- Google search results get worse every year.
- Stackoverflow lies in ruins (albeit the ruins are still useful).
- ICQ/Gtalk/AIM completely dead and all in silos now (Slack).
- Twitter is dead.
- Facebook is too annoying now.
Google Maps is still amazing, but I consider that more a miracle of the internet as opposed to a miracle of the WWW, since the data is essentially sourced commercially (satellites and maps), whereas with the examples above the data was sourced communally.
And so I think it's inevitable Wikipedia will die within my lifetime. Probably within the decade. I suspect my children will never get to enjoy the miraculous shockingly glorious human affirming paradox of Wikipedia. Their (public school) teachers senselessly already tell them to avoid it. :-(
I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
Teachers have been telling students to avoid it since the beginning, this is not a new development. If anything, I think teachers may be more accepting of it than in the past, particularly for finding citable sources.
- Cheap to host, just text and images
- Funded by non-profit with too much funding
- All images are permissively licensed
- Easily archived
- Easily forked
The only potential "death" I can ever see happening to Wikipedia is the kind that happens from some kind of fracturing, similar to what we often see with fan wikis. But this kind of outcome could be a good thing really, multiple competing Wikipedia's would probably help keep each other honest, and wouldn't functionally be too different than the non-english sections of Wikipedia that already exist.
If anything I'm a bit concerned that Wikipedia might be getting a bit too influential than an encyclopedia aught to be.
Right. The Wikimedia Foundation keeps trying other projects. They think they are supposed to grow. This leads to increasingly obnoxious demands for more contributions. "By 2022, it employed around 700 staff and contractors, with annual revenues of $155 million, annual expenses of $146 million, net assets of $240 million and a growing endowment, which surpassed $100 million in June 2021."
It's the disease of universities - too many administrators.
Either way, it functions but I feel it's simply a tool for 99.9% of people. They don't read the in depth heated arguments, they looks something up, get brief context, and dip. What they do with that information is honestly no better or worse than any news organization.
Ideally we teach to identify and take bias into account, but we've been at a trend for a while now to try and regulate tech instead of society.
I doubt it's cheap at this level of traffic.
It's as if blogs became popular again. Though the days of simple RSS feeds with a high signal to noise ratio are probably long behind us. (I know some are still around, but I mean popular in the way podcasts are now).
Weren't they doing that from the beginning? I get the feeling this feeling has gone down not up.
>I don't think Wikipedia will die for any specific technical or political reason. I just think it will die because everything else that was wonderful from 2009 or before already has, so why not Wikipedia?
It still seems to be surviving. Editor count may be down but a lot of the articles that have to be written already exist. It may stop improving much and only include new events but I don't think it will die until there's a replacement. Maybe people will just consult LLMs for general information and never visit Wikipedia?
One of the most basic features, saving a pin on a map, broke years ago and despite many complaints on their support forum it hasn't been fixed. Directions can be terrible in less traveled areas, and dangerous if followed blindly since they will happily lead you down roads that require 4x4 or are totally impassible. Not to mention saved offline maps are unreliable and the UI clutter has gotten drasticaly worse over the years.
Maps still works fine for the typical things a Google emplyee cares about like getting directions in a well traveled city or finding places to shop, but it's only a matter of time before those usecases get crushed under the ever-building pressures of short term monetization, enshittification, and Google's general apathy and lack of care for users.
Trying to use Google Maps in France usually ends up being send down a dirt road or up a mountain.
Trying to use Google Maps to check my train the other day and I showed the next train and then a train 2 hours later, I had to put the depart time to 1 minute after the train leaving to see the next one.
I've said for years now the product owners of Google Maps are some of the most incompetent on the planet for the size of app they have.
Nowadays, everybody wanna share like they've found the freshest link, But when they scroll, it's closer to the brink, Just echoes of the past, faster than you blink, And online crowds act like they forgot about Digg.
Assuming this is true, what are the leading hypotheses? Regression to the mean? Eternal September? I know everyone likes to talk about "enshittification", but what is the actual mechanism?
Since this is HN, someone's going to say "capitalism", but "capitalism" doesn't explain why Google search results get worse or Facebook is too annoying.
not dismissing other points your making or questions you're asking, but what happens with search results is a phenomenon that's more or less related to monopoly power - so as they (Google) control more, the classical theories behind capitalism no longer hold. For example, they provide worse search, but there is no close second. Even if there is a close second, that "other guy" is unable to afford the 60+ billion Google is paying to other companies to make them the default.
There isn't a simple solution here.
I highly suggest reading the talk page of wikipedia articles. Not just the talk page, but read through the history of the talk page too. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Ada_Lovelace...
Lovelace's notes are important in the early history of computers, especially since the seventh one contained what many consider to be the first computer program—that is, an algorithm designed to be carried out by a machine. Other historians reject this perspective and point out that Babbage's personal notes from the years 1836/1837 contain the first programs for the engine.[6][better source needed] She also developed a vision of the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching, while many others, including Babbage himself, focused only on those capabilities.
Packet switching was invented in the UK by Donald Davies, yet somehow it’s always the Americans that get sole credit for the internet. :)
I mean, encyclopedias didn't have sources at all, and people were overly confident in books being correct.
On the niche topic part, I wonder if we'll ever be able to do something about it. I don't believe in AI check being a good fit for specialized or rare contexts, and as there's fewer eyes it's by definition more complicated to cross reference and have many active contributors on the same topics.
Even with more appeal to authority (let's say you get more power to edit if you're proven to be an expert in the field) I assume that would get abused to insert personal gripes in some place or another.
The main thing is to check out the talk pages. That's where the controversies crop up and at least you know the opposing view.
I think that concept is a fairy tale. It's kind of like open source software: just because the code is out there doesn't mean anyone's looking for bugs in or or fixing them.
Wikipedia articles settle on the stalemate between its most obsessive or motivated users, the result of which is frequently is wrong or biased. The quantity of eyeballs is irrelevant.
What made Wikipedia successful was that it was free in a time that people were more used to paying for that kind of information, and that it was open in the sense that anyone could contribute when many places were significantly gatekept.
It has now evolved it's own form of said gatekeeping, not because such is necessary for Wikipedia to be successful, but to harvest the residual success of that open system for the benefit of the parasites.
You’re consciousness trapped in meat, everything you experience is an interpretation of your environment and entirely subject to that meat.
“The Republican Party exists” is an interpretation of each word, and is controversial on some axis. “2” is a concept, it literally does not exist outside of the mind.
This is to say: your desire for objectivity has failed, the best we can ever get are “well defined and explained rationalizations that many people agree with”.