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Comment by hliyan | Hacker News Reader

To me, the main difference between almost every other place on the Internet (save for personal websites) and Wikipedia is the lack of advertising, or attempting to generate revenue through engagement. That is the reason why Wikipedia still remains tolerable.

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I'd be willing to say this is causation. Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night to make 0.006 cents on ad revenue. So the content can actually be useful instead of drowned out in SEO and ads.

> Wikipedia is one of the few places on the Internet where there isn't an a absolutely desperate end goal to keep people staring at it all day and all night

And yet so successful at it :)

So much this. One thing I regularly think about is that there are many popular websites that could be sustainable with a smaller headcount, but they took VC and need to eat the world.

~0% interest was a mistake.

Should we expect more useful websites in the next 10 years? Should we expect them to rot and need replacement in the decade after that? Should the Fed add "make the Internet a nice place" as a fourth mission?

I would like to pitch OpenStreetMap as another example (to be clear there are also banners about donating, but it is smaller and not misleading one)

Yes, but I have no idea how to participate in OSM and I'm a huge map nerd. Not true of Wiki

I only recently started editing in OpenStreetMap and its fun! The OSM has a wiki with lots of documentation, and there is page on how to get started here: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Getting_Involved

I find working from a computer the most satisfying to contribute. I mostly just make updates on the map for my town, the places I really engage with. Biking is a new hobby of mine, so I've updated bicycle lanes and paths, as well as crosswalks that I come across. I also sometimes update local business information and such.

As someone else noted, Andriod also has the StreetComplete app, which is great for making simple and fast edits. Sometimes when I take the bus or am riding in the passenger seat of a car, I'll use StreetComplete to update the bus stops or street info as I go by.

I also use Komoot for planning cycling routes, which itself uses OpenStreetMap. It's nice to see my edits show up in other places, like Komoot

Back when I used android devices, I used https://streetcomplete.app/ - great user interface, it directs you to a location and asks you simple questions.

This probably isn't the spirit, but the simplest thing is to right-click on the map and pick "Add note", that's definitely participating, although there's an "outsiderness" to it, you have to hope an "insider" (someone who has created an account) actually works on the map to address your note... someone unlike Wikipedia where both anonymous and logged-in users get direct editing access to the underlying data.

They routinely run absolutely massive banner ads for themselves at the top of every page begging for donations they don't need. And these ads are the worst: extremely deceptive, unnecessary, and huge.

There's a huge functional difference between fundraising ads (no matter how manipulative) and the kind of commercial (and behavioral) ads you see everywhere else: the incentive structure it creates. Behavioral ads also require extremely intrusive tracking.

Commercial ads incentivise optimising for impressions, i.e. getting users to see as many ads as possible. This leads to clickbait, bloating one-line news bits into entire articles and extending the number of clicks necessary for a user to get what they want. Social media makes this even worse by making the ads "content" (i.e. "sponsored posts") and thus trying to drive up "engagement" which in practice leads to outrage bait (because people are more likely to comment or share what they disagree with or dislike).

Wikipedia on the other hand just has a slightly annoying banner made more annoying by lazy-loading (and thus shifting the layout) that shows up for a few weeks each year.

Unless your complaint is with "supposedly non-profit organizations trying to make more money" (in which case I'd say your problem might be more systemic than just a website with an ad) I'd take this over the former any day.

The Wikipedia ads are nothing but clickbait. Wikipedia itself doesn't need any funds, but the ads urge users to click by claiming that the site may go offline if they don't. Then the money is embezzled and spent on left wing causes. This is pure commercialism of the worst kind, but it's actually worse than that because many countries have various kinds of truth in advertising laws that apply to companies, whereas Wikimedia Foundation can get away with this sort of deception.

They run house ads, and it's the same ad on every page. It's not engagement driven, and it's not deceptive like Google's ads that look like search results. Whether or not they need the money is a different question.

The parent comment only claimed that the ads were deceptive (which they are), not that they are deceptive __like Google's__. That is entirely a straw man which you added to conveniently knock down.

Wikipedia ads are frequently phrased in a way to suggest that the funds are vital for keeping the site up when in reality, the majority of the funding goes to various social "justice" orgs.

https://nitter.net/echetus/status/1579776106034757633

Honestly once you learn the truth about their finances their banner campaign are actually the absolute pits of advertising and the most deceptive and emotionally manipulative type of advertising going.

Laughable to claim wikipedia is "ad free" just because the one ad is for wikipedia.

I completely agree that their campaigns are distasteful for a number of reasons, but I think the original point was more that the lack of ad slots for sale has prevented the site from turning into the addiction optimized hellsite that most websites have become now

I like that they're up front about it. They also didn't pollute their own content with indistinguishable ads.

Also I've been using adblocks for so long, the only ads I see are ones that pollute the content. So yay wikipedia.

i agree, that is annoying. i think it can be zapped with things like ublock

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