Wikipedia’s co-founder takes on Facebook with ad-free social network | Hacker News Reader

Wikipedia’s co-founder takes on Facebook with ad-free social network

thenextweb.com

52 points8bitsrule15 comments

This feature could be a huge differentiator:

> “Almost everything on the platform is editable,” he said. “That alone gives a huge incentive for good behaviour because if you say something obnoxious, someone will just delete it.” However, while this approach has succeeded on Wikipedia, it is largely untested on a social network.

(Quote is from the FT article linked from TFA)

That sounds terrible. The whole point of a social network is to know what somebody is saying / has said. It isn't about democratising the spread of factual information. If I say x, but somebody else thinks I should have said y, who cares? The point of a social network is to let people know that I said x. If x is wrong, the point of a public encyclopedia (like Wikipedia) is for people to be able to read y. But for a social network, this does not seem like a useful feature at all.

A crowdsourced cancel culture, nice..

I'm already on an ad-free social network: Mastodon.

Thanks for mentioning it. I think on of the problems of fb (out of many) is the centralization, which Mastodon solves in a beautiful way without making it too technically challenging for the average user to get started.

I like very much the idea behind this new social network, but once again giving all my data to a centralized system is a deal breaker for me.

And even better: it's federated.

The i stance you're using doesn't like what you say? Just pick another instance and carry on.

I think you mean fediverse. Mastodon is just one of the many server software that you can use. Pleroma for example tends to be more standard-conforming, lighter, and about as used as Mastodon.

So, Ello, again? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8346429

Well, count me in, no question about it. Information is the fourth pillar of democracy, and there's a direct qualitative relation from information to debate.

We need such efforts to make substantial progress in producing information, to the best of what should be our ability as of 2019 and onwards.

Weird. When I signed up I had access and could look around. I close it and open it again and now I'm locked out and stuck on a waiting list unless I donate.

I wasn't planning to be locked out so I didn't have the greatest of looks but it seemed much heavier on the news side of thing than the network side of things. Very limited profile, content appears to all come from groups?

Give it some time. Hopefully, it will get better.

Likely it will but news also seems to be an intentional focus. As someone who is continuously trying to consume less news, it's a bad fit.

The same situation here. Registered with my real name and it asked me to verify the account, then I was asked to pay on a yearly basis.

Kind of reminds me of Aether. https://getaether.net/

I wonder if ActivityPub or some sort of federation is on the roadmap

Reply on news.ycombinator.com