The biggest crime against shared knowledge ever committed is photobucket fucking off with the pictures in every "how to fix this car problem" forum post.
There’s some old Reddit posts like this too. Advice threads where the person who posted a solution went back and overwrote their comments during the boycott last year. I know why they did it but we still lost some information in the grand scheme of things.
And that is why I criticized the decisions every time I read about it. Every time I got mixed responses but ultimately got a higher downvote ratio.
Also a reason I participate(d) in the archive warrior reddit project.
You are trying to reach neo. Please select all the pictures with crosswalks. In order to contact an AI agent instead, you must agree to our data policy.
That's an exaggeration. We had nice things back then with forums and ICQ\AIM\others, which we don't have now, but the tech allows us to have them. It's the society that has degraded.
The technology is working against it too. App search engines are just spam ads now and will never find that niche forum that has what you are looking for, like they once did 20 years ago.
I think a lot of stuff got adjusted when mobile became a thing.
Instant message apps just got replaced with Whatsapp, Signal, etc.
Monetisation is a huge problem. Nobody ever expected to make money off a wonky old webpage they made in HoTMetaL, or a MySpace page. Now everyone is on homogenised platforms, they're quite happy to accept bucketloads of money to project whatever you have to say to the masses, and none of it is good. All the hate you see out there isn't society. It's money.
Instant message apps just got replaced with Whatsapp, Signal, etc.
Alternately, Whatsapp, Signal, etc... are instant message apps. I'm a little surprised none of the messaging apps that had been popular on PCs managed to stay popular on mobile.
This is the main thing that happened, I think. I met some old friends recently I hadn't seen in a while and it's wild how differently we engage with the internet. My main source of interaction is on a laptop, and even then a non-trivial amount of my web interaction is purely via the terminal. Of all of my friends, one of them had a PC, and they don't use it. Their engagement with the internet is purely on mobile devices. I was dumbfounded. Like...how do you do stuff on a phone. I hate phones. They're so much worse than a good keyboard. But I also hate the current version of the internet and they seem to love it.
And that, I think, is the core difference. It's not that the phones took over, it's that the keyboard died for the average user. A keyboard allows a complex degree of engagement that is difficult, if not truly impossible, to match on a device meant for short bursts of canned responses and auto-complete suggestions. It forces individually brief, but ultimately continuous pre-programmed engagement.
And that's the entirety of the modern internet. It's why tiktok is so popular. It's why youtube shoves Shorts down your throat when you visit. It's why Twitter took off. It's also why a website like reddit, that was based initially around the kind of engagement I like, is so hard to monetize and why the attempts at dumbing it down and strangling it of anything that isn't that same kind of superficial engagement (and by God are they trying) is so difficult for the website's leadership: because all the other places that are more profitable than it are designed to do that from the jump, and they have to superimpose that strategy onto a content aggregator whose main attraction was a robust, nested comment system.
I keep thinking about what was, for me, the Golden Age of the internet. I know it's different for everyone, but from around, I guess, 2009 to 2017 I was online a lot. And a lot of what the internet was and how it operated and the ideas there, especially on reddit, were so formative to who I am. And I keep feeling like I never appreciated it or really thought about how vibrant and interesting it was while it was like that. It feels like when you're a kid and you see a wave for the first time, and it's building and building and it seems like it'll be building forever, getting bigger and bigger, but then suddenly it collapses under its own weight and is gone as if it were never there, and after the fact you just wish you'd appreciated it for the wonder it was in that moment. Part of it's just getting older and the general feeling of nostalgia that comes with age, but sometimes that nostalgia is justified.
All the hate you see out there isn’t society. It’s money.
I know, right? No matter how rude I am on one forum I still frequent, or in a groupchat of friends, or in family chat, it just dissolves because everybody wants to understand each other. In "global" social media it's some PvP, as if people didn't have boxing pears to vent their frustration there.
Forums are still around. People just got lazy and started using reddit instead. Search engines are also to blame since they don't bring up smaller forums in search results. People can go back to forums if they want.
That's the point. One can think what they want, decide and go there. Or one can just leave their home and walk with the crowd wherever it brings them. (A metaphor.)
Social media make it appear like you could live a life like the latter. Doing all things you need. Just walk with the crowd and never decide.
People are afraid of even the tiny bits of freedom, when they are looking at it from that human stream which never leaves them. They think that outside of it, if a decision they make is wrong, they are lost.
It's psychological, all of it, like a very subtle and less deadly slaughtering block.
Everything you post has potential to remain forever even if it's not monetized directly. Cautioning people about it makes sense now and has always made sense.
Yes. And wikis, too.
We (people in general) have a tendency to share stuff in forums, like Lemmy. That's fine in the short term, but in the long term this stuff should be sorted, organised, and preferably mirrored. Wikis are perfect for that, while the internet archive is more like "bulk" storage.
Wikis are not really a defense against this issue, they are by nature a secondary or (occasionally by policy) a tertiary source of information. Once the source they are recording dies so does the value of that page on the wiki. From the OP:
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
There's nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they're collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it's just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.
And I believe that they could help a lot with this issue if people migrated/copied meaningful info from forums (like Lemmy) to wikis. Forums are good for discussion, but they tend to accumulate a lot of trash; having the good content sieved and sorted in a wiki makes it more accessible for everyone.
There’s nothing intrinsically non-primary in the format. At the end of the day they’re collaborative writing projects, split into pages with internal and external links; it’s just that the biggest one out there happens to be tertiary.
This is an accurate point. Thanks for the correction. I think what I should have said is that the biggest one has that policy and, as a result, there is a trend of others following suit.
This is why Discord is poison to our shared pool of knowledge, it's such a black hole for many games and software (especially ironically enough open source projects) in lieu of decent docs.
The worst part is, after wasting a bunch of time tracking down the correct Discord server to ask a question about a piece of software, you generally get lambasted by the "regulars" of that server to "just use the search feature, that's what it's for!"
Yeah, no. I don't want to wade through a reverse chronology of a bunch of conflicting back-and-forth conversations - just gimme a FAQ or some actual documentation!!!
54% of Wikipedia pages contain at least one link in their “References” section that points to a page that no longer exists.
It would be interesting to know how many of these references don't exist anymore and how many have just moved. Web has come a very long way since 2013 and I bet that websites hosting the references have undergone several iterations altering the URLs in some way.
That, in and of itself, is also a problem! First of all, because such pages often fail to return a HTTP 301 moved permanently response, and second (but perhaps even more importantly) the reason they move is because the site transitioned from using static, human-readable URLs to some kind of unstable CMS-managed non-descriptive gibberish that breaks caching and linking. It's an intentional siloing and hoarding of content.
The online era is going to be a thousand Library of Alexandria's worth of lost information, records, journals, news, ... everything. It will all just digital-rot into the memory hole.
This content has been moving from free accessible internet into the walled gardens of social media. we did it ourselves. blogs and forums disappeared, copycat farms and SEO made it so maintaining blog or a community forum a waste of time, everyone is just tiktoking and looking to monetise every bit of content they put on the internet.
I’ve often wondered what the implications of the internet will be for future historians. On the one hand, there is now an enormous body of writings from not just the educated elite as in the past but from all sorts of ordinary people, which is something that has never really existed before.
On the other hand, how and for how long will these writings be retained? If we stop writing things on paper, will these digital writings become completely inaccessible at some point? Could we have a situation where there are almost no writings from a certain period down the road? That would be unfortunate.
There are so many way to adequately protect digital information from solar flares. That would be the least of our problems, the actually dangerous part of geomagnetic storms is the severe power outages and the severance of the electrical grid.
Freely licensed works will be preserved a lot better because there will be more copies of them.
Likewise the fediverse is a step in that direction: this message will be federated to hundreds of servers so is more likely to survive longer than if I posted it to reddit.
Already a lot of stuff is becoming one harddrive failure away from being lost forever. Companies don't care about preserving content, so it's largely up to random people happening to have saved a copy of something for it to still exist at all.
Also.... I once created hellblade.com. We sold gaming computers with cases that changed colour with heat in the UK. Was a total disaster. Now it's some big game franchise. Wish I'd kept the domain.
pewresearch.org
Top