Quora had been going downhill for quite some time before that, as they realized they had no idea how to monetize the content and were grasping at straws. But that was the point where they appear to have pivoted entirely towards AI and continued the human generated content side on minimum life support.
This sort of thing should be a nonprofit. When it was good, it was literally making the world a better place.
Possibly the Library of Congress would be a good steward for such a platform. Something to make it resistant to enshittification.
If anything, Musk is less profit-oriented. Someone looking to profit off the platform wouldn't be actively driving off advertisers. But I suppose that because we must all believe that Elon Bad, he must also be the evilest capitalistest person in the whole world, and everything before him was sunshine and roses.
And now it’s know to censor content to be friendly to autocratic governments.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88xqnv/elon-musk-censors-twi...
By complying with government regulations when displaying content in their respective regions to avoid getting the entire network banned there, right. While this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet would like to equate this with ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government, it's obviously more transparent and fair to comply with censorship locally and provide a reason for the missing content. Reeks of "it's okay when we do it".
Being unable to turn a profit is not the same as not prioritising profit.
If he’s so unconcerned with making a profit, then why weasel out from paying rent, the fired employees, and all the rest? Why be so adamant about a payed subscription? Why complain of advertisers leaving?
More importantly, why does a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” kowtow to an autocratic government if he’s not even concerned with profit? And why does he keep banning his own critics?
> ye olde Twitter's regular practice of of suppressing or deleting content worldwide at the whim of the US government
Disputed by his own lawyers.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/06/tech/twitter-files-lawyer...
> this hit piece from a notoriously biased outlet
Here are eight more sources and a study. Surely they won’t all be “notoriously biased outlets” writing hit pieces, or is the definition for that “writes something negative about Musk”?
https://nypost.com/2023/04/01/twitter-censorship-increases-u...
https://www.thestreet.com/technology/twitter-promised-to-fig...
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...
https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/elon-musk-...
https://slate.com/technology/2023/05/elon-musk-turkey-twitte...
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/elon-musk-twitte...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/27/tw...
https://censortrack.org/study-twitter-censorship-shockingly-...
In fact till mid-1993, with a few unimportant exceptions (Clari-Net, early "retail" ISPs like Netcom) the entire Internet, which was already the largest network of computers by a comfortable margin, was non-profit.
I will get downvoted for this, but it's my perception.
--
[0]: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/wikipedia-millions-bank-beg/
Though, hoarding seems like a mischaracterization. Per the article linked, the cash burn rate is on the order of $100M/yr, having $150M in the bank is 18 months worth of funding.
The biggest gripe I read in the article is the "high" expenditure rate and how necessary it is. It seems like reasonable people may disagree on whether that spend rate is excessive.
If the expenditure rate were lower, I'd agree it would be hoarding.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has...
If they kept expenditures low and hoarded, I would actually be fine with that and happy to contribute. I see nothing wrong with forming a large endowment for a project like Wikipedia.
I believe I was likely incorrect and you are correct here @HillRat. The nuance where I was incorrect was if the nonprofit fails to properly pay taxes on unrelated activities - in which case the government can decide that entity is a for-profit entity. This link was helpful for me for that clarification: https://www.findlaw.com/smallbusiness/incorporation-and-lega...
I recall this being an issue for an HOA which wound up collecting more than it needed and there was concern that (A) it would be taxed & (B) nonprofit status would be lost. Paying taxes correctly is very important, but does not speak to a non-profits ability to hoard cash. My earlier comment is incorrect, I apologize for the bad information.
I will always downvote a comment when someone writes something like this. It is irrelevant to the conversation and screams insecurity.
The what? I cannot visit Wikipedia without seeing a donate bar, even when I close it every time. "Year-round" maybe.
Their sister Wikicities / Wikia / Fandom (also relying on MediaWiki), and now owned by Texas Pacific Group, is however, another example of a platform getting enshittified.
The US has done terrible things in the too-recent future in the explicit name of making the world a better place.
At least, that rationale triggers my gag reflex.
There is a lot of money in lobbying for certain things.
Companies generally don't want political outcomes per se via lobbying outside of their own niche interests.
Much more impactful are dedicated lobby groups.
For exmaple, there's a particular country that I'm not allowed to mention here under duress of being banned that has a lot of moneyed lobbying.
Do you think Wikipedia has jumped the shark? Obviously not perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than Quora in terms of accuracy. It's been around for a very long time and it doesn't seem to me like quality has decreased.
Granted, it might be the best possible way for an open-source encyclopedia to work. It is after all an incredible success. It's just pretty bad in some parts.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38974614
But to expand a bit, for example I'm annoyed at many of the entries calling their subject "conspiracy theory/ theorist". Not that conspiracy theories and their believers don't exist, but at this point it has become a highly pejorative and judgemental term to frame ideas and narratives that need to be stigmatized rather than explained. Passing judgements should not, in my view, be the primary focus of an encyclopedia entry.
What ever I answer in this case the easiest reaction will be; for you will be to judge me and lump me together with what you cal activists, and for those activists it will me easiest to put me in the same conspiracy theorist group as you. This is not a problem with Wikipedia, this is a human problem.
While I also think that article is abysmal, it does give context what to expect from people posting stuff by her. The biggest problem with your complaint is that you are not linking to an alternative, just do a fast draft on Wikipedia remove everything that you feel is not relevant and link that. Sure it will be reverted but that is probably because you first draft will not be a good article, those are evidently very hard to write when people think so differently about something.
Wikipedia could be an excellent attack vector for sorting out human's heads at scale.
Also they pretty clearly note that her doctorate in interdisciplinary studies focused on mammals as its subject, what would you have them do? Claim that her doctorate was in something it wasn't, instead of interdisciplinary studies, just to make her look better, because a doctorate in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on some particular thing is "essentially equivalent" in your mind to an actual doctorate in that thing? Or claim she focused on evolutionary biology, when not even her own blog bio claims it was about "evolutionary biology" (she implies it was about zoology or another similar field)? Why do you say evolutionary biology should be listed then? Is it just to make her sound better?
Likewise, why wouldn't the criticism section be mostly filled with what she's been criticized about the most? If most of her other work was unremarkable or solid and nobody criticized it, but she's gotten a lot of criticism for her climate change views, why wouldn't that dominate the criticism section?
And if she hasn't had much notable work outside of her business, books, dotgs, and polar bears, I'm not sure why you would expect her career or education sections to have a ton of other stuff? That's the stuff even herself bio on her blog focuses on. Like you look at the headings of her non-criticism sections and decry them as if they are obviously lacking or derogatory or something but if that's all her notable work is about, why wouldn't they be like that?
Like, your entire criticism seems at least to lack citations of why the material you are upset about shouldn't be there, and without them it really appears like you're just upset that a factual article about someone you are to some degree sympathetic with makes them look worse than you'd like.
Honestly this is my problem with a lot of people's complaints of bias. A lot of it boils down to "the facts make my side of the issue look bad, can you emphasize/deemphasize some facts for me so both sides seem equal?"
People seem to think that truly unbiased reporting makes all sides of a controversy seem equally correct and equally to have a point, but that is simply not true. Unbiased reporting is reporting the facts of the case, and if that happens to show that one side of a controversy is more correct than the others, then so be it. The job is to report the facts as best you can, and misrepresenting the facts and skewing their connotation or interpretation to make it look like a side of a controversy that doesn't have much going for it is equal to a side that has more of the facts on their side just in order to make everyone look equal would actually be biased, not the other way around. I'm not claiming the mainstream news media reports the facts of the case well, they don't, but they also fall afoul of this problem: on whatever issue the mainstream news media has decided they are going to be "impartial" on, every time they publish an article that is even slightly supportive of one side of the controversy, they feel it necessary to post an article from the other side of the controversy, even if that second article is a completely factually false, incoherent screed that has no facts or logic on its side, and treat it on supposedly equal footing in the name of impartiality. Or anytime they report on the issue they feel the need to use unnecessarily strained language to circumlocate around calling things what they actually are in order to prevent people from coming to the obvious conclusion the facts would lead them to, because that would make one side of the narrative be obviously more correct than the other, and you can't have that.
She also has a consulting company that specialises in identifying bone fragments of North American fish, birds and mammals- the clients are mostly universities, museums and park/ forest services. I don't see references on the company's page about searching in "the scat of wild animals for ... items", which seems at one time very specific and vague. Curious choice. (*)
More, just on the lede: "she is a blogger"- no, she also runs a blog, as many scientists do. "her blog posts on polar bear biology which are unsupported ..."- imprecise, we don't yet know what those posts are about- and yet we already know that they're "unsupported by the consensus". Ah, by the way- this is just wrong: consensus is not a support for anything- you might go with or against the consensus, certainly not look for its support.
The "Early life and education" section fails to mention the title of her doctorate thesis, but instead dedicates half of its seven lines to a completely out-of-context, minute controversy about what one "Lars Olof Bjorn" thinks of one line of one article by her in 2009.
Career section "Business" ends (after two lines) with the following sentence (again, at the same time very precise and vague): "Since the start of her career, she has worked primarily through paid contracts for specific work on a variety of topics". What is it even supposed to mean? You know, that would also apply to me. "Paid contracts" indeed, for "specific work" on "a variety of topics".
In the "Books" section, only one book is cited (Google gives me 5 or 6) and again, half of the space is dedicated to the criticism from a single person.
The "Polar bears" section is basically entirely dedicated to a controversy- and still we don't know anything about what Susan Crockford claims about polar bears, why she does it, what are her points, how does she go against the "consensus". Nothing.
I'll stop here. A cursory read is enough to understand that there has been no attempt whatsoever to approach this subject with a minimum of detachment- the entry almost reads like a parody, or a satirical piece. If you don't see it, I'm sorry, think it's a problem.
* If I can pinpoint what feels wrong with these statements, is the constant oscillation between extremely vague ("a small business", "other items", "known for posts about polar bear biology") and curiously precise ("contract scientist", "in the scat of wildlife", "gained her interest in elementary school") etc.
;-)
What we label as “centrist” isn’t guaranteed to be the “actual” center of reality’s spectrum of ideology.
Right wing people are too busy earning them sweet, sweet dollars.
This is typically done in under the guise of notability ("GPL/copyleft is notable, other alternatives aren't").
One major problem is that you need to submit references to back up any claim. PR companies can easily buy an article in a fringe news site and them modify Wikipedia with a reference to that article. It is almost impossible to roll back.
I once tried to update a company page to state they were going through redundancies. I was personally affected by this, and had internal emails to back this up. However, lacking a public reference it was rolled back.
The point is that Wikipedia isn't original research. You updating the page on the basis of personal knowledge isn't the way it is supposed to work.
Was reverted as that was not reference to some book or sciene article.
Never contributed after that. May be one or 2 graph theory improvements.
Wiki denies realitity.
And for math i use only 10% of my math requests.
- Thing done
- Editor makes a judgement call
- Turns out to be a bad call
- Editor refuses to admit mistake
- Things escalateImagine your quite large company has a small guitar shop on the other side of the globe that has the same name.
You just want a disambiguation so nobody thinks your company is this little guitar shop. You can't just edit it yourself, you need to find a Wikipedia expert and bribe them to somehow help with your plight. It is easy to imagine that a vast PR company will wave a magic wand, but it is not always like that.
https://www.wikiexpertsinc.com/get-free-wikipedia-consultanc...
https://www.legalmorning.com/cleaning-up-a-company-wikipedia...
I remember when nascent Wikipedia had user-contributed content, and the niche articles were way more interesting and detailed. Though at the cost of inaccuracy.
Now, the submarine PR being backfed into it makes cited content pretty beige.
Something like (1) a non-reader-visible, upstream Wikifacts + (2) a community-driven, laxer Wikiprototype + (3) an authoritative, cited Wikipedia.
An amusing discussion where the OP says Wikipedia is here to stay, and every answer is downvoted, most of them flagged. All of them voicing concerns of some validity.
This is super representative of that happens on Wikipedia.
Wikipedia is notorious for excluding ordinary contributors from the process. Anybody can revert your change and that takes precedence over what you did, and there is no obvious appeal process for you, but de facto there is for the well-connected long-time editors. They can always gather some cavalry and run you over.
So they should probably do what Stack Overflow tried to do, and explicitly say that new users / infrequent contributors have to receive more care, that needs to be provided by veterans / frequent contributors, as well as provide mechanisms to do so.
Otherwise it is not a wikipedia that everyone can edit, rather a wikipedia written by a cabal who is also contains a large number of biased people, often getting direct or indirect funding from maintaining that bias.
I think these things turn out to be a bit important.
However, having been a long time contributor to [Current Events](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events) (fought over because of news relevancy), there have been waves of sock puppeting and attempts to constantly revoke all edits from certain users, that often make you not want to contribute.
There is also this editorial talking about spending that makes some arguments about current issues with Wikipedia. Namely, that there's a lot of money going in, and not a lot of requested feature development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C...
> Every for-profit contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark
So now you have this bizarro world where English language pages on Portuguese politicians have corruption scandals but Portuguese language do not.
Fine, Facebook , TikTok , Reddit and myriad others have found how to moderate and monetize user generated content if you need better examples
Streaming services (you mean 5he likes of Netflix ?) are arguably not platforms, because they are much closer to distributors or even publishers (rather than just editors, sometimes), with all the extra legal issues and contract-signing that come with that.
*"content" is really corporate-speak, I would hate my works to be called that :
https://craphound.com/content/Cory_Doctorow_-_Content.html#1
Reddit is a cluster that manages to ONLY keep going because of how agressive mods can be about their positions, but as we have seen time in, time out, MODs positions get molested by ADMINs and ADMINs posing as MODs. MODs on the take.
When I ran /r/conspiracy for nearly ten years, I had brought up the fact (way early on ~2009 maybe?) about reddit accounts being sold, and votes being sold. This was just as this was starting to hit reddit.
I suggested a catfish of whomever was trying to buy accounts with mod access, and expose them/disclose what the market rates were...
That was before being ousted by an admin + their friend/shill mod account...
The point being that when Reddit IPOs - there are undoubtedly mods who have/are/will-be compensated/profit when IPO hits.
Early users are a different band of the population, on every successful platform from StackOverflow to Uber they create a particular culture which is impossible to maintain as the general public arrives in large numbers.
All the mods’ accounts were years younger than both the question and answer. Even weirder, the mod who initiated the deletion first tried to answer the question. He only voted to delete it after I commented that the question already had had an accepted answer for 13 years.
Fortunately it's so terrible I was easily dissuaded from ever answering anything.
I've run huge forums and they have mostly enshittified because I didn't put the work into moderating them correctly. I would promote good users to moderators, and six months later they would all literally become Hitler and I would have to fire them, and then they become weaponized and the destruction of the site becomes circular.
As someone who has started a "content contributed by users" website recently (golfcourse.wiki), I've thought long and hard about why the enshitification creep happens. I really think it happens because most of the people who start these businesses either need to take venture capital to survive, or are looking for a way to sell the business to retire rich af.
I thought long and hard about a monetization strategy, and I've got a few in my mind that don't suck. However, to achieve those goals, the project has to stay a side project and it has to run on a shoe string budget.
Call me an optimist, but in the long run, I think we will replace our enshitified websites with more open ones, the slow but steady growth fediverse shows this is happening, it's just that it won't happen fast enough for most of us to be satisfied consumers.
I just think we are looking at this through the lens of consumers, not generous creators. I occasionally help edit Wikipedia, and it looks like about 10,000-to-1, at best, people who contribute to my dumb little site. If we're all willing to waste a bit of time we can build some pretty cool sites, but there always needs to be a way for users to capture that good if the company turns evil instead of the company trying to capture the users for profit.
I see it as, well, a sort of mexican-standoff relationship that Wikipedia has built for itself (for lack of a better term). Basically, we won't enshitify the website because you'll just copy-paste it, but you won't copy-paste it because you know it's a waste of time right now. If you don't need to squeeze revenues, that's a very good relationship for long-term success.
That's a good idea though. The main idea, since it is a golf wiki, is to provide tournament services to clubs. My understanding is that most of the cost of operating tournament services is due to licensing agreements with the the governing bodies, but if clubs are willing to provide their data themselves, that's not necessary, and I can charge orders of magnitude less than the competition.
Reddit seems to be the exception to the rule. I and millions of others still spend a ton of time there. People have loudly griped about ads and API pricing, meanwhile I'm still finding new interesting subreddits. They seem to have monetized without destroying the UX.
I hope the forthcoming IPO doesn't ruin this comment!
Whose sole job it is to (1) figure out what contributors are thinking and want & (2) advocate for them inside the company.
Every contributor-driven platform has eventually jumped the shark, and all in exactly the same way.
Management begins to take contributions for granted. Stops caring about attracting contributors. Then focuses on revenue. Then makes changes to the platform that kill contributions, in pursuit of revenue.
And they miss so many obvious ways to placate and delight their contributors. "It'd be nice to have a mod tool that does X" shouldn't be a 3-year back burner ask.
Maybe make it harder for your company to footgun your golden goose?