The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.

The next best thought out knowledge-based site is StackExchange.

- Antifa did the coup.

- Face masks are harmful.

- There have been "almost zero" deaths from COVID-19.

- Soros may have paid people to riot for George Floyd.

- The Ten Commandments were God's words: not "inspired", but precisely dictated. [2]

Since Wikipedia is hostile to conspiracy theories and religious woo, Larry has in the ensuing years tried (without success) to make a Wikipedia-equivalent site that will be friendly to his nuttery.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger

[2] https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1719344152356217057

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Views_on_Rational...

> Besides being the cofounder of one of the biggest websites on the Internet, he is mostly known for two things; criticising Wikipedia, and having created many failed WikiProjects to fix said criticisms.

This writing is fine penmanship for a 2nd grader about why I hate Kevin and his Pokemon cards.

I was clued into this when the BLM protests happened. When I poked into all the names of the protesters I could find who were present on-site, very few of them had day jobs.

There's also the whole way the software works. So that's twice that Wikipedia owes Ward Cunningham.

Well, that and the most important exchange of all of course:

"My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales [a]

Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham [b]" [2]

[1] http://wiki.c2.com/

[2] https://wiki.c2.com/?WikiPedia

[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Wales

[b] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham

Advertising provides a perverse incentive that has the effect of injecting rot into the core of products that depend on it.

I think it's a good rule of thumb to not have people edit articles too close to them, but for some objective facts you may as well let it in (and remember: "facts" means "can be proven OR disproven". I can make a fake birth certifricate but you can objecively prove through later talks that I lied. Or the hospital realizes they messed up and my own birthday is a lie to begin with. Much easier to reason with than "am I a good person?")

1. Someone adds obvious nonsense to wikipedia

2. A mainstream publication republishes this because wikipedia is generally trustworthy

3. Someone else at wikipedia notices nonsense and removes article

4. Article gets reinstated using a referense to publication at (2)

It may sound weird but it has happened a few times. Wikipedia could probably do more to avoid circular references, but there's really no simple answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Amelia_Bedelia

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/amelia-bedelia-wikipedia-ho...

(EDIT: please use noscript if you visit the daily dot link, it's a terrible 3rd party spam site)

but the answer in my head is simple.

1. make sure the primary source is publicly viewable and archiveable (be it a blog, acedemic profile, about us on a news site, or even a social media post).

2. ensure that there's some way to verify this as a primary source. This one pains me the most, but if we trust news sites to vet anonymous sources, may as well trust social media communities to vouch for a source really being that person. IME social media loves to call out lies, so them trusting a personality isn't as scary as it sounds.

3. be able to mark a source as "primary" to give a bit of distinction so we know there is some lack of vetting compared to a mainstream resource (which hopefully has such vetting built in). similar to [citation needed], it can be footnoted like [2, primary].

There is and always will be nonsense that penetrates through, but I don't think we should discount primary resources as much we do currently. That's not how real life reflects on such resources. Wikipedia has loosened up and started to use more social media as ciations, so this isn't a radical direction.

It's a bizarre rule that doesn't consider a birth certificate to be a primary source.

There's an insidious aspect to Wikipedia's reliance on verifiability: any wild claim can be posted, repeated by third parties, and afterwards have Wikipedia refer to those third parties as sources. I know this to be a fact because I read a Wikipedia article on the subject.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesi...

[Accessing Wikipedia from command line I never see the nags for donations.]

And yet so successful at it :)

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

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

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

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

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.

Many times, what you actually experience is a variant on the smart mob concept [1], which are enabled by watchlists and diverse central coordination pages[2] . The number of ways you could organize people on wikipedia without them even realizing (let alone being offended by it) by smart use of smart-mobs was (and probably still is) endless.

Of course, for a casual observer, these smart mobs look very much like coordinated cabals, even if in reality the individual members don't even know each other.

I'm not sure how well this base principle has been documented though. Possibly

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_mob

[2] eg DRN, ANI, AFD, diverse wikiprojects:

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_noticeboard

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion

   * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject

Some jumped-up self-appointed 'editor' appeared as-if-by-magic, made an obviously stupid decision to keep all the copy pasta, backed it up with a kangaroo court of 1 or 2 buddies weighing in on the Talk page, and that was that - 30 polluted pages.

If they had a couple of other editors backing them up, then it doesn't sound all that "jumped up" to me. Sounds more like you are playing with a different set of rules in mind.

This happens. Unless you're heavily-invested in the subject of an article, you can just shrug and move on, no? There's over a million articles you can choose to edit.

And by the way, when you made your edits, were you appointed to the position of editor, or were you a " jumped-up self-appointed 'editor'" as well?

No, I was doing everyday wikigardening of pages that were well-known to me. The 'editor' was jumped-up and self-appointed in the sense that: they were not the original poster of the copy pasta; they had no previous record of creating or editing those pages; they had a bezillion WP edits (indicating an almost full-time obsession with editing random pages); and they had no rational argument against my common-sense application of normal WP rules & style guidelines.

I've been editing since about 2005, so I have a lot of edits (but nothing you could describe as a bazillion). They would seem fairly random, because I edit when I find a page that needs improving. Arguably, it's more likely to be "obsessive" if the edits are not random, but all in one subject-area.

Also, I revert crap edits when I find them, usually when I was not the original poster. You don't have to be the original poster to revert a crap edit; and if you were, there's a smell of edit-warring and proprietorship.

FWIW, Wikipedia also has this problem. Just spend half an hour going through some page histories and browsing some user pages, you'll find feuds and infighting all over the place. People with a profile saying "I stopped contributing because user XYZ essentially bullied me", yadda yadda.

One of the things in particular I felt that there should be more of a presence of (because it was basically nonexistent at the time) and I had some good knowledge of, was for Flash animations and games that had literally tens of millions of views and were practically pop culture for some of them.

But because there wasn't a dead paper news article I could easily cite, that was enough for it to be 'not notable' and eligible for long and stupid debates on whether or not there should be an article about it on this virtual Wikipedia that doesn't have a size limitation.

So stupid. Lost interest pretty quickly after that (I had contributed a few dozen minor edits before I started trying to submit those pages).

Now, of course, many years later, there's a whole bunch of them included on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Flash_games But at the time the editors kept arguing to get them killed.

I also notice that a lot of the references that are included on these pages were ones that would be consider not-notable back then, because they are online web articles. Those weren't primary source enough for them at the time.

Jerks found other ways to be jerks?

So of course anti-social nutcases dominate these spaces. That’s how these spaces are structured.

It would be very easy for websites to weight upvotes so that one from someone who seldom uses them weighs more.

Changes were clearly necessary because SO became too large. So, I'm not sure there was an alternative besides staying small. (Maybe that's the answer.)

basically after sub-forums like bicycle, gardening etc which didn't fit at all under the programming forum, they opened up for randoms moderators. But the jerks started to abuse it to create a reddit-like web of overlapping forums. in 2018(?) you could not post anything without a question being closed with "offtopic! to ask about this specific setting on android phones with a blue or green protective case you must do so on xyz.stackoverflow.com. closed."

Well, that failed spectacularly. The Stack Exchange sites are some of the most hostile, caustic places on the Internet, surpassed on that axis by only a small handful I'm aware of.

Why at least a year after? I also remember the speaker relating a conversation he had with someone from whom it seems like he was asking for money: maybe a VC? The VC told the speaker, "I sat on a plane next to somebody who told me he doesn't answer anything on stackoverflow any more because all the questions are answered too quickly." And the speaker responded, "So wait. You talked to a random person on a plane. This person had heard of my website. And his main complaint was that questions were answered too quickly?"

Wikipedia says SO did get VC funding in 2010, so that sort of matches; and quote from sibling comment is along the same lines. So I don't think I'm imagining things, but I also don't think I'm going to be able to give much more information. :-)

I didn't quite find the quote mentioned by GP but for stack overflow itself, an explicit design goal is to minimize discussions and make the site focus on Q&A, since the kind of argumentative jerks mentioned by GP tend to be involved in long discussions. I quote from Jeff Atwood:

> At Stack Exchange, one of the tricky things we learned about Q&A is that if your goal is to have an excellent signal to noise ratio, you must suppress discussion. Stack Exchange only supports the absolute minimum amount of discussion necessary to produce great questions and great answers. That's why answers get constantly re-ordered by votes, that's why comments have limited formatting and length and only a few display, and so forth. Almost every design decision we made was informed by our desire to push discussion down, to inhibit it in every way we could. Spare us the long-winded diatribe, just answer the damn question already.

Okay, so before the mid-20th century Wikipedia would have categorized the concept of plate tectonics as pseudoscience. Consensus doesn't mean truth. Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release. Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth.

One thing I see with 100% of conspiracy theorists is that they have no self-awareness of when they're wrong. They will believe 1000 things and when 1 of them turns out to be true, they both think it validates the other 999 and will never consider they were perhaps right for the wrong reasons. My point is that, as you say, "Being firmly anti-pseudoscience and anti-conspiracy theory and anti-fringe might not be the best heuristic for discovering the truth", but it's the best we have. I'll also paraphrase one more quote that I heard from the great Tim Minchin, but he didn't know who to credit it to, "if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out".

So just throw all theory/hypothesis in the same bucket because one might be true? You can't cherry pick one thing that happened to be true and say "it is wrong to label that pseudoscience" There are a lot of bad theories and hypothesis out there.

Clathrate gun hypothesis is just that, and should be labeled as such.

The plate tectonics hypothesis was criticized because there was no known mechanism for how continental plates could drift. Until that mechanism was understood, it was perfectly good science to be critical of Wegener's hypothesis, and a Wikipedia of that time would have been entirely correct to document the hypothesis as controversial. Hindsight is 20:20.

It's also very much not an encyclopedia's job to try to discover the "truth", whatever that means! Its job is explicitly to document current consensus understanding, however flawed that might be. Trying to figure out the "truth" is very much above Wikipedia editors' pay grade.

Pseudoscience and conspiracy theories are something entirely different from simply proposing hypotheses that might not be backed by currently available evidence, and it's incredibly fallacious and dangerous to try to equate homeopathy or flat-Earthism or climate change denial with something like hand hygiene or plate tectonics.

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

If anything, my criticism of this article is that the first few paragraphs don't explain how fringe it is. (And I'm firmly on the opinion that working on it is important, because it's the only path out of the almost disproved box that we have.)

I read wikipedia articles about phenomena my academic discipline is involved with and I keep thinking, "why do they still push that as true? This is ridiculous" about every time I log in.

But it serves hegemonic knowledge production,so it's in there, and we now know the effort the US government is making to make sure its viewpoint gets shown as "true". It's disgusting at times.

If Wikipedia existed in its current form in the mid-20th century, it would have dismissed plate tectonics. But, importantly, as the scientific consensus evolved, so would Wikipedia's stance on the theory.

This is the key difference between science/academia and politics/religion. The former changes with new evidence while the latter doubles down in the face of it.

That's true, but it's fine if Wikipedia, not being able to discern truth and falsehood as "a collection of people arguing online about stuff," uses consensus as a low-resolution proxy. It's the best tool they have given their circumstances.

> Today's conspiracy theory could be tomorrow's government press release

But it usually isn't, which is why consensus works as a pretty good low-resolution proxy for truth.

However, to say that "fringe" editors were largely driven out is false. In many places, "fringe" editors co-operate to win edit wars and form secret voting blocks in community decisions in an attempt to push their misshapen ideas into the mainstream.

This vast amount of high quality human knowledge was not available in the good old internet 20 years ago.

Every time I have posted a question on SE it is either flagged as already answered (when it's not) or people screaming "XY Problem!"

My approach to SE now is "Look, Don't Touch".

Like, I can solve most concrete single answer problems (the kind SE is "for") on my own by digging into the offending component's source code. Reverse engineering if necessary.

The type of question that I really want to ask others, is when I have multiple options that all seem good to me as solutions, and I want guidance on which way to go — or, more deeply, which factors I should consider in my selection. (Example: "what should I use as a database for this project?")

This is exactly the sort of decision that a manager on a product, would hire a lead engineer for that project for their expertise in, and so would expect said lead engineer to be able to lay out for them when asked.

I feel like all the right people are there on SE to be able to answer this type of question. But SE itself just doesn't let them do it — or at least, isn't structured to incentivize them to do it.

It's such a pain in the ass to contribute knowledge there that I just don't even bother trying anymore.

It's a collection of petty tyrants at this point. I can't wait for LLMs to just digest them whole.

It doesn't matter how much effort one puts into researching and troubleshooting (including reading many F (man)uals and forums) before asking, nor does it matter how much detail you provide to show how X (which is supposed to do Y, and does on many machines), does Z on yours for some reason, and, BTW, here's my logs and output for foo[1-5], all you get is "asked and answered RTFM, n00b."

Also with HN, many subreddits, millions of personal blogs and sites...

I tried to find why the paper says that Wikipedia is "the last good place on the internet", but it doesn't seem to provide any reference for that. Is it a meme somewhere?

HN is more of a bad habit for me than anything else, unfortunately. I end up lurking comment sections just to disagree with everyone and turn it off.

Also it's worth noting that you do NOT need to be a professional historian to answer, you basically just have to provide sources that pass the sniff test.

Not to say its all bad but reading wikipedia you have to be aware of that it's an opinionated lens of viewing the world, and by not realizing you're viewing through a lens is why over the past decade people keep getting blindsided when reality doesn't play out how their bubble told them it would.

Honestly I feel a "metaverse wikipedia" with tabs at the top I could view a topic through different socio/economic/political lenses would be much more useful for actually making sense of the world we have today.

Came here to say this. 98% of the content is perfectly fine. Searching for "lemurs" in any search engine returns a perfectly trustworthy (calling all lemur experts!) wikipedia page. But, look for anything divisive, political, cultural, etc., and I've increasingly noticed the articles take clear positions.

I barely recognize much of the 70's and 80's history on wiki. A lot of it clearly wasn't written by someone who lived through it, and if it isn't linkable it basically doesn't exist. History is written by the victors, and they only do the internet. All those books, newspaper and magazine articles of that era just don't exist outside of libraries and microfiche and it's clear none of those wiki editors are going there.

I've seen younger people start to complain about this as link rot reaches into their generation.

At least academics have standards, even if they don't always follow them.

Yup. History is a battleground; so is politics, and in some cases geography. Even food can be a battleground; "Biryani" is on my watchlist. It is constantly being vandalized, to state that the canonical version belongs to this or that community.

Interestingly, articles on religion don't seem to be battlegrounds to anything like the same extent.

Even with the internet, there are things (eg. from the beginning of covid), where I clearly remember someone (in my country) saying/promising something, eg. regarding vaccines, anti-covid measures, etc., and those things don't exist anymore. I've found a few articles or transcripts in google cache, but the orignals are gone, archive.org doesn't have them and poof, they're gone. "we've always been saying X" will become the truth, since any record of them saying otherwise has somehow disapeared... and it's only been two years!

That's astonishing that the world hasn't recognised your unique and privileged position in the 1970s and 80s.

What exactly did you achieve at that time?

I wrote countless articles for them, but they didn’t give a crap. I now contribute photos to commons.

Don’t bother contributing to Wikipedia. Only people who fiddle around with changing URLs, categories and templates are appreciated. It’s not worthwhile putting in the effort.

If you want to contribute to making human knowledge available to everyone, it's the best place we have.

My personal rule: don't interact with the community, unless absolutely necessary. has served me well in the last 18 years.

You can configure Wikipedia to send you an email whenever a certain article is edited. I monitor several thousand articles that way, and remove malicious edits. Lots of editors do that, and vandalism is usually cleaned up very quickly.

I want that, when it is being said by someone who

>built up a grudge which turned into making more unhelpful edits

https://gutenberg.net

https://www.pgdp.net

Next, there should be a market for re-publishing web2.0 into 1.0. For instance, if a news article is posted on a major outlet, services (people, bots, whatever) should crawl it and strip the content and pictures and re-serve it as web 1.0 content. Then, a browser add-on or internet service should allow you to enter the URL to the main article, but then switch to the 1.0 version (thanks to someone who already translated it).

This is NOT the same as "disable javascript in your browser". If you do that, many sites will turn you away. I'm proposing a translation layer of a rendered webpage back to 1999 style, then sharing that document in p2p network.

This would take the edge off one major form of enshittification of the web, make your mobile page load faster, eliminate tracking, and so forth. Although it wouldn't solve the deeper issues of click-bait infotainment and misinformation.

(I know the name is a bit of a retrofit from after O'Reilly decided to host a web 2.0 conference. Back when it was meaningless.)

it's one click away with uBlockOrigin. disable for all and enable per domain as they deserve it.

hit a link that don't load? hit back and try another. it's not like there's no alternatives for everything.

Imagine something like automatic archiving everything one visits with tools to prune the data, some granular scoring based on number of visits with automatic [intelligent] organization in a folder tree/web directory. A slider that on the left only shows the tree of bookmarks somewhat to the right everything ever visited, further to the right the rest of the www starting with the largest websites. Have both a fixed tree and a dynamic one. Bookmarks visited often gradually migrate to the root. Less often is moved into appropriately named folders. Different bookmark buttons for different projects. (say, start with work/recreation/administration) Do paid listings, say 5 euro per year per domain. Have additional hosts to subscribe to that expand your index with free listings.

Just a rough idea, others can no doubt do better.

For politicized stuff I see it no differently than any other aggregator like Reddit or Hacker News. get a quick feel from the post and comments (yeah I even read the editor comments), look at several sources and get a feel for their bias. Then try to form my own view based on that. I see bias/editorialization there because I see it in every single person's POV. That's just life and why the number of sources I'd ever take wholesale are ones I can count on onehand.

Wikipedia is definitely very weak at developing stories, where you'll really see the back and forth happen underneath.

What else could you reasonably expect? Unanimity without discussion?

There is no unanimity being arrived at, it’s simply whomever has made the latest edit by the time a given person arrives at the page. Many people can read the “same” article and if they take it at face value, arrive at different conclusions.

I didn’t state my expectations about how WP should function. I pointed out why I think GP is wrong.

It's not perfect but Wikipedia is an accomplishment and treasure compared to all the walled gardens and extractive BS everywhere.

* Join fediverse services, e.g. [Lemmy](feddit.de) or Mastodon and post a bit.

* Create your own website if you have sth like a cool hobby to share. Webhosting is available for free or cheap, depending on what you want. Link other pages you like to form a net.

* If you can, host your own instances and federate.

* Look into alternative search engines like marginalia to find "small-web" content

* Talk to your friends to also make the move or at least look at alternatives to the large sites.

We can't just wait for the problem to fix itself, this is something where internet users have to become active. It won't solve itself.

EDIT: Commenters here are rightly saying that discoverability is a problem. Again, relying on search engines is required for productivity, but when we consider browsing for research or leisure, don't underestimate manually curated link pages. Webrings were a thing we might wanna consider again.

Part of the early internet was about being able to find a huge range of different attitudes and beliefs, every possible politics, every possible religion. It was about being able to get a glimpse of non-Western cultures you might never have been able to learn about before. There is very little diversity in the fediverse.

Even Wikipedia (not that it counts as early internet):

> I knew that early Wikipedia editors were (and kinda still are) academically-inclined hacker dudes, but it's crazy when you realize the article about mole day, created January 2002, is an entire year older than the article "hip hop music" and five years older than "fashion show"

https://twitter.com/depthsofwiki/status/1716655903695425695

Mastodon's federation policies, which require mod instances to police anti-LGBT speech for example, expressly excludes that. If you spend any time on the Nigerian internet, for instance, you see this is a matter that ordinary people are strident about, but they would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people whose views conform to what the Mastodon founding generation is comfortable with. Don't people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or (Great Firewall aside) China have the right to join this ecosystem and still be the ordinary representatives of their societies that they are?

To consider current events, let's take Hamas. Hamas is a deeply conservative and radicalized group. They believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. This is not slander, they would agree with all of this. And there are good historical reasons why they believe these things.

Suppose that you're LBGTQ+ and aren't a member of a church, and are carrying a sign saying, "Palestine will be free from sea to sea." What are you actually supporting? You're supporting people who are brown and oppressed, who in turn would like to see you dead. Now it may be that in your ideology it is worth this on ethical principles. But most people like that who I've dealt with simply ignore the fact that they are supporting people who believe in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. And then are caught by surprise if they encounter the fact that Hamas believes in banning abortion, killing gays, killing Jews, and that atheists are evil. (And try to forget that they heard it.)

I, personally, like knowing a diverse group of people. And understanding them for who they are. I may disagree with them violently, but I still like trying to understand them. But this requires a very different kind of tolerance than most progressives preach. For a start, you can't start by banning intolerant speech. Because there is no way to express the intolerant views that many people actually have without being willing to listen to (though not agree with) intolerant speech.

If I've understood correctly... Yeah, I don't know if it's for good or ill but I think we see less of that kind of diversity as the enlargement of the Internet allows people to build virtual communities that are more like-minded and have less need to tolerate uncomfortable differences (in that you have the option of going somewhere else instead of "putting up with the asshole next door" because this is the only online space that caters to the thing you like).

On the other hand, I have no strategy to force people to coexist in the same virtual space when they don't want to, nor do I have concrete evidence that's even a desired outcome.

Considering people are sentenced to death by stoning for being LGBTQ in Nigeria. It is easy to understand why this might be an issue worth policing if you can.. Is it sane to fedderate with people who might be killed for what they interact with on your fediverse. Ordinary people does include gay people you know.

There is nothing hindering the ones who want to kill all gays to run their own fediverse.

Perhaps you're referring to the policies of individual instance administrators, as "Mastodon" has no centralized "policies" as far as I know.

I run more than one instance, and as far as I can tell, I can manage them however I want.

To me, this seemed counterproductive. But it was at least interesting to see the creative URLs some people come up with.

And if what you’re seeking is the privilege to compel other people who take responsibility for setting up and administering such spaces to carry / broadcast your unmoderated views regardless of their own, what we’re talking about isn’t really any principled kind of liberty.

It's the same kind of leg work that the existing status quo of the major mastodon nodes had to undertake, and there's no reason anyone should expect that the existing status quo of Mastodon nodes would help a mastodon federation ideologically opposed to their own succeed.

> they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse

I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.

An LGBT community is in no way obliged to listen to anti-LGBT voices. In the same way that an unlocked front door is not an invitation for me to enter, the fact that many of these communities are on public platforms doesn’t guarantee your access. Nor is being blocked from that community a strike against free speech: you are able to speak freely in any other location of your choice.

I call it like I see it.

> I’m not LGBT but it’s my understanding that many LGBT folks are open about wanting to block beyond just extreme cases. They wish to participate in a community of shared values, which is hardly a new notion.

Nobody cares about gatekeeping in niche communities. The problem is when niche groups enter larger communities and employ the tried-and-true Motte and Bailey harangue for censorship, which ultimately ends up becoming political and problematic, as with old twitter.

> What is new is that the blurred lines of public vs private spaces has confused everyone’s concept of “free speech”.

What’s new is erstwhile liberals abandoning their commitment to open discourse, advocating for corporations to police speech, and boycotting/organizing against corporations who commit the sin of platforming wrongthink.

> An LGBT community is in no way obliged to listen to anti-LGBT voices. In the same way that an unlocked front door is not an invitation for me to enter.

Agreed! But nor should LGBT voices be permitted (or, rather, used) to dictate rules to everyone else on the planet.

> Nor is being blocked from that community a strike against free speech: you are able to speak freely in any other location of your choice.

This is a cynical and deeply authoritarian take. Does first amendment apply to social media? Of course it doesn’t. The first amendment prevents the federal government from squashing speech, because they can’t be trusted with such power over the people. Are you of the opinion that a power that’s considered too corrupting to be wielded by our elected officials can be responsibly wielded by unelected technocrats?

Of course a person gets booted for attacking other members of the community regardless of who they are.

Same with being pro-LGBT: The activists aren't pro gay people, or pro black, or pro transpeople. They don't want me listening to Douglas Murray, or Gays Against Groomers, or Thomas Sowell. They definitely aren't pro Scott Newgent of "What is a woman?" fame. They're pro rainbow ideologue people. The politics is the point, the minority status simply a convenient shield from criticism and hate claims a cudgel to beat people over the head with.

I think you're committing the error of treating social categories as set-theoretic absolutes when humans are far more multidimensional.

It's like "Well they're not really patriots; they tell me Americans are great but they don't want me talking to Benedict Arnold or Aaron Burr." No, they don't, because those Americans were traitors who hurt their fellow countrymen. "Listen to more LGBTQ voices" and "Don't listen to Gays Against Groomers" aren't actually contradictory concepts; 'listen to' doesn't mean 'give equal, uncritical weight to every'.

The missing sociological tool you may want to dive in on is 'Intersectionality,' which is the concept of how one's privilege is contextual and multidimensional factor; a person can be both oppressed and oppressor.

I wonder if anyone in the sports club would ever have noticed if it weren't for a journalist looking into that neo-Nazi group.

No, in my experience people mostly kept to individual federated spaces dependent on interests or demographics. LGBTQ people kept to their IRC channels, black people kept to their channels, and banned anyone who was also a member of the local nazi IRC channel. This was totally normal and I don't see a difference between 1990s era IRC and Fediverse in this respect.

You are remembering experiences on forums or, depending on your age, BBSs or perhaps even USENET, the only system I can think of that was architected to move much power from the hands of the service administrators to the hands of the clients attaching to the service (and, not coincidentally, an experiment that lapsed into obsolescence because that's a terrible bargain for anybody to want to host if there are any alternatives).

The internet you are imagining still exists. It just hasn't grown because it turns out most users don't want that. But if someone wants to build a community that is LGBTQ-hostile online, all the pieces are there. They just have to do the legwork themselves because very few people will be interested in helping support that.

(I would also humbly hypothesize that most of that culture mixing you remember is because when the internet was small, people attended communities with others who had hostile worldviews to their own because it was the only community where, for example, Star Trek was being discussed and people wanted to participate in hobbies more than they cared about having to put up with phobes. Now that there's an option to join a Star Trek fan group in social media that is LGBTQ friendly versus one that isn't, the marketplace of ideas rewards one and not the other).

Nerdy = Educated, because most people joining at that time were academics or people who really wanted to use the internet despite the difficulty to get there at the time.

As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. There were a lot of people from different continents even in the early days, while of course the majority was from the US. And as far as I know, diversity of thought is not tied to the type of melanin you have in your skin.

I'm sorry, but you're taking offence at reality here.

When I got to Usenet in the early 1990s, it was clear that most users were from North America and involved with college. This group was overwhelmingly white. Furthermore at many institutions, access required learning enough Unix to run rn. A barrier to entry that favored people who were nerdy relative to the general population. Email had similar demographics at the time, for similar reasons.

Therefore it is historically accurate to say that more than 50% of users were white and nerdy, even relative to other educated people. You're right that the other users included a lot of diversity. But afavour is absolutely right about the majority.

On diversity of thought. It is absolutely true that we had diverse thinking on Usenet at that point. However it is like clustering in some high dimensional space. The existence of diversity along some dimensions of thought within some dimensions doesn't change the fact that along some other dimensions there is more diversity of thought when you include people from different backgrounds and cultures.

What did you expect? It was invented and operated by "white nerds".

The early internet didn't attempt to silo you as it had no real technical capacity for it. Maybe only (for argument's sake) ~2% of the internet back then was non-US/Europe, but that meant ~2% of the messages I read came from non-US/Europe. Nowadays, Xitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. all have algorithms that try to fit me into a bucket with similar people, so even if now 50% of the internet is non-US/Europe, what I'm actually experiencing is far closer to 0% than it used to be.

The internet I experience now is far less diverse even than just walking down my local high street. Looking at that mastodon link, for example, is so unbelievably unrepresentative of the kind of diversity (by all axes) I experience just by going outside.

Many of us in the world chatted and conversed (VoIP was a thing already) with people around the world in the mid-1990's.

and male.

Today we have most of the world online, but they live on 5 websites, so even though it feels like there's more diversity and breadth, it has become a much more homogeneous culture.

There must be a name for this scientific phenomenon (variable increases between two spans of time, but the relative effect of it on the entire system has decreased)

Just as minorities are not defined by their skin color, neither are whites.