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Social networks, though, have since colonized the web for television's values. From Facebook to Instagram, the medium refocuses our attention on videos and images, rewarding emotional appeals—'like' buttons—over rational ones. Instead of a quest for knowledge, it engages us in an endless zest for instant approval from an audience, for which we are constantly but unconsciouly performing. (It's telling that, while Google began life as a PhD thesis, Facebook started as a tool to judge classmates' appearances.) It reduces our curiosity by showing us exactly what we already want and think, based on our profiles and preferences. Enlightenment's motto of 'Dare to know' has become 'Dare not to care to know.'
It is a development that further proves the words of French philosopher Guy Debord, who wrote that, if pre-capitalism was about 'being', and capitalism about 'having', in late-capitalism what matters is only 'appearing'—appearing rich, happy, thoughtful, cool and cosmopolitan. It's hard to open Instagram without being struck by the accuracy of his diagnosis.
Now the challenge is to save Wikipedia and its promise of a free and open collection of all human knowledge amid the conquest of new and old television—how to collect and preserve knowledge when nobody cares to know. Television has even infected Wikipedia itself—today many of the most popular entries tend to revolve around television series or their cast.
This doesn't mean it is time to give up. But we need to understand that the decline of the web and thereby of the Wikipedia is part of a much larger civilizational shift which has just started to unfold.
Wired: How Social Media Endangers Knowledge
(Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Monday October 30 2017, @05:58PM (9 children)
Google primarily serves up links based on popularity. This means, inevitably, that the links thus presented will be the ones that have managed to attract those at the peak of the curve - which will be at the median. Not the worst, and not the best. Most likely, the easiest to digest (which is not a set matching most accurate, unfortunately.)
There are almost always better links deeper in the search results, but they probably won't be on the front page, because the most informative and detail-rich pages aren't "sound-bitey" enough to be attractive to the limited attention span of the majority – clicks from non-first page results are much rarer. Likewise, a great product that is marketed poorly or not popular yet (or ever)... you aren't likely to find it with a Google search unless you search very specifically for it. And of course there are the myriad attempts, some successful, to game the search engine algorithms, plus those that directly impose themselves on us via paid placement, that further bias the results away from "best" and towards "tricksie little linkseses."
At one time, curated link pages / sites presented a hope of actually bringing the best of the web to us, but they're hugely effort-intensive, while search engines / web crawlers are, at least comparatively so, easy. Yahoo tried, and fell on its face when they tried to monetize it; there was an open project to do this as well, with volunteer curators, but I can't find it or any mention of it using several Google searches for variations on "curated lists of links", which would be funny, except it isn't, really.
Perhaps when someone get some really high-capability deep learning leveraged in with a web crawler we'll have a chance at a "best results" type of search.
Until then, it's unrelenting mediocrity pretty much all the way down (the first page.)
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday October 30 2017, @06:34PM
The Open Directory Project
Now closed, static mirror presently located here. [dmoztools.net]
As I said above – this just seems to be too difficult a task for people to deal with.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 30 2017, @07:07PM (7 children)
Tell that to all the Youtube channel creators Google demonitized or outright shut down for wrongthink.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 31 2017, @01:00AM (6 children)
First it was the Nazis, and now TMB is defending demons? Well, I never thought we would see such an end of days!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 31 2017, @01:06AM (5 children)
Well I am a Linux guy... We're all about the daemons.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 31 2017, @01:12AM (4 children)
What a coincidence! So was Socrates! And speaking of the persecution of philosophers, who spam-modded me this time?
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 31 2017, @02:24AM (2 children)
Nobody unless someone's already dealt with it. No recent posts by you are currently modded Spam.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Tuesday October 31 2017, @05:39AM (1 child)
Hmm, still "down by 10" as they say. Are you sure? I had to search, but then got the latest mod message today, which revealed what I suspected: https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=22117&cid=584998 [soylentnews.org]
Modded Spam. I think I know who the culprit is. I recommend that admin go easy on him, since he is obviously quite young, naive, and stupid. And a Nazi sympathizing alt-right hanger-on. And he has very small. . . . Go easy on him.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday October 31 2017, @10:46AM
Ahh, so it is. Looks like it somehow got out of order in the listing; shuffled down below a couple older Spam mods. My guess is the SQL query sorts by comment date instead of moderation date and the comment in question was almost too old to moderate anymore. Sneaky. I'll have to fix that.
Taken care of.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fyngyrz on Tuesday October 31 2017, @06:49PM
So was Maxwell [wikipedia.org]. 👿😊