Why do people leave ILX for good?

Quick bit of a search reveals: "Google says that the web now has 30 trillion unique individual pages."

that's disgusting

And that's not counting the 77 borad

tabula rasa!

wikipedia is bad and indicative of what made online community’s early days so frustrating but that’s a separate thread

once the "pros" got involved, for whom it was a job, it quickly became unfun.

this is obviously the right answer to 'how has the internet got worse'

wikipedia is one of the best websites

Wikipedia's shortcomings are similar to any other encyclopedia's shortcomings, but not exactly the same. Its great weakness is dilettantism. Its greatest strength is the obvious one; the breadth of subject matter it addresses extends far beyond any previous encyclopedia ever published by orders of magnitude, while it remains easy to search.

I quite like Momus's latest 'Open University episode on 'Computers':
https://youtu.be/eqhW-8NJd44

where he identifies the introduction of the iPhone as the moment when the internet became 'finger food'/fast food, and the quality of content became degraded (from around 16:00 onwards).

Momus you say

it also has psychotic admins who want to separate out “women _______” while not being as obsessively fastidious about filtering their male counterparts from the all-gender listings. (i know from personal experience.) also its lack of information on cultural phenomena that fall outside nerd “culture”’s straight white guy purview is galling.

xp

Momus otm.

I think it has a lot to do with what the technology people are using makes possible and encourages. When we were all using desktop PCs, it was natural to both read longform and do a lot of typing.

On phones, where everyone is, many of them for hours a day, both of those are just a bit harder to do than they were before. Conversely, it’s easier than it ever was to take and make photos and videos. So naturally that’s the stuff that gets made and consumed. All the action now is in Instagram and TikTok and Snap, not in forums or blogs. What typing is left is as short as possible, hence the Twitter hellmouth.

(This also combines with the always-with-you-ness of phones. People used to (sometimes) turn their PCs off and return to their physical spaces. Now it’s very easy to spend your whole existence with a foot in both worlds. No wonder it’s unpleasant: we are closer than ever before to all of everything of everybody. It’s like moving into the world’s shittest commune and not even having a bedroom door. Who wants to add to the chorus when they’re already enveloped in millions of voices?)

Curating your internet content is the newish curating your music before the internet. Time consuming to be selective and not just consume what is thrown your way.

I say this also because I know a lot of record collectors who got into wine because there are a lot of transferable skills: attention to production, pressings, labels, allotments and cruising of stores to find gems.

It’s like moving into the world’s shittest commune and not even having a bedroom door.

upvoted this

No wonder it’s unpleasant: we are closer than ever before to all of everything of everybody.
this is suuuuuper otm
looking at/reading what other people complain about is one of the most depressing ways to spend one's time

xp stet, I always feel frustrated that the smartphone era ended up being about information consumption, not about communication. It frustrates me that I cannot buy a handheld device that I can use for convenient >160 chars communication. And yeah I post more on ilx since I bought a laptop. For the last decade I felt confident that the tide would turn. And, in fact, the collapse of tablets in the marketplace are a glimmer of that possibility. But clearly we're not there yet...

xp when my brother in law was getting his PhD one committee prof was a huge audiophile and another was a huge oenophile; they kind of hated each other and would often end up in fighting about why their esoteric and expensive hobby was great while the other’s esoteric and expensive hobby was a scam and pointless waste of time.

maura otm abt wikipedia, its shortcomings go way beyond dilettanteism (though it remains massively useful if you are conscious abt what you are consuming). there's a great ilx post abt this, maybe a whole thread... gimme a sec.

ugh can't find it, maybe googleproofed thread or something..... it was an ilxor (maybe you, maura!) doing this sentence by sentence takedown of an entry on slavery in the united states, how the milktoast compromise language was effectively adding up to an apologia for slavery. really revealing, even more than e.g. how every single star trek episode gets an entry while no mary tyler moore ones do (or whatever).

found it, rushomancy itt: The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

i can write the mary tyler moore pages if it will improve things

So this is now the “why is the internet bad” thread?

Old Lunch OTM on that thread.

Using Wikipedia as anything other than a starting point for further research/inquiry has always been problematic at the very least.

― Transformed From The Norm By The Nuclear Goop (Old Lunch), Monday, February 6, 2017 1:01 PM (one year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Didn't know about this, though:

it also has psychotic admins who want to separate out “women _______” while not being as obsessively fastidious about filtering their male counterparts from the all-gender listings. (i know from personal experience.)

found it, rushomancy itt: The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

― |Restore| |Restart| |Quit| (Doctor Casino)

hahahaha i don't even remember writing that, cool :)

"Didn't know about this, though:

it also has psychotic admins who want to separate out “women _______” while not being as obsessively fastidious about filtering their male counterparts from the all-gender listings. (i know from personal experience.)

― Locked in silent monologue, in silent scream (Sund4r)"

yeah wikipedia has serious governance issues when you start looking at how the sausage is made, it's to their credit that even with all the bullshit going on behind the scenes wikipedia is still probably the best site on the internet

i know el sandifer had strong criticisms of wikipedia that seem reasonably well-founded particularly re: transphobia

re: mtm:

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

having said that there are literally two mary tyler moore show episodes with their own pages, as opposed to, say, the first forty-two episodes of M*A*S*H and many thereafter, so i think the argument does still hold water

isn't this more to do with which fan base is interested in making episode pages? mary tyler moore fans probably are more at peace with the passage of time and don't feel a need to fetishistically document everything

i'm sure there is tons of gender bias in wikipedia just don't know about that data point

editing wikipedia articles is pretty fun imo

treesh, that's my point - wiki's coverage is inevitably lopsided towards things that have not just people interested in them, but people who are tech-savvy, internet-battle-inclined, and obsessive. that's going to produce comparatively benign distortions, like suggesting star trek was a more popular or significant show than mtm, but obviously bigger ones as well. doesn't mean the whole project is worthless but def means that wiki-literacy includes having to take these grains of salt with one's browsing.

ah, gotcha

sentence by sentence takedown of an entry on slavery in the united states, how the milktoast compromise language was effectively adding up to an apologia for slavery.

I have not done the necessary research, but I would be surprised if any printed encyclopedia in English ever included an article on the US history of slavery that amounted to a scathing rebuke aimed at everyone who participated in or apologized for that cruel and morally criminal institution.

history textbooks have some issues, especially in conservative states

http://www.keranews.org/post/american-slavery-isnt-taught-well-schools-texas-or-across-us-report-says

and that's why some people leave ILX for good

I have not done the necessary research, but I would be surprised if any printed encyclopedia in English ever included an article on the US history of slavery that amounted to a scathing rebuke aimed at everyone who participated in or apologized for that cruel and morally criminal institution.

― A is for (Aimless)

as far as i can tell i wasn't trying to hold it up to that standard, nor did i go into my analysis with any preconceived conclusion. i was probably just bored that day and felt like seeing what i would find out by doing a critical analysis of wikipedia's article on the history of slavery. i don't really know how it would hold up to the average textbook (which i think is a better point of comparison than an encyclopedia). it's not as good as the treatment of slavery in my go-to american history textbook, tindall and shi's "america", but that's setting the bar fairly high.

wikipedia is a great resource, so far uncorrupted afaict, and one of very few internet "enlightenment" projects (what else is left... the waybackmachine?) that didn't fail

think I use it daily

I'm sure it could be better in many ways but when comparing to the rest of the post apocalyptic internet it really seems an oasis

The Encyclopédie of the 18th Century (which m/l kicked off the encyclopedia in its popular-use modern form) was an almost unapologetically biased work. Same as it ever was. Wikipedia is an awesome way to stumble upon and get a general summary of concepts like (to use a couple recent personal examples) urheimat or the Aarne-Thompson folklore categorization system, which I can then explore further via sources that haven't been extensively edited by DarthBaderGinsburg.

And that, indeed, is why I left ILX for good.

“uncorrupted” is in the eye of the beholder i guess

Enlightenment not all its cracked up to be

Where's the Dark Wikipedia?

https://www.conservapedia.com/ iirc

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page (nb, was more fun in the days when human beings still possessed the cognitive ability to discern blatant lies from facts)

There's also https://encyclopediadramatica.rs/Main_Page

And the arch-Enlightened version: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

Finally! Guess I'll stay on ILX after all

i figure i'll eventually get killfiled by everyone and then i'll take the hint and scoot

looking at/reading what other people complain about is one of the most depressing ways to spend one's time

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Sunday, November 25, 2018 3:55 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i find myself thinking this w/politics on social media and it *almost* doesn't matter what side you're complaining about. i have friends whose entire life is apparently based on complaining about politics or social justice. i think what's grating is not the fact that they're complaining, but their complaints show up in meme or link or cartoon form and there's zero discussion, it's just dropping something on their page and leaving it sitting there.

complaining just leads to arguments and it's never worth it, i mean made a mild complaint via instagram about the shitty ad campaign for the new Grinch movie and wound up in an awkward back and forth with a friend who worked on the film in post production and somehow i tried to saved myself by saying no actually i was interested in seeing it, so she invited me to check it out the next day, and i invented a birthday party i had to go to. so she's going to send me a screener.

wikipedia is pretty incredible imo, its community has its biases and significant problems but there are also awesome people (some i know personally) who are not straight white male nerds who are actively working to improve it. kind of amazing that it exists tbh

Ain't that how social media arguments always end: being sent a Grinch screener

looking at/reading what other people complain about is one of the most depressing ways to spend one's time