Any book - one about maths, as much as one about the world - is written from a point of view. This is the "bias" that phrases like "riddled with bias" seem to suggest can - and should be - completely eradicated. But the decision what to include in a book, what to exclude, for example, is a personal one. (It's why committees have a bad name.) All we know of the world is how it appears to 'biased' individuals. There's no eliminating the human factor, and the desire to do so seems to me futile and misconceived.
"...every mind has a new compass, a new north, a new direction of its own, differencing its genius and aim from every other mind; as every man, with whatever family resemblances, has a new countenance, new manner, new voice, new thoughts, and new character. Whilst he shares with all mankind the gift of reason, and the moral sentiment, there is a teaching for him from within, which is leading him in a new path, and, the more it is trusted, separates and signalizes him, while it makes him more important and necessary to society. We call this specialty the bias of each individual. And none of us will ever accomplish anything excellent or commanding except when he listens to this whisper which is heard by him alone. ...A point of education that I can never too much insist upon is this tenet, that every individual man has a bias which he must obey, and that it is only as he feels and obeys this that he rightly develops and attains his legitimate power in the world. It is his magnetic needle, which points always in one direction to his proper path, with more or less variation from any other man’s. He is never happy nor strong until he finds it, keeps it; learns to be at home with himself; learns to watch the delicate hints and insights that come to him, and to have the entire assurance of his own mind. And in this self-respect, or hearkening to the privatest oracle, he consults his ease, I may say, or need never be at a loss. In morals this is conscience; in intellect, genius; in practice, talent; not to imitate or surpass a particular man in his way, but to bring out your own new way; to each his own method, style, wit, eloquence." - Emerson, Greatness
There has been a transition from culture being produced by members of one's community/village/family to culture being produced by professionals for money.
Stories and songs of the past were just as unbalanced and insane as stories and songs of the present. (Both in terms of being fantastical and showing only one side of complex emotional situations.) People grounded in the reality of making living things grow, keeping animals alive, and fixing their own houses and equipment most often understood those stories for what they were. What magic such people believed in was often closely tied to feelings of belonging and community. Gatherings of people often have such magic feelings, but this is quite a real phenomena of human social organization.
Now, there is less of such intense community, and we are bombarded by more commercially produced culture than we could possibly consume, made by people who often live lives of exaggerated imbalance, enabled by what our ancestors would have considered the phenomenal wealth of modern resources. What's more, so much of what we're given as non-fiction also fits into this model by varying degrees.
When Rome's military went from citizen soldiers to full time specialist professionals, the misalignment of incentives between the specialists and the citizens was the subtle, long term root of many problems. I think there is such a misalignment with how human civilizations in general produce culture.
I think this phenomenon may be a "Great Filter" answer to the Fermi paradox. We might not only be swallowed up by Virtual Reality, but also by the purely mental constructs of our own fantastical narratives, as we abandon more and more of the creature connections with nature which keep us grounded in reality.
(Plato. Cave. Shadows.)
There are a couple of other steps beyond the actors/producers usually, particularly for mass media -- there are the owners, or funders who ultimately choose what becomes mainstream; and there's the use of psychological manipulation (advertising, marketing) to direct them to "want" (or accept) what is offered.
There has to be accounting for vagaries and fashions of the time but with those constraints those deciding the parameters for which productions are funded wield immense power.
Note, I didn't say that everything professional culture generators produced was fundamentally wrong and poisonous and would instantly result in your mental and spiritual death.
Thanks for that.
Perhaps this is why poets are to be banished in The Republic.
I have certainly seen this shift in culture creation to professionals within Christian communities in the US. The modern megachurches (2000+ attendees) are rather different culturally from the small community churches of the past (~150-200 members). The shift has coincided with increased political polarization (e.g., Jerry Falwell and his relatively early megachurch) and personal isolation.
This thought often crosses my mind in particular when I consume media that is more 'psychological' in nature. Much of the time I can't shake the feeling that no matter how convincing the characters and their 'inner life' is presented, we're still ultimately seeing a projection of the writer themselves.
Sometimes I notice how certain characters seem richer than others, and usually these characters are obviously closer to the writer's own life. Perhaps this is why slice-of-life shows seem to do well (Atlanta, Better Things, Louie), because they're just the writers writing about themselves.
Or when I read a Dostoevski novel, I can't help but wonder how much of these character's inner lives are really just thinly-veiled versions of Dostoevski's (and, considering my love for his novels, probably my thoughts are 'compatible' with his).
What makes all this worse or more complicated though is that especially for television as a media, there are all sorts of pretty serious constraints. A show needs cliffhangers, ideally every episode, and at least every season, and unless you're on Netflix, you need mini-cliffhangers before every ad block. I imagine that's got to have some significant effect on the story.
I rather like this article by David Foster Wallace that sort-of goes into all of this: https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf (E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction).
I always wondered why USA places so much focus on the Presidents wife? I'm not an American but I know more American leaders wives than I know spouses for all other country leaders together... Isn't that insane? I've never heard anyone talk about spouses of leaders in other countries. Do you know who Merkels husband is? Did you ever hear about David Cameron's wife?
So who is pushing that story? Why is Michelle still in the spotlight? Why was she ever in the spotlight? Why does anyone cares what she thinks?
Those who actively pursue the role do a good job of staying in the limelight. For example, Michelle spearheaded a number of projects like her shift to require more nutritional school lunches.
It's an interesting position, and I wonder how things will be for the first first husband, if it happens and it's not Bill.
At the risk of sounding ignorant, do most other countries require their president-equivalent to live in a government building? If not, perhaps that’s a contributing factor?
It also helps that she wrote a #1 NY Times best-seller that everyone is talking about[0]. Maybe if you read it you will understand what makes her so special.
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⁰ https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Michelle-Obama-ebook/dp/B079...
I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that.
54-year-old black women from the South Side of Chicago who go to Princeton occasionally get an interview in a local magazine and enjoy fifteen minutes of something that if you squint might pass for fame. If they fight a high-profile court case, they may get a two-paragraph Wikipedia article without a photo. To go further they need to become federal judges, or achieve a comparably prestigious position.
Women who marry a President of the United States automatically get on the cover of national magazines and have their Wikipedia page protected from non-logged in editors. If they're accomplished and eloquent as well, sure, that's a bonus.
> I refuse to believe that you honestly believe that.
I'm offering one explanation for why she is more in the spotlight than the wives of foreign presidents. I didn't say being married to Obama wasn't a factor in her popularity. Read again.
She was almost as much part of the Obama presidential image as her husband.
That ain’t peanuts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Burns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Brewer
I guess not.
Agree, to the extent that we consume that media for purposes other than entertainment. I would argue that most of what entertains us is created by "insane" people, and that's ok. Same about art.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/exclusive-documents-...
Humans absolutely require a narrative surrounding anything with which they consider themselves associated with. It’s vastly superior to that being one provided by you versus one invented for use by those who know you.
So the news you read isn't necessarily the most accurate take (you could argue it's almost never the most accurate take), and there is often a tremendous amount of bias that most people never know exists. A disproportionate number of stories come from a small but motivated group with an agenda. Those with no agenda don't care as much about getting their perspectives distributed
This isn't a novel observation, but i still think most people take news at face value more often than they should.
I think it's also a good example of why it's important to make your voice heard, even if it's as simple as commenting on Reddit / HN. Having informed public discussions requires that informed but disinterested (i.e. unbiased) parties make their voices heard.
I think this is less because most of us are 'sheeple' and more to do with how we have some (huge) low-level bugs that can be exploited in particular configurations. We care, but our heuristics can steer us wrong. Marketing/PR/propaganda as a way to exploit these things, and the scientific study of these things really kind of scare the crap out of me when it comes to my hope for the future of humanity.
On the other hand part of the reason he seemed like such an outlier might be because the consensus he seemed to deviate from was itself driven by outliers.
Me too, I suppose.
It still amazes me how deeply titles shape discussion. Most of what you read on the internet is by insane people reacting to titles.
The content is there, by lesser known figures and lurkers alike. It’s just hard to discover. You need to stumble upon it by accident, instead of by a deliberate process like consuming the top upvoted posts.
As a counter-example, I find the "editor's picks" comments on some New York Times articles to be high quality and quite diverse. But that model, of course, doesn't scale.
This is actually why disinformation works so well. Many people are consumers. A handful of people create content. Everyone has an expected behavior in a rather fragile system. If an organized group comes in and acts in a way that is outside of the system norms, they can very much control the dialog.
I did a project on this during my Masters. [1] Reddit has an option to display your upvotes and downvotes publicly. About 2% of users have this option enabled. I scraped a random sample that I found from the torrent of all Reddit posts and comments. I looked at pairs from that set that shared common votes and the highest pair was from /r/the_donald. This behavior is what allowed it dominate the front page for so long. When most users are just voting on 1 or 2 things per page, and someone else comes along and votes for every post they see, it can greatly affect what is displayed.
When you have a small set of people controlling a conversation, they can manipulate what a huge number of people consume. Social media is an incredibly effective propaganda machine!
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/82ylpv/_/d...
I stopped using reddit because of this. I've no idea about the credibility of the authors, their intentions and their motivation. When I'm listening to someone's opinion, I'd like to know more about them, so I can decide for myself how seriously to take it.
This outlook is alien to me. I'm quite the opposite; I'm happy reading and judging anonymous comments purely on the strength of the argument being made there and then (although I don't ignore the background and history of a commenter when that is available to me).
Not attacking your point of view; just very interesting to see an approach described so different to mine.
I only look through the post history of someone if I feel they have a particularly interesting outlook, or if they're batshit crazy and I'm a bit bored.
The point is: the hurdle to contribute or even create is quite high, no matter if it's on the internet or in the "real world".
Stackoverflow is not a magic community, they have guidelines otherwise their content won't work so well. Same goes for Wikipedia. As a matter of fact, either you know how these sites work and what is expected or your content gets downvoted and eventually removed. Even HN works like this.
So yes, then there is a small percentage of users that took the hurdle to internalize how things work. It's much easier actually when you do it regularly. In fact I used to be Wikipedia contributor but I gave it up because it's time consuming and frustrating. If you're not a frequent user, you can correct orthographic errors, anything else is pointless unless you're a writing genius/journalist.
Nobody ever complains how insane they are working 10+ hours a day for an unstable job and oftentimes bad salary.
The author's definition of insane is stuff such as having read a lot of books, posting a high mumber of edits in wikipedia, or streaming videogaming for a profit.
That's not clickbaity. It's simply wrong.
Focusing on the most arguable assertion, the wikipedia user who has on average an edit per 4 minutes for pretty much the last decade. Based on my personal experience, it's very easy to reach that sort of rate due to wikipedia's auto-edit features, as it only takes a single click on a link to submit an edit.
For example, you can revert a vandalism submission by clicking the revert link, you can mark an article as stub by clicking on a link, you can add a post to a category by clicking on a link... You can even post a warning on a user page by clicking on a link. Each of these actions count as an edit.
This means that if you happen to stumble on a user who posted a joke on a set of articles, in the half minute it takes to revert all vandalism submissions and warn the user to not repeat that you will contribute tens of edits, which can give you easily a rate of 100 edits per minute.
Does that count as insane?
First, when zoomed out, outliers in all possible tasks become more common — internet commenting is just a subset for silly folks like me.
Secondly, the emergent human social fabric is built to recognize and amplify outspoken and / or talented outliers, via mechanisms whereby others who {agree, can find utility, can profit} are incentivized to act as amplifiers. The cost function to repeat a message drops precipitously every time it’s repeated (influences status quo). I’m not sure it’s particularly surprising that internet social forums behave by the same rules — and are even optimized to replicate them mechanistically (upvotes).
I mean... not be dismissive, I guess it does strike me as particularly neat that the internet provides a medium for these people to productively share insight and identify new niches where they can potentially add value to the rest of the world. Where would we on HN be without, say, patio11? :)
I don't know which foster the best quality discussions, but I feel the HN way is a bit impersonal.
When I don't see the replies, they're easy to ignore.
At some point (I have no idea when), Reddit also added a "disable inbox replies" button to comments, so that you can prevent notifications on a comment by comment basis.
It's pointless to comment if one cannot add new information, perspectives, arguments, or humors to the thread, as a result, one really needs to make an effort to engage in the discussion. In practice, it means you'll need a proper keyboard, and a fast Internet connection to search for references. At least, at there, or at Reddit, or even at 4chan, this principle applies. I mean, you can make pointless comments, but you'll lower the SNR of the entire community, or your comment will be ignored or filtered on 4chan, or downvoted (or not getting votes) on HN/Reddit/Slashdot.
There are other places where the barrier-of-entry is lower, like the comments section below the stories on "ordinary" news websites (not HN), etc, but make an comment is even more pointless.
I guess the best counterexample I can think of is Twitter. It's no more than 140 chars and highly personal, so making a knee-jerk comment is common, and you can use a mobile phone instead of a proper computer to do so.
I'd also presume (and it is a presumption!) that people who are commenting on one platform will likely also to be commenting on another. As in, I would presume they would establish a conversation as the preferred method of internet discourse they digest, as opposed to a one way consumption of data.
This also gives me an opportunity to use one of my favourite Cronenberg quotes: "The monologue is his preferred method of discourse" - Videodrome
This is especially true if the content itself gives authoritative or complete information about something, as Warnock's dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma) described:
""" The problem with no response is that there are five possible interpretations:
* The post is correct, well-written information that needs no follow-up commentary. There's nothing more to say except "Yeah, what he said."
* The post is complete and utter nonsense, and no one wants to waste the energy or bandwidth to even point this out.
* No one read the post, for whatever reason.
* No one understood the post, but won't ask for clarification, for whatever reason.
* No one cares about the post, for whatever reason.
— Bryan C. Warnock """
In this way, I think the voting system became popular, not only because it's usable a mechanism to select interesting information, but also gives an important feedback to encourage the poster, same for the "Like" button. However, they has their own problems.
In truth the polarizing of the Internet is causing a lot of us to be lurkers who may have things to say but do not want to engage in emotional content with strangers, because everything is interpreted so emotionally these days.
Most people (who can) read. That's a lower effort (and most of the time sufficient) than writing.
But I remember teenage me, over 20 years ago, being very reserved about writing online because I considered my grammar too bad and I didn't want to embarrass myself.
And back then there wasn't even anything social media, where blunders like that could lead straight back to "real" me, the whole idea still made me anxious.
Can't even begin to imagine how teenagers these days must feel with social media being literally everywhere and recording pretty much everything they write for the foreseeable future.
At least nowadays they have access to some pretty good grammar correction tools ;)
Maybe out of fear of saying something wrong and getting debated on it - though it's quite civilized here. They might have seen too much of other websites where things turn less civil :)
You get publicly scored on your contributions to the discussion. Most people are turned off by the idea of discussions being adversarial, point scoring, confrontational.
And in that respect, I consider the barriers to comment contribution to be very high indeed.
* is it true?
* is it necessary?
* is it kind?
That's clearly not true with Wikipedia's hostile to new users policies (even with the existance of "don't bite the newbies").
Even creating a username means you have to navigate the username policy, and the two admin boards (one RFC, one noticeboard) for usernames. There are two templates for usernames (and templating new users is pretty hostile). And until very recently the noticeboard had two different sections, a holding pen and the main board. (They've got rid of the holding pen).
Username creation is less hostile right now that it was a few years ago, but that can change at any moment if someone choses to trawl the new username lists.
1. Must represent a single person, not a company, organization, website, band, partnership, or other group of people
2. Must not be deceptive or impersonate someone else
3. Must not be unreasonably long
4. Must not be inflammatory or imply that you intend to troll
If you create an account that doesn't meet this policy, an administrator will prevent you from editing until you choose a new username, and you can continue afterward.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Username_policy
You're absolutely right in that Wikipedia needs to improve its user experience to ensure that new editors know what the rules are before they accidentally violate them.
It's repeated for every single policy page - they are enormously long and complex for every single topic. There is nothing remotely like a friendly beginners guide to helping - be that fixing some poor language, or correcting a mistake. You have to plough through the meta Wikipedia policy encyclopedia and figure out what's relevant or not the hard way.
On my experience many moons ago, Wikipedia was one of the most hostile sites I've ever encountered for new users. I dread to think how a subject expert who isn't also an IT expert finds it.
> This page in a nutshell: When choosing an account name, do not choose names which may be offensive, misleading, disruptive, or promotional. In general, one username should represent one person.
Seems fine to have the sussinct description at the top followed by details on the same page. If there really are lots of people that have issues picking a username (these policies seem petty typical so I’d expect most users to be fine) then a link from the create account page would be a good idea.
For a few years the new username lists were trawled by vandal patrols and there was a lot of biting of newbies -- so much that "don't bite the newbies" had to be added to the policy pages.
For example: the section on "confusing usernames". This was added to avoid people suggesting they were a bot account if they weren't a bot account, or were an admin if they weren't an admin, or to prevent impersonation.
So, if you register as "kjwenflkjclnaksdnalmsd" that's confusing, but it's not against the policy. Except a lot of people reporting usernames hadn't bothered to read the policy, and so they were just reporting names like that as confusing. For sometime people using their real names in a non-latin script were being blocked because their name was "confusing". This again led to changes in policy.
What WP really needs to do (and what they've actually done) is have a bot that checks usernames and places them on a list with descriptions of the problems, and warnings about why it might not be a problem. (There are differences between "WhitePower88" and "MartyJenkins88") -- and then have people checking the list.
No, an admin may instantly block you permanently, or may temporarily block you until you change your name, or may temporarily block you while they discuss it with you, or may not block you but apply one of two templates, or add your name to a username for discussion board where you'll have to try to justify your name.
EDIT: Reads some stuff about his company. He knows that information is factually incorrect. It's not harmful to his company, but it is misleading to people reading Wikipedia. He signs up for an account.
If he signs up a "xargleblarg" he's fine, he can edit the article.
If he choses to be open and honest and he signs up as "Bob from BobCo" he faces instant blocks across multiple policies (COI, Spam, spam username), even if those policies are being incorrectly applied.
The only interactions I had with Wikipedia are reading articles. Even I know it is frowned upon to edit your own articles.
And it's really inconsistant: depending who's looking at the name the new user may get instantly blocked permanently; may have to go through RFC/usernames, may have to discuss with admins on usernames for admin attention or on ANI, may have to discuss with admins on their userpage, may have to discuss with non-admins on their userpage.
Anyone can edit it, but only those with enough obsessession can meaningfully make a change (beyond fixing typos and such) that will persist. That was my impression anyway, after spending a bit of time trying to contribute and it seems to be very much inline with the message in the OP.
I don’t bother anymore.
You know why the political process is so opaque? Fundamentally, it's because the people who are there making stuff happen had the time and inclination to be there. They stuffed envelopes, went to events and ate lots of rubber chicken, and did stupid nonsense to be a councilman or chief of staff or whatever.
The same thing happens in these scenarios, but with different types of "toil" to gain acceptance.
I'm not trying to be a contrarian on this point but some social forums (e.g.: reddit, where this was linked from) end-up being sgemented into their own forms of echo-chambers, where any dissenting outliers - however valid - are voted into oblivion, simply because it doesn't agree with "muh viewpoint".
IMHO, that reinforces status quo, rather than influences it. I realise that this mightn't be the case with all or even the majority of social forums but it's the loudest that gets the most attention and since we're discussing something directly linked from redditstan, I figured it worth mentioning (since the aspect of influencing the status quo angle crumbles in this specific regard).
To give an example: Create an account on reddit and comment a valid point in the donald, even if it's down-voted into oblivion, go and then comment on something in politics or worldpolitics or the like. Wait for someone to go look at your post history and see that you commented in the donald and watch the tide turn against you, simply because of your participation - even if that comment is directly contradictory the original post in the donald. Just by association, that influence of the status quo is immediately eroded way because it's deemed "invalid" because, again, "muh viewpoint".
Any possibility of influence is lost, at that point. Repeat it day and night, it won't eventually influence the status quo until enough people repeat it and I think that's, probably, more along the lines of what you meant: It's not the number of times it's repeated, it's the volume of that repition's saturation into the larger group that's intrinsically more important. A single person repeating a message over 30 years has far less weight than people (en masse) repeating the same message. Granted, it - sometimes -takes a single person to incite the spread of that message, simply repeating it ad infinum won't reach the end-goal of influencing the status quo.
/endRantThatWasntParticularlyAimedAtYou
Again, I'm not trying to be contrarian because you bring up valid points - save for Theories of Relativity because they were review before being published by someone.
A good example, which was quashed from its inception, was the Copernican Theory of Heliocentrism: Though, very much valid, it was oppressively pushed from gaining ground by "muh religious viewpoint[s]". Even when substantiated by Galileo, this wasn't influential enough to change the status quo - with Galileo living the remainder of his in house arrest.
To lazily quote Nietzsche, in this regard: "All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
1. Mentioning Gab as a possible site to sign up for is "pretty blatantly out of line" and a violation of the Stack Exchange Code of Conduct, and
2. If they discovered that a job candidate had a Gab account, they would throw out the application based upon that fact alone.
So it's not just internet communities; we've got academics openly bragging that even engaging with a community they politically disapprove of, regardless of your individual views, will lead to them barring you from employment in academia.
Even assuming that's true (and I don't know or care if it is), it's unclear to me why it should reflect on the community. If tomorrow somebody were to leak a tape of Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky ranting about their hatred of some race, it wouldn't somehow reflect poorly on the character of anyone with a Hacker News or Stack Overflow account.
First and foremost political opinions have no place in most professional settings and no influence on someones work. If I recall correctly it's even illegal to judge someone based on their political affiliations in many countries.
Further, someone could have an account there to comment against the radical opinions or because he has friends with those opinions, which brought him to the network. And surely some more reasons why someone might have an account without sharing the extremist views of the outliers there.
New ideas in this context are not limited to what disagrees with the overall consensus. Simiple refinements make real changes over time.
I agree most actors we see on TV and movies are outliers (even within the total population of actors). I don't agree they are consequently better than most other people at acting. I think they're marginally better, somewhat practiced, but really "into it" as a career.
Likewise, I think you're underestimating how "good" someone is at a thing if they do it all day. It is difficult to not become good at an activity - for some subset of what that activity entails - if you do it all day long. I think most actors are good at some subset of acting and most Wikipedia editors are good at some subset of editing.
If you dribble a basketball all day long for five years you'll become remarkable at the narrow skill of dribbling unless you deliberately try not to. You probably won't get significantly better at the broader activity of basketball, but dribbling will become like walking for you. In the same way, I don't think there is a large difference in the way actors and Wikipedia editors become good at their activities. They just spend a lot of time in a particular niche.
Part of this is also just the options that first-rate actors open up for you as a writer or director that less capable ones cannot. If you think of the performer's talent as kind of a box that you can fit your narrative and emotional depth in, you just wouldn't try to ship something unless you have a box big enough to hold it.
If you have someone like Anthony Hopkins or Ian McKellan on hand you can give them long, baroque speeches and they will nail it. With a less capable actor you would be forced to keep it simpler because most of that stuff might sound corny as hell in less capable hands.
1. Luck does indeed play at big role in getting a break, the right roles, the right director, etc. A lot of people who could have become big stars don't. People know this and leap from there to the whole thing being pretty random.
2. It's often not obvious what makes a great actor that much greater than someone who is not quite so great. Film probably accentuates the differences. But even with mid- to top-level professional theater, the whole cast is probably pretty solid, but the stars really shine in hard to put your finger on it ways. In more "normal" professional roles, it's usually a lot easier to peg why someone is just better than someone else.
Let me try to explain with a bit of an overstatement: Most TV is crap, but year after year they keep making it. People making it cannot be good at it? Well actually they are. They found the sweet-spot by maximizing the profit in terms of eyeball captured they will make from the least amount of effort. That is success.
Now-a-day successful politicians are far better at making people vote for them than actually realizing the platform they are elected on. They are literally good at the game of democracy, but don't know what to do with the spoils. The difference between those two seems to be "fake-news".
Lets assume that the prolific reviewer on Amazon is completely legit. He is obviously good in the sense of efficient at reading and writing reviews. That we do not see the "good" in an outcome of having so many reviews written by the same person does not make his activity less good as an activity.
Yup. The way the internet works is it privileges the perspectives and opinions of people who have an abundance of time to spend on the internet (either because their jobs are online or because they just have a lot of free time). So you wind up seeing the perspectives of bored office workers overrepresented and manual laborers underrepresented, you see a lot from students but not as much from working parents, etc.
This might be why online discourse is especially toxic around any subject that actually has to overlap with people out in the real world: The people least in touch with it are best positioned to dominate the conversation. And any system that relies on majoritarianism to do curation just amplifies these defects. One of the problems with this has been that it's actually impossible to get a real understanding of what motivates people who disagree with you. Even if you go looking, all you will ever find are the worst representatives of that worldview.
It's definitely true of subjects like politics, but it's also kind of true about things like dating or relationship advice or even restaurant reviews. Even job advice can be spotty. The conversation is always amplifying the voices of people who have strong, poorly thought out opinions. And in cases like politics people aren't even really interested in discussion. John Scalzi characterizes it as "gamified rhetoric" (https://twitter.com/scalzi/status/1025372965754621953) where the whole rhetorical strategy is to frustrate and exhaust you by nitpicking everything you say. The goal isn't to clarify, synthesize, or understand so much as to "disqualify" you and your perspective from consideration.
This is such an important point it needs to be repeated.
The notion that manufacturing workers are the real America and desk jobs are held by privileged outliers may have been true at one time, but today it is a myth. The right model for “average working stiff” today works in a hospital, restaurant, or government office building.
Stats per BLS: https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-...
I sat down and read every...single...link.
What I discovered was that not only had he clearly not read anything he'd posted but that what is allowed to pass for a publishable study is borderline laughable.
After going through it and then realizing that several "prominent voices" on my assorted feeds use the exact same approach, it became apparent that these folks only goal was to keep a conversation thread going in order to amplify the headline reach of a post. Slightly more sophisticated spamming essentially. The only solution was to realize what was happening and refuse to engage.
Now the only conversations I'll have about topics online are a) off of Facebook and b) logical conversations that can be had without link bombing.
The more conversations I've been involved in, the more I've realized that if it seems like what's being said doesn't add up...there's usually a reason.
On reddit you can submit posts all day but you only see the light if others upvote you.
In short I think you have to be both obsessive and skilled, which is something like the real world.
Sure, but we should consider which outliers most internet discussions end up encouraging. They're going to encourage people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions. It's going to encourage people who spend less time writing their comments, because if you're spending 15-45 minutes making sure your comment is of high enough quality you're simply not going to be able to make many comments. If you spend a few seconds/a few minutes writing one, you can make a lot. It's going to encourage comments when people are outside of their own areas of expertise or when they don't have much to say (because you're not going to be seeing all the people who refrained from commenting).
You mentioned voting, but the same issue applies. Someone who has fewer time obligations is going to end up upvoting/downvoting a lot more comments than someone with an very active offline life. Someone who votes before reading an entire comment is going to be able to make a lot more votes than someone who does. Someone who upvotes/downvotes everything because of how they feel is going to be giving out more votes than someone who wants to reserve those for truly bad/truly good comments. Someone who checks whether or not a comment is true is going to have less time to vote than someone who doesn't. Someone who has time to refresh a page every 10 minutes throughout the day is going to be voting earlier, affecting what comments/posts even get seen by less active user (people with other things to do miss a post because really active users downvoted it off the front page within 30 minutes).
A lot of people seem to be unaware that this is an issue, and think the internet is representative of society at large. But commenting and voting as much as you want encourages certain kinds of content from certain kinds of people (a small subsection of people[1]), and discourages content from others.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)
> people with fewer family/community/social/hobby/work obligations, because the more of those obligations one has the less time one has for online discussions
seems like a bit of a category error. There are any number of stable online groups that should be considered under the rubric of "community/social" activities. People participating in them know and expect things of each other, just as they do in a face-to-face group.
There are other factors at play at Wikipedia too. In my native language, Danish, Wikipedia is all but dead. Years ago, I tried contributing within my own field. I researched and spent hours adding relevant information to different topics, only to find out a few days after that all my contributions had been deleted by the administrators.
Here is the Danish site for one of the most beloved Danes: https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup
Here is the English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Laudrup
It's just one example, but it is true for culture, history and many other areas. If you want to know anything on Danish matters, the English Wikipedia is usually a much better option than the Danish.
There are some situations where the non-English Wikipedias have far more information than the English ones though, because of how "notability" works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
Deleting articles doesn't prevent anyone from participating, since anyone can write/edit articles on any notable subject. The deletion process protects Wikipedia from search engine marketers who try to promote their clients with biased low-quality content. They can go to Quora for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_policy#Reas...
When I said that it "doesn't prevent anyone from participating", I was only considering the editors who are interested in writing about a wider variety of topics.
For better or worse, Wikipedia frowns on editors who are only interested in editing articles on one topic. There's a page for that:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Single-purpose_accou...
This is because these editors usually have a conflict of interest, and must make an extra effort to keep their writing free of bias.
Policies aimed at improving the quality of articles also tend to reduce participation. It's a trade-off, and I don't know that the optimal balance would be.
It's a trade-off, and I don't know what the optimal balance would be.
A bit later on, there was Croteam, the maker of Serious Sam, AMA on Reddit so I asked them if the reference to Derek Smart was an inside joke or what. The reply was along the lines of "he's a dear friend of ours and our inspiration". I went back to the Derek Smart Wikipedia article, pointed out the screenshot of the credits with Derek's name, the AMA reply and asked a very innocuous question: "Can we put this in the article?"
I got a reply that what I did is termed "original research" and the only acceptable way to include the reference would be if some noteworthy third party, such as Washington Times, mentions and explains the connection, meaning all the work I did up to that point was in vain. That's when I completely gave up on editing Wikipedia as it seemed to me, and still does, absolutely Sisyphean. Editors of that article then went on to argue how to phrase the incident where Derek Smart assaulted a vending machine to best fit the article.
The implication of "no original research" and "noteworthy sources of information" means a large mass of regional events and persons can't be included in the English Wikipedia unless they clear this arbitrary bar of noteworthiness that can still be gamed with ease: a) be an employee of a mainstream news source, b) publish a biased article on any given topic, c) create an anonymous Wikipedia account, d) create an article on the topic or edit an exiting one to embed the information you published and e) marvel as Wikipedia editors revert the changes under the guise of preventing vandalism.
Automated edit-correction tools are another grave issue for Wikipedia, as they instantly revert an article to its sanctioned version set by a reputable Wikipedia editor. How is Wikipedia "an encyclopedia anyone can edit" again?
I attemped to create a page about a slightly obscure file format with all the information I had found while developing with it. I linked to all the sources I found that helped me understand it and my submission was rejected because my sources were not academic enough so I removed those sources and added the only official source in existence which is a zip file containing code examples and example files. My second edit was rejected for not sourcing all of my info.
Literally the only info available is the zip and forum posts. I mainly used the forum posts while learning and verified it against the data I was seeing in the file. How am I meant to share this info for others to benefit from? If I make it in to a blog post it's not an acceptable source but if I post it as a PDF and pretend its some wanky research paper then it probably would get accepted.
One of the core principles of Wikipedia is "No original research". Your proposed article sounds like it was just that. The Wikipedia editors would rather have you share that research in a blog post or similar.
In other words, unless there are reliable secondary sources to base the article on, it is considered original research and is not a good fit for Wikipedia.
I guess part of the reason that new contributors feel bad is confusion about the goals and nature of Wikipedia itself.
The basic ideas of not doing original research or relying on primary sources are fine. But writing just about any article requires synthesizing multiple sources to some degree. Rules are one thing. Saying that the documentation is not a suitable source for information about a file format is something else.
The article needs independent sources (as in, secondary sources that are financially and editorially independent of the company who develops the .mix file type) to show that the topic warrants an article.
If an article has enough sources cited to show notability, primary sources like documentation pages can be used. If notability is not shown, then the topic doesn't meet Wikipedia's inclusion criteria and the content of the article is moot.
Without this requirement, any company would be able to publish promotional articles on all of its products, and exclusively use its own web pages as citations. Wikipedia's notability guidelines are in place to prevent spam and to ensure that topics only get articles if they can be written about in a neutral way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_and_usin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
While not every topic belongs on Wikipedia, there are a number of other places where your article would be appreciated:
The test is called the "general notability guideline". In short, any topic needs to have at least 2 citations to different sources that meet all of the following requirements:
1. The source provides significant coverage (at least 1-2 sizable paragraphs) of the topic
2. The source is reliable
3. The source is a secondary source that is editorially and financially independent of the subject (and of the other source)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Notability#General_n...
A manual for the file format would not meet requirement #3, since it's a primary source that was published by the company who developed it.
This rule is in place to prevent companies from publishing information about their own products, and then promoting them on Wikipedia in a biased way.
However, it isn't considered an independent source, since it was written by a company with a vested interest in the topic.
To prove that the file type is notable, you'll need at least different 2 sources that meet all 3 requirements: they must provide significant coverage of the topic, be reliable, and be independent of the topic.
You don't have to use these sources to write all of the content in your article, but they do have to be cited as references to pass the notability test.
The three most common kinds of reliable sources are:
- Articles or web pages from a reputable news organization, magazine, or web publisher (with an editorial team)
- Books from a reputable publishing company
- Publications from a peer-reviewed academic journal
Offline and non-English sources are accepted.
If you can't find at least 2 sources that meet these requirements, then the topic doesn't pass the notability test and isn't suitable for Wikipedia. In this case, you're probably better off sharing your article somewhere else, such as Wikibooks, Wikiversity, or your personal blog.
I also find it ironic that Wikipedia notability is so tied to traditional publishing sources.
ADDED: I admit to falling pretty heavily on the inclusionist side; I'm pretty skeptical about notability at times.
There are two places where editors can ask for help: the Teahouse (for new editors) and the Help Desk (for anyone).
"Significant coverage" addresses the topic directly and in detail, so that no original research is needed to extract the content. Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material.
Since she is your family member, you're asked to disclose that you have a conflict of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest
But the answer is yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
There doesn't seem to be rhyme or reason to whether something is deemed to be 'notable'.
Worse, you put off people like the grandparent who actually attempt to contribute.
We all want accurate and reliable sources, but why not work with people, rather than just deleting? Or why not a 2 stage process. Have a staging area for pages that aren't good enough. Then promoted to wikipedia proper when good enough?
What happens in X years time, when that file format is 'notable'? You've lost the person most inclined to write the document, and lost historical context from a living document.
The BBC had a habit in its early days of reusing 'old' film. What could have been a treasure trove is now lost. I cant help feeling wikipedia is being similarly short sighted.
/rant (not aimed at you btw)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_creatio...
Drafts in AfC will not be deleted for being non-notable, but they will also not be indexed by search engines.
When a draft is ready to be published, a reviewer looks over it and ensures that it is properly cited, before moving it to the encyclopedia proper.
"Only experienced editors should ever create an article from scratch. Others should first create a draft page and build the article there."
And as you say they aren't indexed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Userspace_draft
Userspace drafts also won't be deleted for non-notability, and they can be published whenever the editor feels that they're ready.
Neither of the draft spaces on Wikipedia are indexed by search engines, because these staging areas generally aren't proofread by other editors.
Grandparent said it was rejected because of the citations, not because of any supposed lack of notability. Are you implying that reviewers refuse articles for other reasons than the ones they actually give?
(Edit: from what I gather on this thread, the citations were both secondary and substantial, so the notability criterion was probably met.)
Over time your page will naturally get referenced by Google and other search engines.
Too bad it's not accepted in Wikipedia, but as long as the information is easily findable and organized as an easy to read and comprehensive enough reference, your work will be useful to many.
Also out of interest, what is the file format?
Lower English language fluency in the general population, compared to the Netherlands or Scandinavia, supports this of course. But also the fact that German remains a scholarly language to this day (in the humanities but also in some branches of engineering).
I think that may be a problem for Wikipedia in such countries. People can read/write English good enough that they just go directly to English.
It's pure speculation on my end though. But I'm a non-native English speaker but I never go do my native language's Wikipedia.
I've encountered torrent sites that make more effort to make newcomers feel welcome.
Never tried again, and won't, despite running across much that's inaccurate, plain wrong or has poor language over the years.
The animation could have 50 million views and be known across the internet, but because no 'reputable news organization' wrote about it, i.e. no CNN or BBC article or whatever, they would routinely be brought up for deletion and quickly killed.
Which always seemed strange to me, that this new fangled technology that took advantage of the power of the Internet wouldn't find anything on the Internet itself worthy of gracing its virtual pages. Especially since, as Wikipedia itself states, "Wikipedia is not Paper", and doesn't have a physical limit to what it can talk about or include.
It always annoyed me that these things wouldn't get passed the notability filter, but the most obscure Star Trek episode would have a dedicated page with a full synopsis and details and Easter Eggs, despite the fact that there couldn't have been a news article about that specific episode anywhere out there and the author had to be drawing from the episode... I mean, primary source, itself in order to get that information, which is something that gets squashed elsewhere (No primary sources!)
The hypocrisy just got to me big time. And then when I'd fix spelling or grammar issues on other random pages and see every single one of those get reverted without comment, it was clear that doing anything on Wikipedia was just a big waste of my fucking time. While I still read it to get a really rough handle on topics sometimes, I will never 'contribute' to it again, including every time that giant "We Desperately Need Your Financial Support" message from Jimmy Wales comes up on the site once a year.
I'd love for there to be an alternative where the admins aren't such deletionist zealots, but alternatives just don't exist.
I should also state that I had such a negative experience trying to contribute to Wikipedia that it still riles me up thinking about it to this day. And there's not a whole lot out there that riles me up.
That's what I did for Wikipedia's article on software synthesizers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_synthesizer), which in 2014 was rather out of date, particularly on its "typical" examples and other elements.
The article does look a fair bit better now. It does seem to still carry a little awkwardness (eg statements like "a software instrument is akin to a soundfont" which is not really correct) and a few out-of-date moments (eg why mention Csound and Nyquist as music programming language examples but not mention more common examples these days such as Max/MSP or PureData?) and some other quibbles I have. But it is better. Maybe I'll have to make a few more talk points someday. :)
Personally, I do think Wikipedia for the casual contributor is unfortunately broken. But given the amount of trolls and agenda-oriented people out there, I actually can understand why there is a high barrier to entry. It's just a bit unfortunate because it also restricts the diversity of the contribution ecosystem. I'm not sure how to reconcile the two personally...
For instance, in the gaming world, I often look at Serebii.net as a good example of where Wikipedia's credibility priorities are misplaced. To them, it being a fan site run pseudononymously makes it less credible/reputable than a publication like IGN or Vice or what not, but in the actual community/among those who know of the topic, it's actually the far more credible source. The owner has written in magazines, been quoted by popular media sources, used as a reference by those seen as more reputable, etc.
But Wikipedia doesn't think like this. To them, credibility equals being paid as part of a major publication, and it doesn't matter even if you're a distinguished professor writing on your blog or academic site otherwise. And this then hurts the niche topics you mention even more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
You're right about fan sites. It's harder for people outside of the fan community to evaluate whether a fan site is reliable, and that contributes to the skepticism you see.
Yes, but a simple link to which article it was would be enough. What also might be useful is a user name and/or a rough estimate of what the time period was, but without even an article name, there is nothing anybody can do about fixing these things.
It was some hours I spent on a topic I knew well, and had a good selection of books on my own shelves to cite, triggered by finding an incomplete or missing article, or a glaring error. Nothing more. After the challenges contributing I lost interest and moved on. I was doing Wikipedia a favour and trying to contribute, they apparently weren't interested. I'm not going to fight for it, but as a result I'm not open for trying more, or ever again.
As for username, I have no idea whatsoever, but offhand I can only remember one of the several LJ usernames I had, some I used for months rather than just a few days. Mind I doubt I could accurately list all the topics I blogged about on LJ, either, but could cover the main interests easily. I'm not even sure a username was needed at all but it may well have been.
One of Wikipedia's power users, [...] Assuming he
doesn't sleep or eat or anything else [...]
that's still one edit every four minutes.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Plymouth_Brethren...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Raymond_Ramazani_...
It would be odd if, after viewing/reading the exact same content, we all had unique opinions of what we just saw or read. It would be pretty bizarre, and probably imply that our communication system wasn't working. It's good to see more than one POV, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever have agreement either, and if I see someone has already made the same point, why should I type it in?
Admission: I didn't read absolutely every comment here before typing this; just the top dozen or so. :)
And this is exactly why communism will NEVER work: 90% of the population just won't be able to produce anything of value by themselves. They just lack the "business instinct" or "drive to hustle" or whatever you want to call it. Is it environmental? genetic? cultural? I don't know, but if you forcefully stop the "creator class" in favor of the 90%, what you will see happening is exactly what happened to the Soviet economy after WW2.
The concept of preventing a dilution of discourse and output quality by intentionally maintaining a degree of friction in the participation process is well-embodied by, e.g., the effort required to start contributing to certain critical open-source projects like the Linux kernel (think email-based communications, packaging processes, etc.). The notion of friction extends directly to aesthetics as well - consider the difference in discourse level that exists between HN, Reddit, FaceBook, and so on. There are many factors involved in the gradient, but it is worth noting that the aesthetic model employed by a system or product is perhaps the clearest external signal of that system's intended purpose. To that end, the dramatic "gameification" of relatively frictionless communication protocols appears to be incompatible with the idea of truth on a fundamental level. This also applies to the modern incarnation of popular US "news" organizations - think Fox's dramatic music and hyper-augmented hollywood-style visuals, or my personal favorite, CNN's "situation room".
How many people posted letters to news papers in the hay day of paper news..
These are real, actual people who submit comments. And those people are anonymous and free to post whatever lies they care to come up with on forums such as this one.
Is is just that you don't care enough to reply, feel like your opinions are unpopular, don't feel like you have anything to say, or something else?
Of course, sometimes when reading comments I get the feeling that you people are all entirely, inexcusably wrong, and I feel an urge to set the record straight. Normally on HN, it doesn't take long for someone to step up and explain exactly what I was thinking with an eloquence I couldn't have matched. And the world is right again. :-)
Your comment now is marked "5 minutes ago" and seems game for a reply, but later today when it's "5 hours ago" or longer, I'd feel like it has expired and any reply would be lost and never seen.
Not commenting is the natural state for most people. Maybe the question isn't why these people don't post, but why active commenters do.
As a lurker for me most of the times I feel like I am on window shopping of ideas. Not looking anything in particular.
Sometimes I have a question to pose, or I disagree with the premise of the submission (sometimes I'm one of the few people to do so).
I'm a singular, non-influential person. I don't believe I'm exactly changing hearts and minds writing HN comments. I do like the discourse I get, though.
For me personally, I just don't care and don't get any reward in the idea of conversing with some random person on the internet. The chances are, I'll never see you again on here or irl, remember your online name (I remember faces, not names), or you will have any real impact in my day to day life. This is how I feel about every commenter online. I don't talk to random people on the street, so why would I talk to random people on the internet? To me, there is little difference.
I value face to face communication much higher than text chat. I really enjoy reading peoples faces and expressions when chatting, to the point where I find talking to others online is the equivalent of having a conversation where everyone has a paper bag on their head when.
If I think someone is wrong on the internet, I just don't care. I read their comment, think to myself "They are wrong/an idiot" and get on with my day. I see no value in correcting a stranger on the internet.
I much rather have conversations irl, and I do, so I have no time/energy left for an online conversation. I'd much rather spend my time with my girlfriend, programming or anything else.
Everything feels so permanent online. I know I'm going to regret things I've said in this post in the future, my mind will change, maybe I won't lurk anymore after writing this!? The permanent nature of online communication goes the against how I should be as person, my opinions shifting and changing as I experience more of life, not held back by some random thing I said on a forum 5 years ago.
When I post, I open myself up to being attacked by people online. I can avoid this simply by never saying anything online.
To illustrate a point, I finally got round to creating an account on stackoverflow about half a year ago, and I still have only one point. I just wanted to vote on questions, but I can only do that if I have at least 15 points on my account, and that requires writing comments/questions (I think). For me, that means contriving 15 comments that succeed at playing some social game, that I simply don't have the time or energy for, so I've given up on ever voting on stackoverflow.
I almost left during the year of the US primaries as the news was majority political and simply more garbage, so I'm glad that got cleaned up.
Often I don't have anything "more" to say on top of what has been said, so I wont add noise. That may be a common thread with lurkers. When I do have a unique perspective and I feel adds value and not noise I may comment, keyword is "may".
I couldn't care less about karma, popularity, social scores or the like (just more garbage). As long as this site and it's users continue to provide value to me by filtering and aggregating tech news I will continue to use it.
Just another lurker mooching off of non lurkers. Selfish yes, but it works.
Sometimes I won't add a comment because of the chilling effect of a future employer or online mob finding it and reading something into my words. It's not worth being contrarian on the internet, or there's no space for devils advocate anymore. Most of the time I will comment and it's fine though.
Sometimes, unrelated, I will write a comment and then when my thoughts are formulated, I delete it because I have benefited from the conversation and there wouldn't be any additional benefit or use from me posting it.
When I was young I enjoyed commenting and voicing my opinion, after 25 years online, I no longer derive satisfaction from it.
The topics on HN generally align with my interests and the quality of discourse here is fairly high, but I'm rarely willing to make the additional mental effort of participating. I prefer to research any points I make and back them up with data, and it's not worth my time to do so only to end up arguing with trolls or people who refuse to reconsider their position when presented with new information.
I personally think we'd get a lot of duplicate comments stating the same thing which would reduce the overall quality of the topic at hand. An example that proves this is Ebay's user reviews. You have a lot of people participating in reviews because it's a review system that works both ways, so it's in the both user's best interest to review and rate. But most reviews are duplicates.
YouTube's comment system, which has a younger audience mainly, is rife with spam, trolling and comments that add nothing to the discussion. Is this what we want everywhere? Are those people outliers too? Or people with more spare time than people who purely browse?
I wouldn't use the term "outliers" then to describe these people. I would simply call them "people with initiative"... And in some cases "people with initiative who also want to help".
you would end up crowded out with middle-of-the-road comments. Which is really interesting, because nobody would really enjoy that I think, yet it would be entirely representative of the viewer base.
We should also note that the 1% rule also applies to traditional media be it news programs, tv shows, documentaries, or movies. They are many barriers entry and gate keepers to filter out content that may not have mass appeal.
Mainstream media's filtering enables them to be profitable and compensate the content creators unlike most of the people on the internet. People are spending their time creating stuff so the someone else can make money? Maybe that's the insane apart?
I've noticed even people who, for instance, work for mental health advocacy organizations casually use figurative terms like "crazy" all the time. It makes me a little uncomfortable, but not enough to protest.
I'm half on the side of those who say "PC is just civility" and half sympathetic to those who see it as hypersensitive hypocrisy.
The ability to create and to judge might well be separate. How many food critics are good chefs, and vice versa? Perhaps it's due to not having a horse in the race.
What's fascinating is that we have these people who contribute huge amount of content, like the review guy that's mentioned.
Some of these guys are even interactive. I've had programming questions answered by Jon Skeet, and it just boggles the mind how he can be so productive.
There's probably some specific life circumstances that have to come together for us to benefit from a guy like that.
For one, it prevents creating new accounts to downvote someone that pisses you off. For me personally, it means I downvote only for “adds absolutely nothing and is somehow harmful to HN community”. I probably upvote : downvote at 20:1 or greater.
When deciding if a comment voting system is good or bad, I look heavily towards the outcome, and secondarily towards the mechanism. I think outcome on HN is second to none.
- mandatory 60 second re-click to submit a comment, without edits
- mandatory 60 second re-click on votes after a rate threshold is exceeded
- multiple choice votes to express motivation, intention, feedback
- do not publish karma numbers
- publish "example threads" that show values being practiced, including dead links/comments examples
- randomly assign usernames every 12 months
- tags and tag feedsIf you don't have a job, limited money, and social life is difficult, the internet has obvious attraction.
Once I was able to describe this pattern to myself and recognize it in myself, I started trying to reduce the amount of posting I did that expressed "I'm right and you're wrong". Because no matter how right a person is, it's generally more of a selfish activity to tell other people about our rightness than we want to admit. If positive interaction is a goal, being right does not excuse telling people they're wrong.
The problem is we think our life is normal and everyone is like us when that isn't true.
Eg, most people don't have $1 million in the bank. If all the financial advice you can read on the internet were written by millionaires, it might (eg) encourage risk-taking that isn't wise for average people. But you could get the impression that such behavior is normal and expected, since "everybody" says they do that.
Some are discouraged entirely and some try again later.
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-018-07683-5/index.ht...
The phenomenon is not limited to the Internet. In any group of humans, you will always have a small subgroup of active members and a "silent majority". It doesn't matter whether you look at nation states, community churches or your local school's parent-teacher organisation. In general, the larger a group is, the smaller the percentage of active members will be.
Voluntary organisations often expend a lot of effort into getting their "inactives" more involved; some manage this better than others. But somehow, being a passive consumer is the default mode of most people in most circumstances. Human nature, I guess...
"Australian author Phillip Strang has gained his platform as an adventure writer through his career installing telecommunications networks in many remote and exotic parts of the globe, including time spent in Afghanistan and Pakistan - an experience that allowed him to gain direct insights in to the ongoing conflicts there. He has also spent considerable time in Africa including Liberia, Nigeria, and Guinea. It is this direct contact with troubled countries that gives his books intense credibility: he has first hand contact with the events he shares in his books such as DCI Cook Thriller Series (MURDER IS A TRICKY BUSINESS, MURDER HOUSE, MURDER WITHOUT REASON, MURDER IS ONLY A NUMBER, MURDER IN LITTLE VENICE, MURDER IN NOTTING HILL, MURDER IN ROOM 346, MURDER OF A SILENT MAN, MURDER HAS NO GUILE and now MURDER IN HYDE PARK.
We know the main characters and the genteel writing style of Phillip Strang so all that is left is a brief summation of the plot and the story is distilled well in Phillip’s synopsis: ‘An early-morning jogger is murdered in Hyde Park. It's the centre of London, but no one saw him enter the park, no one saw him die. He carries no identification, only a waterlogged phone. As the pieces unravel, it's clear that the dead man had a history of deception. Is the murderer one of those that loved him? Or was it someone with a vengeance? It's proving difficult for DCI Isaac Cook and his team at Challis Street Homicide to find the guilty person - not that they'll cease to search for the truth, not even after one suspect confesses.
Elegant writing and a keen sense of suspense – this is another Phillip Strang winner! Grady Harp, January 19"
There's no personal opinion about the book except the "another winner" at the very end. The first paragraph is author's flattering autobiography, the second paragraph is literally copy/paste of the author's synopsis and perhaps the very last sentence is actually what Grady Harp wrote. Sorry to ruin the illusion but this is a promotional account that simply posts whatever message the authors send in. Also I noted Grady Harp consistently rates books with 5 stars, which is again a sign of promotional account, as anything below that might as well be 1 star.
[1] - https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AGZV527R2U6A...
When Jason Knapp produces some very high percent of content on Wikipedia, at some point he's simply an unpaid contractor, and we've seen how that distinction has gotten other companies in trouble in the past.
Just another anecdote to support the premise of the article.
Edit: The link said "outliers" not "insane" when I first saw it. I did NOT mean to imply that my example was someone insane, far from it.
I observe that the quality of the comments is worse compared to platforms with more lurkers but it's interesting to see, that a platform with, presumably, a higher participation ratio is working as well
So it's not only that most people aren't creators, most creators aren't even creating much.
The probability that you read an article of someone is inversly related to "the author being regular".
Maybe that's also the reason why only a fraction of people are rich?
I think it's fair to call abnormal behavior a form of insanity. But unless it is detrimental to their well being within their environment, it might not be an illness.
When reading something online I always ask myself what motive the person had for writing it.
But for many of the top creators mentioned in the article I strongly suspect that writing reviews, making comments or editing Wikipedia is a part of their identity. Something that gives their life meaning.
And to be fair, writing reviews or editing Wikipedia certainly is a meaningful thing to do.
These 1%'ers have a massive impact on the world. An impact they couldn't necessarily have if their motives were financial.
Often the best kind. They want to share a joke, or a piece of knowledge. I found this kind of material is of much better quality than paid one.
Of course, sometimes we don't know if the "payment motive" really was removed. Marketers and paid trolls do receive money for posting to on-line communities.
The same goes for my news sources and other content. Sure, I enjoy the occasional mainstream YouTube video, but if I'm looking up something technical -- I prefer to read articles and blog posts from actual people with firsthand experience.
Plato -> Insane Proust -> Insane Joyce, Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, the Torah writers... and so on and so forth.