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> The people contributing to WP - the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia.

I might take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:RecentChanges maybe reload it a few times. What percent of the changes are to policy space? (the article name begins with "Wikipedia:") And what percent are to regular articles / discussion of articles (article name is normal, or begins with "Talk:").

I think you'd be surprised because the vast vast vast majority of edits are to the articles themselves.

> Perhaps the only area where editors are as zealous they are about creating obscure processes, is in policing what content should they should fit into the their volumes.

This is important. I'm not sure if you're referring to notability, or sourcing, but both are critical to making an encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_Wikipedia_is_no... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

> I hope for a new wave of optimistic idealism to swallow up tech again, bringing about a new era of amateurism. But with the professionalisation of even the free software community I have, I must admit, all but given up hope.

This wave exists, we’re just old. Go talk to 16 year olds who are building virtual reality machine learning apps in their bedroom.

Web is no longer the frontier. We’re old and out of touch. The kids no longer hang out with us. Hence you see a lack of youthful idealism.

The web is still the frontier, we're just interacting with it in new ways.

Those VR meeting apps still need to connect to other computers, and if you get serious about machine learning the cloud is invaluable. Phone apps are also usually less local-friendly than desktop apps.

Just because kids aren't using email or websites as much doesn't mean that they aren't using the internet more.

Although personally, I wouldn't cry if the internet matured into a sort of academic database. Mass-scale social connectivity should probably move to local intranets, like airdrop and local-area IM platforms.

> Just because kids aren't using email or websites as much doesn't mean that they aren't using the internet more.

For sure, everything uses the internet. But not the web.

Point is most of us aren’t hanging out where the kids are hanging out. And we don’t have as much time to just hang out either.

You're probably right. I've been reading HN for 10+ years now and just assume it's still the best location for hackers.

So what's the newer, cooler, current version of what HN was in 2010?

I've heard the community at Indie Hackers is more supportive and less jaded.

The similarity between the HN & IH communities only runs skin deep with the use of ‘Hacker’ in their names.

Is IH are more supportive crowd? A resounding yes, but that’s because as a group it was designed as a support mechanism for people looking to earn a salary by working solo.

HN is like the opposite of IH with respect to salary: it’s maintained by a VC entity and many hackers here draw high salaries working for trillion-dollar, billion-dollar and upstart tech companies.

HN was designed to be a water cooler for stating & demolishing arguments, with the occasional cheer to YC-funded startups, so it’s not surprising there’s a lot of healthy skepticism which often comes across as cynicism.

>The people contributing to WP - the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia.

I wonder if this is natural. Those in the community who care more about just making a good encyclopedia are eventually forced out by those who are interested in power games and process. I've heard it mentioned before (I forget if it has some formal name or not) in regards to companies where the people who primarily want to prioritize the goal of the company are eventually replaced by those who primarily want to implement and navigate bureaucracy because they can outcompete them on the local level, even if the company is worse off in general.

> professionalisation of even the free software community

Never heard it put like that, but it's pretty on point. The bigger changes I've seen in free software these days, all the way down to systemd, feel very corporate. People try to argue whether it's corporate or not but even that feeling when enough people feel it is detrimental to free software culture. A culture which isn't very much minded or respected by our corporate cousins.

I do not understand peoples literal obsession with grading apologies these days. I've screwed up in big ways in my life before and I had to apologize. The harder work was eventually forgiving myself so that I could move on. I cannot imagine how the expectation that someone is going to be waiting around to grade and critique my apology would weigh on me. I can't even begin to imagine the mindset of someone who engages in that kind of activity must be, what other benign or symbolic things do you question in life? What other baggage have you carried all your life and used to wallop people over the head with?

This "you owe me an apology" trend is wild. Certainly, if you screw up you should apologize if the situations suits it. Rarely are those situations so black and white though. Leaving this to the jury of the public to take sides, to form camps, and to inevitably invade with their pitchforks is the stuff that the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp controversy is fueled by. If someone has wronged you bad enough, take them to court, deal with it there, and leave it there. If things got to that point then no apology will make anything better. At that point, everyone has lost and we're just trying to maintain order.

When I see people grading apologies on Twitter (and at times here) all I see is people propagating a reason to abuse public figures and at times companies. If someone has come to the point of writing a public apology, whether you think it's for damage control or not, it takes some level of humility and self-evaluation. Maybe that triggers nothing, maybe it begets change even in some small way, and maybe it leads to some life altering conclusions. Humans are not machines and we can't just cast people out because we don't feel the vibes of someones apology. For a culture like tech that likes to comment on how terrible cast systems and social hierarchy are, we seem awful quick to throw people into an "other" category because we feel some type of way.

Personally speaking, I think people who grade apologies have a darkness of their own and that darkness begets darkness. The darkness that calls for a public apology and eagerly awaits its arrival for swift and empirical dissection is no better than the incurred darkness of the act itself.

Considering Reddit and 4Chan are things, Wikipedia is far from being the most toxic .

Maybe the most elitist

Both sides on the spectrum are on the same thing.

I think the title of most toxic should go to Twitter.

yes

That's a peculiar way to describe things. I would consider being "elitist" almost synonymous to being "toxic", and thus 4chan being about the least toxic platforms on the list of major English social media, far below Reddit, Wikipedia, Twitter, HN and so on.

I don't think Wikipedia fosters the kind of nihilistic hatred that lead to harassment campaigns and real world violence the way 4chan does. I get that not all of 4chan is pol and r9k, but that's still a decent chunk of the users. I can't think of a place on the internet with a higher concentration of incels and alt-right nazi types, besides 8chan.

Strong disagree. The vast majority of subreddits are fine. Toxicity is compartmentalized to specific subreddits, which you can very easily avoid.

On the other hand, I find a community like Stack Overflow to be much worse because the BS can strike any time, any place. Between questions marked "Off-Topic", and snarky replies, and the non-replies ("We won't answer your simple question because you should not be asking that!") you can't avoid the negativity.

I also agree. I find both Twitter and Reddit to be on the most part delightful sources of information. I do have a certain self-made bubble in terms of who I follow, but it's a bubble full of creators, artists, and those that want to share what they've done in a positive way.

Exactly! Reddit's anonymity and the sheer scale of the site make bullying impossible (hard to imagine /u/subhumanbuttocks88 being victimized by /u/mandocalrissian).

Sure it makes targeted bullying impossible, but not general discrimination. There have been lots of subreddits removed for racism, sexism, etc.

Even then if you want to become a somewhat public figure with a presence on Reddit you can end up with a small team harassing you.

The only winning move is not to play.

In subreddits which are non political you'd still see people injecting nastiness.

I agree, sort of. The project is absolutely massive and is a constant target of "reputation management" campaigns. They have the difficult task of managing this thing with a volunteer workforce. What else can they do except make a process for everything? There are certainly editors that revel in the process, and that's too bad. I think the admin would act if the project started going down the drain.

Only been a pleasant place for me. They're very anal about some rules (copyright, for instance) and that's annoying to me sometimes but overall I can't say I've been upset with any contribution experience.

> The people contributing to WP - the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia

This is one of the biggest challenges with building a self-governing online community: The people with the most time, energy, and desire to be in charge are often not the people with the most to contribute. As the bureaucracy grows, actual contributors are increasingly disincentivized from participating in the governance because it becomes such a distraction to actually producing content. At the extremes, these communities end up with highly-political community governance that spends much of their time with political maneuvering and focusing on a handful of fringe issues, while the actual content creators end up operating largely independently.

If you ignore the politicking and realize it's mostly a distraction, there's often good work still happening on the core content.

Sure that's the case with any bureaucracy.

When Wikipedia came out I was hopeful that the governance model enabled by the web would be able to solve some of those age-old problems.

I think it's important to draw a distinction between mediawiki, the software, and all of its associated (GPL, BSD, apache) licensed ancillary software, and the administration and content side of wikipedia.

mediawiki is used by a lot of organizations for internal wiki stuff.

> coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community

Is there an example of public crowdsourced resource of the comparable to Wikipedia size which managed to generate meaningful content without such kind of processes/bureaucracy?

Yes: Wikipedia ten to fifteen years ago.

The Israel-Palestine wars of that time were quite something and probably deterred a good amount of people who could have produced suitable content. The conflict was handled ineptly and way too late. No surprise that many academics still won't go near Wikipedia, especially in areas involving geopolitical conflicts.

> the editors - seem more concerned with coming up with Kafka-esque processes to introduce to the community than making the actual work of making an encyclopaedia.

Yeah, there probably are widespread cultural problems.

Hyperbole aside, I imagine most of “the actual work” (as you say) of maintaining any open source volunteer encyclopedia for decades has got to be the community culture and processes, not any technical artifact.

If you think the work of Wikipedia is “just” the words in articles, well, this is the same mindset of everyone’s favorite debunked critique of early Dropbox.

The world needs less optimism and idealism. They lead to disappointment, burnout, and bitterness. In healthcare doctors-to-be now often receive training and education that encourages thinking in terms of small victories and approaching treatment from a palliative care perspective, specifically when doing certain rotations. The more you expect a cure or a triumph or the achievement of some utopian fantasy, the faster you will exit many specialties.

> the wikipedia community seems like one of the most toxic communities on the web.

That's unfair; there are plenty of even more toxic communities, you just don't hear about them as much because they're less prominent and easier to ignore or forget.