Comment by evouga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evouga | Hacker News Reader

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It's not just Google---the World Wide Web itself is rapidly becoming a defunct protocol, the culmination of a decades-long shift in the Internet's center of mass away from browsers and towards centralized and commercialized apps---from personal web pages to LinkedIn/GitHub/Twitter handles, from the ubiquitous WordPress blogs to YouTube videos and Medium posts, and from forums to Tweets and subreddits.

The useful information on the Web is now concentrated in a few places---Reddit, Quora, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, etc. When I want reasonable search results, I search there instead of the Web as a whole. (And even many of these services are in the late stages of the Silicon Valley life cycle---desperate monetization and engagement-increasing gimmicks---with uncertain futures.)

Wikipedia, bless its heart, lurches on as a cathedral to early Web's dream of information democratization. It stands as a wonder of the ancient world: incomplete, built from technology few now understand, and reflecting values and priorities that no longer quite align with contemporary culture. But it persists thanks to its inertia and the undeniable sense of awe it invokes even today.

> built from technology few now understand,

Now you’re just being dramatic. I’d review the whole comment and de-dramatize it.

Yes the web has changed and most Forums are dead, but it doesn’t mean change is not possible. Blogs are still a thing, even if you get to them through Twitter.

The issue stems from Google rewarding junk and people wanting to monetize their content. Couple the two and you have lengthy BS lost in ads, while short clean content is lost on page 59 – but it’s there.

Maybe it's just me and my English comprehension, but way too often I am left thinking comments on HN have become a sport of dramatization and usage of thesaurus

It isn't. I admit in the past I've taken time to write comments.

Back in the day I both edited Wikipedia and helped maintain a MediaWiki installation. I found learning wiki markup (and the subtleties of the template engine in particular) quite challenging on the frontend, and the backend was even worse.

The inaccessibility of the software is (was?) widely acknowledged as a significant barrier to new contributors by the project itself. I didn’t think this was especially dramatic or controversial.

It got a chuckle out of me. I went through the Wikimedia source to track down a bug and I can agree with the sentiment.

I guess most technologies are like that. Once it is written, once the major bugs are caught, few revisit the code anymore.

Discord is another tarpit into which a lot of otherwise indexable content is sinking.

And Slack. Can't ever find what I want in it.

Entertainingly, the backronym for Slack is “searchable log of all communication and knowledge”—I kid you not: https://twitter.com/slackhq/status/875547942454689794?s=21

Agreed; Slack search is next to useless for me as well.

However, what is meant here is that content in Discord isn't reachable via search engines such as Google. Whole communities are invisible to traditional search indexing and only reachable through either a special client or an API, both of which require an account and empower gatekeepers.

Wikipedia is also suffering under the issues of "moderation." The original web was based on the idea of "throw your crap up, if people like it they do if not they don't." Evaluation both the content and the credibility of content on the net was up to the viewer. Adding moderators apart from the original authors and viewers, especially when those moderators are at an integration level (be it wikipedia, twitter, google, etc) is in direct opposition to that original ethos.

Actually, Wikipedia has similar issues to Google SEO spam, in the sense you now have people who pay marketing firms for articles to be written on themselves/their company. These articles, unsurprisingly, often infringe core policies like maintaining a neutral point of view.

With respect, I don't think the problem is as bad as you suggest. Some pretty awful articles have survived deletion processes so long as they are on a notable topic.

It's interesting how some Wikipedia articles are carefully fact checked and other articles at the same notability level were clearly written by PR hacks. I do my part when I find the latter. I remember going back and forth with someone from Theranos who tried to insert really promotional stuff into their article years ago. Guess I got the last laugh there.

I read this quite often on HN, but my experience is quite different: English Wikipedia pages are amazing for learning about some scientific or historical thing or when I want to understand something. Even with political things it tries to describe the controversies without being too judgemental (which is really hard to balance out).

It depends heavily on the page. I can personally provide an example of the "Men's rights movement" page. I used to be heavily involved in the movement with regards to parental custody. At least a decade ago, ideological moderators began applying extremely high standards for the page. Whole sections were removed and re-written. Their argument was that "these are the rules," and while technically true, the rules are diverse and opaque. They can be applied in many ways, depending on one's ideological alignment. I encourage you to take a look at the above page, and then contrast it with "Feminism." You'll notice a distinct difference to the breadth of content, the standard for citation, and especially the tone. For example, in the second paragraph on the "Men's rights movement" introduction, moderators have added an entire paragraph of criticism. You'll see no comparable criticism on the "Feminism" page in the introduction. More recently they added a "Not to be confused with the pro-feminist Men's liberation movement" at the very tippy top of the page to try to move traffic towards a feminist friendly page. No such suggestion appears on the "Feminism" page.

I could provide endless commentary on this example, but suffice it to say, it is very difficult to look at this comparison and rationally argue no moderation bias exists. Now consider that this is just one tiny corner of the site. This is happening to millions of pages. Larry Sanger, Wikipedia co-founder, has been very vocal about its political bias. I, for one, believe him.

Even straightforward situations are frustrated by what is a broken process. There was an article for a black WWII pilot - the only black pilot from the war to be designated an ace - whose article was under constant attack by a particular user. The pilot's fifth kill originally been split between himself and another pilot, but a later investigation had awarded him full credit. In any case, the AF had honored him as an ace at some point before he died, and it was covered prominently in his obituary. Well, this user - a researcher who also worked to "debunk" myths about the exploits of the Tuskegee Airmen - was adamant that the pilot did not have enough kills to be designated an ace. He cited work that had gone back to the original war-time records (before the reinvestigation). The author of this research? Him.

The article is so small, though, and on a topic unsympathetic to the largely white and male editor base, that flagrant original research doesn't register.

Thanks, I read it, and sure, with so many citatitions and edits the page gets extremely boring. Also I see some forced changes that are very clear part of the feminist propaganda: I don’t believe that false rape allegations are under 4%, as it would mean 20 real rapes for every person who just goes to the police because she can.

I had an experience a few years ago when a teenage girl was having consensual sex with me on a party in her room, but she didn’t like the sex, so she just casually told me that I have to put my clothes on fast and get out of the room (so that she can have sex with another guy), or else she goes to the police and tells them that I raped her. At that time I believed that it would be impossible to get me into prison for something I have not done, but the ease of how she said it scared me: the incentives against false reporting are clearly missing.

I can understand GP's interest in parental custody. That's an incredibly difficult issue that almost always ends in heartbreak for someone. Your claim is... different. People falsely claim to have been raped far far FAR less often than they don't report actually having been raped. If anything, the incentives should be realigned to encourage the reporting of sexual assault.

Wikipedia also suffers from the "try to be good and they'll hang you" problem.

Whether it's moderation, deletionism, or annual budgets... Wikipedia always seems to have detractors enough to make exon-mobile shudder.

Wikipedia went down quite a few notches in my world view a few days ago, when I went to find out how old Lex Fridman was from his wikipedia page

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LexFridman

Only to find he's not notable enough for an entry. There isn't an article in a "reliable" source about him, so he doesn't exist as far as the club that now manages Wikipedia is concerned. I wasted about an hour seeing if there was something applicable I could add, but to no avail, as Google failed me.

This is hilariously pedantic. For one thing it would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_Fridman and this person isn’t all that popular. If you think he deserves a page create one

I am glad you posted this, I wholeheartedly agree.

"Someone should have made this page about [some obscure thing]."

Followed by "I did a bunch of research"

without a "so I created an entry"

SMH

There is a "draft" entry, that looks ready to use, except the gatekeepers won't let it get published.

I'm curious if the fault is Google's, Wikipedia's or "the Web's"?

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