[HN Gopher] The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web
___________________________________________________________________
The sum of all knowledge and the sorry state of the web
Author : jseliger
Score : 211 points
Date : 2022-09-23 05:51 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (christianheilmann.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (christianheilmann.com)
| trinsic2 wrote:
| I appreciate your personal account about where society is heading
| related to the Internet.
|
| I avoid for-profit social networking websites because for the
| free flow of information because I realize that these sites only
| represent a small portion of what the web is about. I know the
| Internet is really best when I read from people that self-
| publish. I also publish articles on interpersonal work and the
| state of technology myself. As a "principal product manager in
| Microsoft working on tooling to enable people to do more on the
| web." I wonder what you think about Microsoft and Apple creating
| walled gardens in there respective OS's? I recently switched to
| Linux and
| [wrote](https://www.scottrlarson.com/publications/publication-
| transi...) about why I think the biggest threat to the free
| flowing information of the net has to do with how we allow our
| technology that connects to the net to become restricted.
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| IMO the worst side effect of current web of knowledge is what I'd
| call the illusion of knowledge. When it was more difficult to
| access and publish information, that imposed a much higher bar on
| what was being consumed. These days, people watch a 10-minute
| YouTube video or read a reddit comment or twitter thread and
| believe (perhaps unconsciously) that makes them knowledgeable in
| said topic. They will then, in an absolutely confident tone,
| display their expertise by answering questions and stating their
| opinion as if it was a fact. More people read this, and the cycle
| begins.
|
| You see it all the time on HN and other forums. If you're an
| actual expert in a specific (usually scientific) subfield and you
| read comments about an article in that field, you find that a
| large percentage are not just factually wrong, but also written
| in an extremely confident tone by people who have probably
| studied the topic for about 10 minutes.
|
| By having easy access to all this information people have stopped
| being humble about what they don't know.
| wslh wrote:
| At the same time you see people (mainly young people) learning
| at a faster pace watching videos.
| izacus wrote:
| I see mainly young people also struggle with reading
| comprehension skills so they might be learning faster (in
| their own pace) mostly because they can't read effectively.
| danrocks wrote:
| [Citation Needed]
| Loughla wrote:
| Not to be snarky, but I 100% need some kind of source for
| that claim. My experience in higher ed is the literal
| opposite of that.
| sandruso wrote:
| Its good to remind myself this . Not once I thought I know
| something after watching a summary video. When I tried to
| explain the topic to somebody else I struggled. If you can't
| explain you know nothing. Simple as that.
| vsareto wrote:
| >If you can't explain you know nothing. Simple as that.
|
| This is still a pretty good bar, but if I just repeat what
| the video said, it seems like I'm explaining it, and then I
| can give the impression I do know something. I shouldn't get
| credibility for just repeating a video.
|
| The US has devolved into somewhat of a reputation-driven
| expertise market, and there are plenty of ways to gain
| reputation without the expertise. There's still plenty of
| real experts, but I don't blame them if they want to focus on
| their work instead of fighting the endless tide of easily
| produced misinformation.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > If you can't explain you know nothing.
|
| Strongly agree. And I'll raise you: if you can't explain in
| simple, plain language that a 12-year-old could understand,
| then you are not enlightened.
|
| I concede that some subjects are intrinsically complex; e.g.
| the cosmological history of the Universe. But a large part of
| the reason that topic is complex is because it's not settled;
| we haven't got to the bottom of it, so there are loads of
| unanswered questions. How can you explain cosmological
| inflation in language a 12-year-old could understand? Well, I
| can't explain it to myself, so I sure as hell can't explain
| it to a 12-year-old.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| What is the most bizarre thing to me about the online zeitgeist
| is how so many people will allow comments of anonymous or
| pseudonymous strangers on places like Reddit or Twitter to
| shape their world view. Including journalists. An extreme or
| inaccurate view may start on social media and be normalised
| through repetition on social media and subsequent validation by
| main stream journalist.
|
| In the case of Reddit in particular what is it that gets people
| to trust anonymous strangers? It is bizarre and seems like a
| mind virus. If an anonymous stranger tells you what you want to
| hear then you are apt to ingest it uncritically.
|
| For example on social media there is a notion that nuclear
| brinksmanship with Russia over Crimea is acceptable.
| gatonegro wrote:
| > _what is it that gets people to trust anonymous strangers?
| It is bizarre and seems like a mind virus. If an anonymous
| stranger tells you what you want to hear then you are apt to
| ingest it uncritically._
|
| I guess it has something to do with lack of trust in
| Established Sources of Information--TV, newspapers, experts
| and other various figures of authority. The biases of the
| Established Sources has become more apparent over the years,
| to the point where scepticism, doubt, and even defensive
| cynicism are fairly common default attitudes when dealing
| with the information they provide.
|
| The trust in anonymous strangers is, at least in part, the
| result of them _not_ being Established Sources. It 's not a
| lying politician, or a deceitful news anchor or journalist,
| it's just another well-meaning regular person like you. That
| alone makes you more receptive to their message. If their
| message happens to align with your existing beliefs, even
| better. Of course, it can get into cultish/conspiracy
| territory if any of those beliefs are directly opposed to the
| mainstream narrative.
| null_object wrote:
| > What is the most bizarre thing to me about the online
| zeitgeist is how so many people will allow comments of
| anonymous or pseudonymous strangers on places like Reddit or
| Twitter to shape their world view. Including journalists.
|
| I totally second this, and have a recent concrete example
| where at the beginning of this year Sweden's (probably) most
| serious newspaper (what I'd consider a 'journal of record'
| whose articles should be a point of historical reference),
| published a long-form retrospective article comparing
| Sweden's handling of Covid with the way other countries had
| handled the epidemic, and included several internet 'myths'
| that had bandied-around on social media, citing them as
| facts, and even including one 'interview' with what purported
| to be an eyewitness of one event, which turned-out to be
| taken from a Facebook post.
|
| I wrote and complained to the responsible editor with
| citations showing how and where the article was wrong, and a
| few very grudging emendations were made (effectively saying
| that even though the reports were still probably true, they
| couldn't be 'verified').
|
| Totally horrified me that, in wanting something to fit their
| facts, journalists simply accepted fiction they read on
| Facebook and regurgitated it in their articles.
|
| I used to hold them in greater regard than that.
| gnz11 wrote:
| Swap out HN for Reddit and your comment still stands. This
| place isn't really all that different.
| base698 wrote:
| Lack of solid real world social networks. Religion used to be
| a solid defense but people are now less religious.
| muspimerol wrote:
| I wonder if this is just an inevitable outcome of the majority
| of society being online. The beginnings of the internet are
| rooted in academia and hobbyists. Early adopters were experts
| in their respective fields with analytical minds. Now that
| _everyone_ is online, perhaps the average user just better
| reflects the average member of society. In other words, maybe
| it 's not the content of the internet, it's the users.
| concinds wrote:
| I used to agree, but I'm not sure I do anymore.
|
| Yes, social media gives anyone a microphone; non-experts can
| speak on advanced topics with zero knowledge. But Gell-Mann
| Amnesia predates social media. The "reputable sources" of
| yesteryear were anything but.
|
| Experts ignored the media and got their info from other
| experts. That hasn't changed. The masses were clueless or wrong
| about most things, that hasn't changed. People were gullible
| and believed anything they read, that hasn't changed.
|
| To me, the real negative change from the Information Era isn't
| a decline in knowledge, it's the shift towards centralized
| socialization online.
|
| People were robbed of their ability to form independent social
| groups and subcultures, or to differ significantly from the
| mainstream. There will never be anything like the hippies,
| punks, or emos ever again. Music used to be the major "gateway"
| towards political and social countercultures. Now? Music is
| ultra-commercialized. Online movements are much more easily
| molded by commercial interests and _TPTB_. "Counterculture
| political views" get promoted on Fortune 500 brands' Twitter
| accounts. Remember the BLM protests in 2020? Police killings
| increase slightly in 2021 compared to 2020, and are on track to
| remain stable this year; about the only lasting "legacy" of
| those protests was that a few grifters bought multi-million
| dollar houses with donation money. There is no counterculture
| that doesn't get coopted.
|
| Counterintuitively, something else reinforces the status quo:
| social media algorithms' bias towards empty controversy. Could
| Gandhi's peace message succeed today? Martin Luther King? Would
| they even be audible?
|
| Project yourself 10-20 years into the future, with ubiquitous
| availability of GPT-3-style AI; will any of what you read
| online even be from real people? The "open web" movement is
| missing the wider problem. All the effects I describe are
| fundamental and unavoidable consequences of the web _connecting
| the world together_ ; regardless of whether it's "open", or
| kept in corporate walled gardens.
|
| Centralization leads to winner-take-all effects. When every
| road leads to Rome, it marginally increases prosperity in the
| periphery, while it overwhelmingly drives traffic and economic
| activity _away_ from the periphery, towards Rome.[0] The same
| happens when you "connect all humans" together. Remember the
| story from a few days ago, about 90%+ of online content being
| created by 1-2% of people? Any counterculture needs to be
| insulated from mainstream influences in order to truly thrive;
| but social media dynamics (karma, "viralness") inherently
| directs content towards the lowest common denominator, i.e. the
| status quo. The web itself, for all the good it does, is the
| problem. What's the solution? Don't know.
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1184807240198426625
| (for a screenshot of the quoted tweet:
| https://twitter.com/AidanHeronUK/status/1184856198648139777)
| Tenoke wrote:
| People also used to be confidently wrong all the time before
| the internet was ubiquitous, except then it was hard to quickly
| verify they were.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| This is true.
|
| Long before the web, when I was a child, my father would
| chide me for my bold claims unsupported by facts with the
| phrase "Confident; but wrong."
| mudrockbestgirl wrote:
| True, but a difference is that they could not spread their
| confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally, and that
| opinions were tied to their identity.
|
| Take my mom for example. She's 80 years old and doesn't use
| the internet that much. She is confidently wrong about a lot
| of things she sees on TV or hears on the radio. A recent
| example is COVID misinformation.
|
| The difference is that my mom can't easily influence millions
| of others because she doesn't have the reach, but also
| because people are unlikely to take the word of an 80-year
| old person without any medical credentials or training
| seriously. It's much easier to look "legitimate" when you are
| hiding behind an online persona. If my mom wrote a blog or
| posted on HN/reddit, she could certainly come off as a
| doctor, or even lie about being one, and many would believe
| her. Doing this locally, in person, is much harder and
| riskier.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > True, but a difference is that they could not spread
| their confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally,
| and that opinions were tied to their identity.
|
| The content producer - audience ratio was just different, a
| dumb line from a journalist would definitely have an
| outsized reach that go well beyond what the writer might
| have expected.
|
| As you note, even today people with a global reach aren't
| that many: I could be shouting a lot of thing on top of my
| soap box, I'd probably not be actually reaching more than a
| few dozen people, and we have enough content for the effect
| of a single person to be vastly diluted.
| lmm wrote:
| Many true things about COVID were labelled "misinformation"
| at one point or another.
|
| The publishing gatekeepers of a few decades ago projected
| an image of confidence, but I'm not sure they were actually
| any more accurate than random youtube videos. The media
| establishment of today certainly doesn't seem to be.
| tomrod wrote:
| That's a mislabeling. True facts were batched together
| with false conclusions, and should have rather been
| classified as disinformation since it was performed by
| people who knew better in many cases.
| j-bos wrote:
| Pre internet, people could not spread confidently wrong
| opions globally, but connected and well connected people
| could. Take a look at the wave after wave of popular, and
| misleading non fiction books printed last century, or the
| "scientific" food pyramid, or the testimony of nurse
| Nariya. On and on it goes, as it has, only now, anyone can
| play.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| > True, but a difference is that they could not spread
| their confidently wrong opinions globally, only locally,
| and that opinions were tied to their identity.
|
| > If my mom wrote a blog or posted on HN/reddit, she could
| certainly come off as a doctor, or even lie about being
| one, and many would believe her.
|
| I don't think your mom (likeable as she no doubt is) could
| get an audience of millions just by posting her opinion on
| HN/Reddit/Social media.
|
| I think the situation is pretty much back to what it was:
| most of the population have a limited reach of influence.
| Some people have a much greater reach.
|
| The difference is that the people with greater reach used
| to be trained journalists who held to a code of conduct and
| were given that reach by institutions. Now there is no such
| code of conduct, and the assignment of audience reach is
| more random, and totally uncontrolled by any institution.
| QuasarOne wrote:
| Given you are such an expert on viral disease, doesn't it
| make more sense for you to author a book, movie, ... to
| explain to your mum what she's wrong?
|
| PS: I hope you're not one of these Wikipedia editors
| censoring physicists on Wikipedia because you "know"
| better?, or perhaps censoring virologists on Wikipedia
| because likewise.
|
| PS 2: Some doctors were wrong about COVID. Some governments
| were very wrong. COVID lockdowns hurt the world economy
| worse the GFC.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Id say it's gone the other way too. Expert opinion echo
| chambers are rampant on the internet preventing paradigm shifts
| in science.
| QuasarOne wrote:
| Isn't "expert opinion" a fallacy?
|
| If the expert is right it's hardly an "opinion"; it's more a
| fact. But we still talk in terms of "expert opinion" because
| there are other experts with, sometimes, diametrically
| opposite views. Do we get to hear all these experts? Not a
| chance.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| The problem is our egos get in the way of real facts.
| Experts are humans and they are just as vulnerable to being
| wrong as the rest of us. Its great that there are people
| who dedicate there lives to a discipline, but sometimes
| experts use there positions of being right to distort
| larger truths, especially in areas where we don't have all
| the facts, but think we do, and when careers are on the
| line, experts can ban together to protect themselves. Id
| rather find my own way to the truth, then to rely on an
| expert that may or may not have an interest in protecting
| themselves from career breaking situations.
|
| Expert positions can create a false sense of security that
| we know all there is to know about a subject, and that is
| just as damaging to society as not knowing the truth.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I agree. There's a healthy factor form entry cost. There's also
| an healthy inertia into asking more than short term investment
| from your mind.
|
| Map is not territory and I say this after believing it far too
| long.
|
| It's a big fallacy behind the information highway roots of
| internet.
|
| And that's half of it.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| Remember how Commander Data would scan through a few million
| files during a 10-second montage, or how Keanu jacked in
| briefly, woke up and exclaimed "I know Kung Fu!"
|
| Yeah, that's exactly how it works today.
| trasz wrote:
| >When it was more difficult to access and publish information,
| that imposed a much higher bar on what was being consumed.
|
| And yet fringe theories, from quack medicine to religions,
| weren't any less widespread than now. They were just fewer of
| them.
|
| EDIT: Now I think about it, they were more prevalent than now.
| Look at homophobia - it got global, affected everyone, even
| non-Christian cultures like China, for centuries.
| tgv wrote:
| > religion ... homophobia
|
| Do you really consider that knowledge?
|
| > homophobia - it got global, affected everyone, even non-
| Christian cultures like China
|
| Do you think that aversion of homosexuality starts and ends
| with Christianity?
| trasz wrote:
| Homophobia generally spread throughout the world with
| Christianity, carried by colonialism. Again, China is a
| good example. And fixing homophobia in western societies
| strongly corresponds to decreasing importance of religion.
|
| It's not limited to homophobia of course - pretty much
| every single Catholic claim about human sexuality is
| antiscientific bull - but I think homophobia is a good
| enough example of a harmful, false belief that got more
| popular than anything post-internet.
| tgv wrote:
| For one thing, you may be underselling the homophobia in
| Islam a bit. And there's Tacitus, who says that the
| Germans punished homosexuals. That's a bit before the
| Christians, and it comes from someone from a culture not
| opposed to the practice.
|
| Second, I find it hard to believe that the Chinese were
| turned homophobic, and remained so, by a few Christians
| despite millenia of tolerance, when the vast majority of
| the country isn't even Christian. It smells like bad
| historicism.
| rightbyte wrote:
| I guess his take on germanic tribes might have been
| accurate. The first recorded "law" in the Nordics is
| monetarily punnishment for accusing someone of being
| homosexual. (Quoted from distant memory, don't take my
| word for it).
| goodpoint wrote:
| > They will then, in an absolutely confident tone, display
| their expertise by answering questions and stating their
| opinion as if it was a fact.
|
| The irony of talking about this on HN, the home of Dunning-
| Kruger effect.
| sorisos wrote:
| I also believe it is a trend not to go over the head of
| consumers. Can be seen in older documentaries and political
| discussion. Perhaps this is just a result of everyone already
| feeling like a expert and should not be insulted by complex
| language etc.
| vt85 wrote:
| abitnegative wrote:
| molasses wrote:
| I wonder if we could make a more semantic web by enforcing some
| meta data standards and having more piecemeal content.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| I love old books like this !
|
| I managed to salvage this one when my grand parents went away
| https://imgur.com/a/AFmTQv7
|
| I don't think it's worth much but it's old and smells nice and
| feels good to handle.
| mikewarot wrote:
| If we all had the Memex that Vannevar Bush proposed[1,1*], many
| of the losses we all discuss in these threads may have been
| avoided. We now have massive local storage, and _should_ be able
| to freely share data by hosting our own stuff on our own
| machines. We could have done what the editor of the magazine
| implored us to do:
|
| "As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and
| Development, Dr. Vannevar Bush has coordinated the activities of
| some six thousand leading American scientists in the application
| of science to warfare. In this significant article he holds up an
| incentive for scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges
| that men of science should then turn to the massive task of
| making more accessible our bewildering store of knowledge. For
| years inventions have extended man's physical powers rather than
| the powers of his mind. Trip hammers that multiply the fists,
| microscopes that sharpen the eye, and engines of destruction and
| detection are new results, but not the end results, of modern
| science. Now, says Dr. Bush, instruments are at hand which, if
| properly developed, will give man access to and command over the
| inherited knowledge of the ages. The perfection of these pacific
| instruments _should be the first objective of our scientists as
| they emerge from their war work_. Like Emerson 's famous address
| of 1837 on "The American Scholar," this paper by Dr. Bush calls
| for a new relationship between thinking man and the sum of our
| knowledge. -- THE EDITOR"
|
| We don't have that, and it makes me sad. We should fix this
| inadequacy, but there are now so many interests in the entrenched
| model that I think they would squash something that freely allows
| copying like a bug.
|
| [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-
| we-m...
|
| [1*]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220301051333/https://www.theat...
|
| [edits - quoted editor's introduction, revised/extended]
| arcbyte wrote:
| Is it ironic that I can read the article you posted because
| it's behind a paywall?
| mikewarot wrote:
| I was lazy... thanks for prodding me to do better.
| eimrine wrote:
| I use to ask people about the thing exposed in your photo (why
| the seasons change, what the moon phases means) to make a quick
| test about random interlocutor's intelligence to see is it worth
| to keep discussion. Your father passed this test in absentia.
| istinetz wrote:
| nowadays, you can just ask about astrology. It's both obviously
| wrong and socially acceptable to believe in. It filters a solid
| 30% of the population, at least in my country.
| dazc wrote:
| Typical Virgo
| eimrine wrote:
| Too obvious if an interlocutor is an engineer. Too severe if
| an interlocutor is a woman.
| Lammy wrote:
| I dunno, I'm willing to believe the timing of birth can
| influence a child's development since e.g. the ecological
| seasons will influence the amount and types of socialization
| / experiences available to them at a given point in their
| development. The stars or planets probably have nothing to do
| with it, though, besides being a way to articulate "this kid
| said their first word during winter" or whatever.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season#Non-calendar-
| based_reck...
|
| Plus I think it's nice to avoid falling into "I don't hate
| women; I just hate everything women like" lol
| https://dailyfreepress.com/2021/11/04/dont-be-a-hypocrite-
| yo...
| swilliamsio wrote:
| The timing of birth does at least slightly influence a
| child's development through the relative age effect - the
| oldest kids in each academic year get a few benefits over
| their peers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_age_effect
| istinetz wrote:
| >I dunno, I'm willing to believe the timing of birth can
| influence a child's development
|
| That's a post-hoc justification for an obviously ridiculous
| belief.
|
| 1) Astrology makes much stronger claims. "Today, you will
| be lucky in love, but avoid conflicts at work". You're
| committing a motte-and-bailey.
|
| 2) If that's the justification, say "winter babies" and
| "summer babies", not virgo and capricorn.
|
| 3) If that's the justification, there should be much
| stronger effects, such as "born in an ex-communist state,
| so different nutrition", "born in colder climate, so less
| sun" that absolutely dwarf that effect. Yet you don't see
| idiots making intricate psychological profiles based on
| what latitude you were born in.
|
| >I don't hate women; I just hate everything women like
|
| It's a retarded belief regardless of who holds it.
|
| >There are many reasons that the gender gap in modern
| astrology belief exists, but some sociologists say that it
| is, like most things, a result of the patriarchy.
|
| Well, this is something else people say that makes me
| immediately lose respect for them.
| emptyfile wrote:
| I'm so infuriated by your link I'm at a loss for words.
|
| EDIT: This is an UNIVERSITY newspaper? I thought it would
| be some kind of british tabloid or something... depressing
| Peritract wrote:
| The article makes an important point.
|
| Astrology isn't meaningful or rational. However, the
| level of contempt shown for people who are believers in
| astrology is wildly out of proportion. There are lots of
| equally dumb things that don't get the same level of
| vitriol.
|
| It's valid to dismiss astrology, but that doesn't mean
| that all dismissal of astrology is based on high-minded
| scientific ideals. A lot of it is based on sexism.
| mistermann wrote:
| It seems to me that epistemically indeterminate ideas
| (astrology, religion, health (viruses), politics, etc) do
| something strange to the human mind. It's hard to miss
| what they do to the minds of believers, but it's very
| easy to overlook what they do to the minds of non-
| believers. I wonder if this has something to do with the
| increase in polarization among the public, where some
| people cling ever harder to religion, while other people
| increasingly cling to science. The mind seems to seek
| "certainty" (correct or otherwise) first and foremost,
| but epistemic soundness shows up much further down the
| list, if at all.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Good observation. I wonder if we go through certain
| cycles of polarization and if there are external causes
| for these events. I believe there is something to
| astrology, at least the part about the planets
| gravitational forces having an effect on human
| physiology. I'm not sure what that something is, but I
| don't reject it out-of-hand simple because there isn't
| enough scientific understanding around it.
| mistermann wrote:
| An interesting way to think about it: even if there was
| some effect from the planets (you know, like on full
| moons people swear that people genuinely act differently,
| and I don't have a good reason to _conclude_ otherwise),
| the likelihood that we would _necessarily_ be able to
| detect it seems slim - and yet, _this type of
| possibility_ seems to not even be on the radar of The Big
| Brained representatives from the dominant thought
| directing institution going: The Science.
|
| When one's Best and Brightest are actually quite dim, I
| do not think it is a recipe for substantial success. They
| are _excellent_ at deciphering the complexities of
| physical reality, but for the most part they seem
| oblivious to other dimensions.... _while constantly
| complaining about them_!!!
|
| If it wasn't so tragic, it would be hilarious.
| Astrology_Dumb wrote:
| istinetz wrote:
| Really? What equally dumb things are believed by 40% of
| women and 20% of men (as per the article) and are a
| constant topic of conversation?
|
| I'm really struggling to think of any.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Historically, I bet you could find trends based on which
| seasons certain developmental landmarks were hit. I'm sure
| it isn't a coincidence that Leos are attributed all the
| heroic traits, when they are mostly gestating in the
| Summer, and get their first couple months of life in the
| Fall harvest season.
|
| Nowadays I guess it would line up to school seasons. If you
| are born in August your parents can arrange for you to be
| among the oldest kids in the class. First couple grades,
| that extra year of development helps out, and then you get
| the reputation as the smart kid, it snowballs...
|
| Baseball player? Bet he's a Leo.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| > when they are mostly gestating in the Summer
|
| Leos gestate throughout the year, depending on where they
| are located. Perhaps that remark was US-centric?
| bee_rider wrote:
| Wouldn't it be northern-hemisphere-centric? Which makes
| sense -- I mean, there isn't like a uniform standard for
| astological signs. Even within the northern hemisphere
| there are different labels. The trend I'd look for is an
| association between strength and being born near the
| beginning of the local harvest season, or so. But this
| stuff is all ad-hoc folk observations and the
| practitioners are motivated to add extra history, to give
| it the appearance of "ancient wisdom." So I'm not
| motivated enough to gather the data to back it up, haha.
|
| Edit: It also would be the case, I guess, that summers
| being generally pleasant-ish would be regional, right?
| Like some hotter regions can have pretty lean summers I
| think.
| hcks wrote:
| Your explanation is 100 times worse than basic astrology to
| me. It's astrology wrapped in scientism.
|
| We can't even be sure about what part of character comes
| from all of the environment versus what part comes from
| genetics without very careful experimental settings.
|
| Obviously any systematic change due to ecological seasons
| would have a minuscule effect, drowned in the noise of a
| million other parameters.
|
| It's not even like astrology can make any predictions about
| anything, there is nothing to be explained.
| vidaj wrote:
| Seems like something that could be "easy" to validate.
| Compare children's development in the US with those in
| Australia and see if there's a 6 month difference.
|
| Note I put easy in quotes, because this should be provable,
| but I don't think it's trivial to do so due to all the
| different factors that contribute to a child's development.
|
| Edit: And by "6 month difference", I mean that if seasons
| have anything to do with child development, you would see
| the same kind of development in children born in March in
| the US and children born in September in Australia.
| [deleted]
| tiagod wrote:
| Knowledge does not imply intelligence. Nor is the opposite
| true.
| eimrine wrote:
| Since Astronomy is considered one of seven Liberal Arts,
| knowing the very bases of orbital mechanics is not about
| knowing for example difference between interfaces and
| abstract classes. Understanding this astronomical subject
| speaks to a general curiosity that in my opinion correlates
| with intelligence.
|
| An interesting observation, this is not the first time I've
| talked about this little test on HN, but this time it was not
| upvoted for.
| zaknil wrote:
| If that feels too intrusive, just ask people if they _use
| snopes.com to check if the shocking thing they just read is
| real._
| eimrine wrote:
| Cursive means irony? I visited the website but I have not
| seen any good use for me in this website.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| "I read it on Snopes. It must be true." People believing in
| one site that holds the facts for everything in life is a
| recipe for disaster.
| masa331 wrote:
| I don't get how the author can value all the things in the
| article and yet work at Microsoft on a bloatware like Edge which
| is not possible to remove, is pushed hard by Windows against
| other browsers and used as a part of a giant ads engine in itself
| legrande wrote:
| I don't see the unique selling point of Edge. It's just a re-
| skin of Chromium with Microsoft tracking added. It's largely a
| data grab by M$.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| When it comes to the web, I found this Robert Heinlein quote the
| other day that applies to much of what's online:
|
| "Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the
| unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the
| troubles and sins of five billion strangers."
| ram4jesus wrote:
| What I would give to live in the universe where Ted Nelson's
| Xanadu was the default way to interact with the Internet. I bet
| that world has more rainbows and sunshine :)
| llaolleh wrote:
| Part of why the web is shit is low barrier to entry. More often
| than not, if you read classics or older books, it's information
| dense. Every prose and sentence constructed had some economy
| baked in.
|
| Now everyone and their mom, as well as bots and marketers,can
| spam right on over.
|
| We either need a search portal with aligned incentives, or
| perhaps a new internet with none of this crap.
| MMS21 wrote:
| Check out Gopher/ Gemini protocol
| cm2187 wrote:
| On the other hand the digital assets that people make a personal
| copy of never age, so chances are higher that we will find some
| old writing that we thought was lost when the server shut down.
|
| Of course that's in a world where we still have personal
| computers, not apple style locked down devices.
| QuasarOne wrote:
| I'm all for openness. Open standards for example. But 'open
| information' never worked; and never will. Powerful interests
| want to control information. They did it in Communist states.
| They do it in Capitalist states. They even do it on 'Anarchist'
| Wikipedia. That doesn't mean to say I favour closed off
| information. I just think people need to understand that - in
| opening up information and discourse - we are up against powerful
| interests = other people. Many of them are fithy rich and they
| desire to tell us what to think, read and say - because they
| "care" about us and "know what's best" for us.
| _gabe_ wrote:
| > and I now work on the browser that comes out of the box with
| any Windows machine (working on a Mac most of the time).
|
| Is this why Microsoft products are getting progressively worse
| every year? How can you work on a product and then never use it
| natively and expect other people to enjoy using it? Or worse,
| like with windows 11, it leads to the product morphing into
| something the users never wanted. Because developers want to
| conform it to what they're used to using. I don't know, it kind
| of baffles me the way most developers view the products they
| make.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago?
|
| Internet Archive which is a lot easier to search in than going
| manually through microfilm.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| One reason Archive.Today is far more frequently used and
| referenced on HN and elsewhere, including by myself, is that it
| provides actual useful site access in many, many cases where
| the Internet Archive does not.
|
| I'm a big fan of the Internet Archive and its mission. I'm
| concerned over Archive Today's severe lack of transparency
| (I've had a few exchanges with the site's operators, I've no
| idea who they are or what their motives are). I find the site
| _useful_ but _troubling_.
|
| I've also conducted microfilm (and -fiche) searches, as well as
| cataloguing of same. One affordance of a microform _archive_ is
| that it is _indexed_ , in ways that many online archives,
| including The Internet Archive ... aren't, usefully. The
| exchange is one of access-from-anywhere (yes, useful) against
| usable search and curation. It's ... an uncomfortable trade-
| off.
|
| (The history of usefully cataloguing and indexing archives is
| itself a very old one. The US Librarian of Congress's annual
| letters to Congress, available through the otherwise almost
| wholly useless Hathi Trust, though, come to think of it,
| _downloads_ of the entire letter rather than _one single page
| at a time_ require using a different service ... are one
| interesting view to that process and the creation of the
| Library of Congress Classification and Subject Headings.)
| izacus wrote:
| Except that people on this very sight are fighting very very
| hard to ban scraping from sites like Internet Archive and keep
| propping up IP laws that make such libraries illegal.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| Tells a touching story and how that motivated the author to work
| on browsers, standards and CMS. Wonderful. But the rest is awful.
| Whining about ads and paywalls without suggesting any better way
| for websites to make money. Telling people to check snopes.com
| after they read something. Well, I have a better idea: Just don't
| read anything other then snopes in the first place. If you accept
| snopes as the ultimate arbiter of human knowledge, there's no
| point in poisoning your brain with anything else.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _Except, it isn't any longer. The web we have these days is in
| a sorry state._
|
| The web is in a better state than it's ever been. Just between
| Wikipedia, Library Genesis and Sci-Hub alone, let alone things
| like Google Search, Google Scholar, or all the content put online
| from various museums/libraries/etc.
|
| > _On top of that drowning in memes, reposts and funny things you
| already read in newsgroups in 1998._
|
| None of that takes away from all the good parts.
|
| I honestly don't get any of these posts about how the web is so
| bad or so much worse than it used to be. The _absolute_ amount of
| quality content has grown, seemingly exponentially. Even if the
| _relative_ amount of quality has decreased... who even cares?!
| You don 't have to visit the parts of the web you don't like.
|
| And if you're complaining about _reposts_...? I have zero
| sympathy for you. Lots of people are seeing things for the first
| time. And it 's nice to be reminded of things too.
| antonymy wrote:
| I definitely worry about the future of scholarship as our print
| media becomes more and more fragmented and hidden. It's not
| necessarily about ensuring essential knowledge is carried
| forward, but rather a "sense of the past". In researching
| history, the further back you go the more fragmented and
| unreliable your sources usually become. So it becomes harder and
| harder to figure out the broad sweep of these past cultures, what
| life was like, the things they believed, and so on. And I think
| we're doing that to our present historical moment by deleting the
| recent past and creating a continuous present.
|
| We have the Internet Archive, we have Wikipedia page histories,
| but everything else is ephemeral. If Archive.org ever goes the
| way of the Library of Alexandria, we'll have lost irreplaceable
| knowledge of the web itself, and the cultures that existed on it.
| It will live on only in living memory, but this is also
| transient, and soon nobody will live who remembers what this time
| period was like. Wikipedia will not reflect it, you'd have to dig
| through page histories to find fragments, like historians and
| archaeologists sifting through ancient manuscripts and ruins for
| clues.
|
| A potential dark age is forming, and avoiding it right now hinges
| entirely on the continued efforts of two donation-funded
| organizations, one of which makes it increasingly harder to view
| the past, the other facing legal disputes that could see it shut
| down. I think we need to make archiving the present important, so
| it does not become a mysterious, inscrutable past for our
| descendants.
| Beached wrote:
| while I have the same general concerns, both wikipedia and
| archive.org have offline backup and running options for free.
| and, they are surprisingly small. all one has to do is write a
| simple script to auto download these backups
| daily/weekly/whatever and you can access all that info of your
| solar powered raspberry pi.
|
| while I think there could be a short period where this info is
| largely unavailable, I don't believe it will be lost forever.
| if the Internet goes away, once some new Internet like
| technology comes around to replace it, these data repos will
| likely get out back up very quickly. just a matter of how long
| that blip is
| AshleysBrain wrote:
| Blogs are still an underrated goldmine of knowledge, especially
| in tech. I find academic papers often too abstract or opaque,
| textbooks are good but generalized, and documentation is
| reference-like. Stumbling across a tech blog where someone
| explains some fairly specific and difficult problem they had, and
| an interesting solution they found, can be exactly what you
| needed to solve a problem.
|
| The web has its problems for sure, but don't forget there are
| still gems out there which the web has made possible. I'd love to
| see a comeback of blogging culture, but I guess a lot of that has
| been sucked in to social networks now.
| saperyton wrote:
| A great resource to find new blogs is the Thinking About Things
| newsletter. Been getting it for a while and it's a great way to
| find new blogs to read.
| bombcar wrote:
| Blogs are wonderful and still there - they're just much harder
| to find because there is so much OTHER content now. The web
| used to be almost nothing but blogs.
|
| For example, this blog is pertinent to what I'm doing and I
| didn't find it for weeks: https://www.northernbuilt.pro/ and
| only found it by a link to a YouTube video from another one
| from another one.
| molasses wrote:
| I was reading some tech article the other day. Something like 10
| best Foos or something. And there was no date on it. A commenter
| said, great article but no date, and the author replied that the
| page was refreshed with evergreen content. You'd have had to be a
| mind reader to know that. But I guess at least I got my answer
| via a little Q and A on the page.
| carvking wrote:
| Interesting article until: "Use snopes.com to check if the
| shocking thing you just read is real."
|
| Mind baffling that this article could end with this.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, if you read something surprising, then you should
| probably check it somewhere, unless it's trivial. Snopes might
| be a reasonable first check.
| carvking wrote:
| Who fact checks the fact checkers ?
|
| Once you read something totally unreasonable in a fact check,
| why should you go there as a source of truth anymore?
|
| Wikipedia is probably a better bet - at least you have
| history of edits and sources.
| closedloop129 wrote:
| The social web is no problem. We can choose what we visit like
| the author's father chose to buy those books.
|
| What is missing is a beacon of light in the desert of choice.
| There is no lack of knowledge anymore but a lack of orientation.
| The author's father knew that he could buy knowledge in a
| bookstore. Where do we go to find orientation on the web?
|
| People don't know. That's why they are stuck in the social net
| with its memes.
| mellavora wrote:
| Your father's books are real treasures. Were it my library, they
| would have a place of honor.
|
| I want to put your post in the context of yesterday's HN front-
| page post lambasting the EU for trying to build a better search
| engine. The bulk of the comments suggested that a government
| effort could never be as good as a commercial effort.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32915263#32916945
|
| Your post is a strong counter-argument. All of the points you
| mention on the massive decline in quality of web content are due
| to the web being driven by commercial efforts.
|
| Likewise, comments on this current HN front-page post "Despite
| faster broadband every year, web pages don't load any faster"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32945858 also seem to
| explain the poor state of the web as being due to
| commercialization of everything (even the comments about the need
| for cookie banners-- the logic behind the cookie consent is to
| regulate the commercial collection of user data).
|
| Google started as a DARPA project, and was a great engine while
| it stayed true to that ethos. It was the need to commercialize
| it, thus setting perverse business incentives, which has
| destroyed it.
|
| Your post praises libraries. Which are seldom commercial
| ventures.
|
| The economics are simple. I don't know why this even continues to
| be a debate on HN.
|
| - A socially created entity (corporation, government,
| "charitable" organization, ...) needs money to function.
|
| - Money comes from capturing a portion of the value created by
| the organization.
|
| - The most efficient organizational structure depends on the
| relationship between value creation and value capture.
|
| Thus: if the product/service generates immediate and focused
| value, the value capture can be directly linked to the product
| and a business is optimal. Think: a hamburger.
|
| If the product/service generates long-term and diffuse value, the
| value capture also needs to be diffused, i.e. taxes. Thus a
| government. Think: the road network which allows the raw
| materials and the customers to get to the hamburger store.
|
| I leave the case for charitable orgs as an exercise for the
| reader :)
|
| disclaimer: strongly pro-business, have founded 2 personally,
| assisted several others.
| talideon wrote:
| Uh, DARPA had nothing to do with the founding of Google. Brin
| and Page had _NSF_ funding though Brin 's graduate fellowship
| and the Digital Library Initiative, and that was before the
| official founding of the company.
|
| Reference: https://beta.nsf.gov/news/origins-google
| mellavora wrote:
| You may (or may not) be right about DARPA, but you assert
| they were government funded.
|
| And my main point is that government (funding) is the
| economically optimal approach for services which produce
| diffuse value.
|
| See also the comment from marginella_nu in the post I linked
| to. Marginella is building a fantastic alternative search
| engine https://search.marginalia.nu/ Their view: "Arguably
| the biggest most unsolved problem in search is how to make a
| profit"
|
| i.e., capturing the value produced.
|
| kagi https://kagi.com/ attempts to do this with a paid tier.
| I hope it works for them, great product and really responsive
| team.
|
| Bing tries to capture value by collecting the Microsoft tax;
| not exactly government-level, but on those lines.
| Eleison23 wrote:
| >Google started as a DARPA project, and was a great engine
| while it stayed true to that ethos. It was the need to
| commercialize it, thus setting perverse business incentives,
| which has destroyed it.
|
| Google started as a what now? This is an interesting thing to
| say during a discussion of access to information. I'd be happy
| to read your explanation of Google's "DARPA roots", and your
| citations to sources explaining how that came about and how
| they were "destroyed" when they "strayed" from DARPA... that
| should be a fascinating read.
| mellavora wrote:
| It is indeed a fascinating read. Here you go!
|
| https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-
| ci...
|
| >A second grant--the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated
| with Google's origin--was part of a coordinated effort to
| build a massive digital library using the internet as its
| backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate
| students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking,
| as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries:
| future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
|
| >The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the
| heart of Google: people using search functions to find
| precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set.
| softcactus wrote:
| I always wondered how their initial python web scraper was
| fast enough to index the entire internet on that old
| hardware, even given the small size of the internet at the
| time. I guess the answer is that they had a local backup at
| Stanford. Thanks for sharing!
| mellavora wrote:
| You also asked 'how they were "destroyed"'
|
| I refer you to some interesting discussion here:
|
| Google Search is Dying
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30347719 1561 points
|
| Every Google result now looks like an ad
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22107823 972 commments
|
| Google no longer producing high quality search results in
| significant categories
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29772136 1275 comments
| nicbou wrote:
| It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there has
| never been a greater time to be curious.
|
| Encyclopaedia Britannica is still there, and it's _great_. But
| there 's also an army of content creators are there to teach you
| just about anything. If one source doesn't do it, you have more
| to choose from.
|
| Yesterday, I read an article about North Africa that mentioned in
| passing Qaddafi's underground river. A few minutes later I was
| watching a documentary about it, then a variety of videos about
| that man. My information binge extended to other African
| dictators, and will probably last a few days longer.
|
| If I'm curious about something, I can go really deep. I'm not
| constrained to a few paragraphs in whatever book my local library
| carries.
|
| You could argue that the web is in a sorry state, but if that's
| the cost of giving everyone, _everywhere_ access to all this
| knowledge, then it 's a deal worth making. This might be more
| obvious to someone who did not have access to a well-stocked
| library.
|
| The problem is not availability, but curation. The sum of all
| knowledge back then was a well-curated book. Now it's literally
| all of it, unfiltered.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Lets face it - early libraries probably sucked too. We will
| improve
| imiric wrote:
| > It has never been easier to share knowledge, and thus there
| has never been a greater time to be curious.
|
| It's also never been easier to share disinformation, and
| pollute the vast sea of actual knowledge that exists on the
| internet.
|
| Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed off
| gardens run by large corporations who only serve their
| shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by
| advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that
| finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a
| needle in a haystack.
|
| The one exception is Wikipedia, though it also struggles with
| keeping factual information, and has its own set of issues.
| naasking wrote:
| > Sources of information are silo'd into proprietary closed
| off gardens run by large corporations who only serve their
| shareholders. Searching for information has been corrupted by
| advertisers and the sheer amount of misleading content, that
| finding reliable sources often feels like searching for a
| needle in a haystack.
|
| I'm not particularly worried about disinformation or
| misinformation as long as good information is out there to
| improve the signal to noise ratio. But you've definitely hit
| a nail on the head here, good information has value so there
| are a lot of incentives to wall it off and charge for it.
| This is the real danger.
| smolder wrote:
| > good information has value so there are a lot of
| incentives to wall it off and charge for it.
|
| There's even an incentive there to pollute free sources of
| good information in order to devalue them relative to
| proprietary knowledgebases.
| morpheos137 wrote:
| Wikipedia can be show to be biased or unbalanced about
| political issues. Since wikipedia views newspapers as
| reliable sources their articles are often skewed by whatever
| is the conventions of the day.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I second the call that WP is web done right. Yes, of course
| there's bias; it's not possible to produce bias-free
| content, and WP's particularly bad in the fields of
| politics and history, and really any field where facts
| aren't settled and feelings are strong.
|
| Enter critical thinking. If you dig just a little (e.g.
| read the talk pages and the edit histories), you can soon
| learn that some topic has been taken over by POV-pushers
| and is unreliable. Anything to do with
| Israel/Palestine/West Bank is unreliable; the boss is a
| zionist, and so are a lot of the senior staff, so it's not
| surprising. But WP is a million times better than the web
| that search engines expose.
|
| Incidentally, I usually search using DDG. But DDG seems to
| hate Wikipedia; WP results usually don't show up on DDG
| until page 2. Google surfaces WP results on page 1, if not
| at the top of the resultset.
| this2shallPass wrote:
| > Anything to do with Israel/Palestine/West Bank is
| unreliable; the boss is a zionist, and so are a lot of
| the senior staff, so it's not surprising. But WP is a
| million times better than the web that search engines
| expose.
|
| Is there good evidence for this claim? Evidence is
| useful, especially for these claims of general bias.
|
| On the contrary, in general Wikipedia's content is likely
| biased _against_ Israel when considering its general
| overall political preferences / bias.
|
| > _5 Studies Find Wikipedia Bias_
|
| > Five studies, including two from Harvard researchers,
| have found a left-wing bias at Wikipedia:
|
| > * A Harvard study found Wikipedia articles are more
| left-wing than Encyclopedia Britannica.
|
| > * Another paper from the same Harvard researchers found
| left-wing editors are more active and partisan on the
| site.
|
| > * A 2018 analysis found top-cited news outlets on
| Wikipedia are mainly left-wing.
|
| > * Another analysis using AllSides Media Bias
| Ratings(tm) found that pages on American politicians cite
| mostly left-wing news outlets.
|
| > * American academics found conservative editors are 6
| times more likely to be sanctioned in Wikipedia policy
| enforcement.
|
| From: https://www.allsides.com/blog/wikipedia-biased
| inkywatcher wrote:
| I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-
| Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are
| quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does
| not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty
| of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse
| in their support of Israel.
|
| Neither should it surprise that a scholarly endeavor for
| bored young people on the internet tends to tilt
| leftward: there is a big education differential between
| political poles, and a strong demographic tilt based on
| age. To put it in a nutshell: if boomers spent their time
| writing citations instead of pounding out all-caps
| screeds about ivermectin in the comments sections of
| local newspapers, there would be a more robust wikipedia
| contingent.
| this2shallPass wrote:
| > I find it interesting that your way of proving anti-
| Zionist sentiment is to demonstrate that there are
| quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia. That does
| not demonstrate your thesis of anti-Israeli bias. Plenty
| of people who at least claim to be leftists are profuse
| in their support of Israel.
|
| It's not definitive _proof_ of anti-Israel bias - it is,
| however, _evidence_. As opposed to the unsubstantiated
| assertion I responded to.
|
| Evidence of what? A leftward slant in Wikipedia, if you
| believe the conclusion of these studies (or the summaries
| of them - I haven't read them all). And it's easy to see
| that such a slant would broadly coincide with somewhat
| less support - though far from _zero_ support - for
| Israel in 2022 and the past couple decades.
|
| I'm not sure how leftward the slant is. It could be
| slight. It could also not be relevant in specific areas
| (such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict). I didn't
| exhaustively research the topic (nor did I believe
| Wikipedia had any specific leftward slant before today.)
| If you find anything useful, please share your findings -
| happy to read!
|
| "Quantifiably more leftist editors on Wikipedia" isn't a
| good summary of the headlines of those 5 studies.
|
| To your other point, number of editors matter - and the
| Israel-antagonists presumably outnumber the Israel-
| supporters - but it's far from the only thing that
| matters. To name a few more things that make an editor
| more or less influential: the number of edits made, the
| prominence of their edits (for example if it is in the
| introduction vs elsewhere in an article), the degree to
| which the edits are neutral vs slanted, and the relative
| power they have as editors.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Add in the rising tide of ML generated content that is able
| to get itself well placed in search results, diluting
| information with real value. It's really irritating to start
| reading something that starts out seeming legit and then you
| get in a few sentences or paragraphs before it becomes
| incoherent nonsense.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I'm not sure you and the author are talking about the same
| thing. He mentions the fact you can't even read the news from
| 10 years ago, the content has simply disappeared. No amount of
| YouTube videos can replace that.
|
| The problem is not "everything, everywhere" or a lack of
| filters but the extreme commercialization of all content
| available, closed networks, the short life of URLs...
| grumbel wrote:
| > No amount of YouTube videos can replace that.
|
| The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago are
| still alive and well. As Youtube makes a much better places
| for publishing and archiving content than the rest of the
| Web. With Youtube you don't have to worry about URLs changing
| or domain names expiring or anything like that. You just
| publish your video once, get a unique video-id and don't have
| to worry about anything else. Google's monopoly worked here
| in our favor for once and they have been reasonably good in
| not breaking old content (not perfectly, as video annotation
| got crippled pretty badly).
|
| I think that's where the rest of the Web fell short. The Web
| has no concept of "publishing". There is no ISBN when you
| write a blog, no library were you could look up that ISBN.
| It's all just a file on a server or an entry in a database,
| that will get mangled and lost in the coming years. Worse
| yet, the article itself isn't even accessible from the Web,
| it's mixed together with a user-interface, ads and other
| stuff or spread across multiple pages. All this makes it
| quite tricky to keep old content readable and archived for
| the future.
|
| This also leads to a weird situation that a lot of
| publications are still avoiding the Web after 20+ years. They
| publish as ePub or PDFs instead, which you can somewhat
| access from the Web, but really aren't well integrated into
| it. But it's by far the easiest way to ensure that a text
| document published today will remain readable a decade down
| the line.
| auggierose wrote:
| Well, I once had a comment exchange with Sean Young (of
| Bladerunner fame) on YouTube, but that is gone now. So much
| for its archival qualities.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > There is no ISBN when you write a blog, no library were
| you could look up that ISBN.
|
| An ISBN is a string of characters, much like a URI/URL, and
| offers no more "protection" for long term access and the
| latter. Books get mangled and lost too; their only benefit
| is that it is harder to mangle and lose them, and there is
| likely to be more than one of them.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| More or less all "proper" books are kept by national
| libraries. So if you got real need, there is a chance to
| hunt them down.
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| > _The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago
| are still alive and well._
|
| Tons of them aren't. I've run into many linked from
| wikipedia footnotes that no longer exist, particularly
| digitized film from the 20th century. A ton of wikipedia
| pages still cite old films, documentary footage, linking to
| videos which were uploaded by Jeff Quitney, who was banned
| from youtube a few years ago because some of the old films
| he uploaded contained material that ran counter to modern
| values (I think the one that eventually got him banned was
| an old christian film warning children about homosexual
| predators.) When they banned him, they took down a _ton_ of
| completely innocuous videos because a tiny minority were
| offensive.
|
| https://archive.org/download/Jeff_Quitney_me
| londons_explore wrote:
| Unlisted youtube videos from 10 years ago are all gone...
| Google made the decision to delete every video 'shared by
| URL' because of the possibility that the URL generation
| algorithm had leaked. It was legally less risky to delete
| all the content than to risk leaking all the content to the
| open web.
|
| IMO, they made the wrong call - it would have been better
| for the internet as a whole to notify all users that "We
| have a new 'share by link' option, and no longer consider
| the old links private. Please update all old links and then
| click this button to disable the old URL. If you don't
| click the button, videos shared by URL may be discovered by
| others in the future."
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Do you have a source for this?
| MichaelCollins wrote:
| I think he has it slightly wrong; unlisted videos were
| made private (not deleted AFAIK, but still rendered
| unavailable.)
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/9230970
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27610409
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks.
| dEnigma wrote:
| Unfortunately when I look through my old Favourites
| playlist, which at some point reached the limit of 5000
| videos, I can see how many of those videos are now private,
| deleted, or blocked in my country. The worst part is that
| in many cases I can't even recover the video title, so I
| have no idea what has been lost. A possible solution would
| be to store the titles separately, but I didn't think about
| this while I added stuff to my collection. I do agree
| though that the unique, unchanging URL is a huge boon, when
| I look at the situation in my browser's bookmarks for
| comparison.
| laurex wrote:
| I made our wedding playlist on YouTube, since I pay for
| premium, and about 30% is now gone after a couple years.
| It would be nice if YT at least gave some indication of
| things they do not plan to delete, i.e. it's an official
| source not an upload subject to the whims of DMCA.
| base698 wrote:
| Noticed this in a playlist of about 80 videos. It's now
| 55. I have no idea what it is that's missing.
| VHRanger wrote:
| > The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago
| are still alive and well.
|
| They're not, though.
|
| Because Youtube re-encodes videos every couple of years,
| with new "better" lossy compression algorithms. And each
| time the videos get successively worse.
|
| Watching a 2008 Youtube video will not only look grainy
| because it's 360p, but it'll look actively *worse* than it
| did in 2008 because of all the lossy compression that was
| applied to it over the decades.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I know the norm when I read an article more than a year
| or two old that has tons of YouTube embeds is for most or
| all of them to show a "video gone" error. Sometimes even
| ones that are _weeks_ old are like that.
|
| It seems to be at least as bad as the rest of the web as
| far as data/link rot goes.
| ReactiveJelly wrote:
| YouTube has definitely kept the original videos for as
| long as I can remember, so any transcodes you see are
| only one generation after the original (plus maybe one
| more for if they didn't launch with this feature)
|
| And yes the new codecs really are better. Same quality at
| lower bitrate.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| As a sibling comment noted, I'm pretty sure Youtube keeps
| the original video files, so generational loss should not
| be a huge problem.
|
| The problem is that Youtube is bitstarving 240p and 360p
| streams. That makes sense when a video is available at a
| higher resolution, and the 240p version is for people
| stuck on dial up or whatever. But in cases where 240p is
| the highest resolution available, Youtube should provide
| a high quality 240p stream!
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago
| are still alive and well._
|
| Roughly 1/3 of my YouTube bookmarks are dead and most of
| them are much more recent than 10 years. They purge videos
| at an alarming rate.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| There's plenty of videos on youtube that have been removed.
| Every few years when I look through my list of liked
| videos, a couple more are gone forever. Granted, this is
| likely by the creator themselves, but that doesn't matter
| when the purpose is archival.
| hobs wrote:
| On a playlist of about 27 thousand videos (me and my
| cohorts links to each other over ~8 years) I observe
| about 10% missing, its a lot!
|
| Most of these are not information but amusing, random,
| short videos, and of course some of it is account
| deletions/disabling - copyright strikes - and people
| taking down their own stuff, but still, a lot!
| 6510 wrote:
| here 2000+ subs 1900+ channels gone
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > The irony here is that Youtube videos from ten years ago
| are still alive and well.
|
| Do videos survive account deletion ?
|
| In particular, GDPR has provisions about deleting account
| info after years of inactivity, and Youtube is apparently
| not an exception (https://qr.ae/pv9o9j)
|
| So except the chunk of accounts that will stay active for
| the years to come, a big part of youtube videos should be
| disappearing progressively.
| trinsic2 wrote:
| The "All content available" statement is a bit much. I'd go
| so far as to say there are a good portion of sites that have
| commercialized information. But I can easily access other
| forms of information not commercialized by avoiding
| mainstream views.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| > you can't even read the news from 10 years ago, the content
| has simply disappeared
|
| Isn't most of it on the wayback machine?
| 6510 wrote:
| if you are researching something you need 100%, what I
| wrote 10 years ago with access to 80% has now turned into
| bullshit with < 20% available.
| pasc1878 wrote:
| Depends where you read. Also how do you read the news of 50
| or 100 years ago - isn't that more difficult.
|
| I use UK news sites. BBC Guardian and Telegraph all have
| their old articles online
| ricardobeat wrote:
| One of the functions of public libraries is to archive the
| news. One could browse weekly papers going back decades,
| either as hard copies or microfilm. There's a good chance
| major city libraries still do that, or have digital scans.
|
| For example: https://www.chipublib.org/resources-
| types/newspaper/
| bbarnett wrote:
| Even on Canada (only a few hundred years in the new
| world), we have microfiche going back hundreds of years
| in many libraries.
|
| Much has been digitized, I hope they kept the microfiche
| for longevity.
| pessimizer wrote:
| BBC used to be an extensive and complicated site with non-
| news articles, study guides and curated collections. All of
| that was destroyed with a revamp. You can still read the
| news articles, but that's all that's left.
| davedx wrote:
| I saw that too, and yet he didn't give any examples of "News
| that's disappeared". Feels very polemic to me
| zasdffaa wrote:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/store/archive/?page=400
|
| From August 30, 1856. Goes back even further but point mmade.
| Needs a payment to read but it's there.
| [deleted]
| mountainb wrote:
| Not really. There are vast archives of newspaper articles
| accessible through a web interface. You just need library
| access. The free, open web is mostly just a spam ocean, but
| if you make an effort to access the services that catalog
| useful information, it's still very useful. The Google web is
| shit, though.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Yes, old paper newspapers, which are very thin now, and
| vanishing.
|
| For web based newspapers, good luck trusting longevity
| there, just because the library has a free interface to an
| api...
| mountainb wrote:
| There are scans of old newspapers going back ages, and
| current ones also. Stop using the web, it sucks ass. Use
| ProQuest and other similar databases. Web searches are
| wastes of time for most things. Google wants to train you
| to believe research is not a skill and that you can get
| usually get good information from the open web. Neither
| of those points are true.
| fny wrote:
| You absolutely can read news from 10 even 20 even 100 years
| ago.
|
| One example: https://news.google.com/newspapers
|
| I think you forget or may not have grown up with the
| microfiche.
|
| The reality of the internet is that everyone has a voice and
| things will only be archived if someone gives a damn to
| archive them. And that's fine. Some information deserves to
| be transient. Hell, we've survived millennia without this
| level of information storage. Does every single YouTube
| video, Reddit post, and Flickr photo really need to live
| forever? No. Would it be nice? Sure.
| freediver wrote:
| This is very interesting. Do you know how are these
| licensed?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| lordnacho wrote:
| It's really the curation that needs to be taught to everyone. A
| big dose of critical thinking skills is what we all need,
| because in earlier times you could tell the crappy ideas by the
| way they were packaged: crazy guy at Hyde Park Corner, dude
| with a megaphone shouting out passages of the bible, crappy
| home-made flyers. You could work backwards from "nutter is
| probably wrong" to why he was wrong. Part of why this worked
| was because it cost something to publish stuff, and so
| publishers would have a think about what they wanted to spend
| their resources on.
|
| Nowadays everyone has figured out how to package the message,
| and it's super cheap to do so and get it out there.
| (Incidentally, actual packaging is the same now, crappy
| products used to come in crappy packages, but no more.)
|
| So now to pick apart an argument you have to be a bit more
| aware of the actual content, and it's a bit harder to get to
| the bottom of BS.
| hobs wrote:
| Plenty of people either fill the pews or worship on a carpet
| pointed towards a thing that fell from the sky, I wouldn't
| give us that much credit.
| hinkley wrote:
| Curation is the first step, but we also need more
| organizations who take on the job of keeping some bits of the
| internet from going dark. Especially for things that were
| originally done for the common good.
|
| There's a local group here that basically specializes in
| devops for little public projects that have run their course.
| They even do a little bit of work trying to provide templates
| for new projects (eg, for a local hackathon), but I'd like to
| see them go farther.
|
| Bigger, more national or international groups that come up
| with recipes for projects where they say, "If you build your
| project on this structure, then we will be more likely to run
| it for you," I think is a reasonable logical next step for
| the Internet. Given the task of running 10 projects that
| 'need' 4 servers each, it would be very good if I could do it
| all with 20 servers, not 44 (40 + orchestration machines).
|
| We don't have a "PBS for the internet" but then PBS didn't
| always exist either. You need a beach head of some sort to
| even propose such a thing to government.
| gsatic wrote:
| Curation won't solve the issues of the Knowledge Gap Hypothesis
| or the Information Defecit Model or the Digital Divide or Info
| Asymmetry.
|
| If we test people on where they went "deep" there is a good
| chance most will fail the test.
|
| We don't even know what we are trying to do with these
| networks.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It may never have been easier to share knowledge but it also
| hasn't ever been easier to share misinformation.
|
| It also hasn't gotten easier to _find_ information. Search
| results are worse now than 10 years ago because of Search
| Engine "Optimization". Google search needs uBlocklist[1] with
| a steadily growing list of manually curated domains just to
| poorly approximate usability.
|
| Additionally, sites load slower every day. Why does every
| partial refresh of a site require 2 seconds, even though I'm on
| a decent computer? On phones sites are practically unusable.
|
| The benefits you're touting for the web could be accomplished
| with Web 1.0 level of tech or even simpler protocols such as
| Gopher[2] or Gemini[3]. Everything else is an overall decrease
| in accessibility, usability, user experience, and the ease of
| finding or sharing knowledge.
|
| [1]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist/
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
| bombcar wrote:
| I find that you used to find "silos" of information when
| searching - if you were looking for information on toilets
| say, you might end up on a love site [687] dedicated to
| plumbing, which would have a whole cornucopia of information
| and knowledgeable people.
|
| Now you're less likely do find that kind of thing and more
| likely to find a video or a SEO optimized site - which can be
| much more difficult to parse for verifiability.
|
| [687] https://www.terrylove.com/crtoilet.htm
| fatneckbeardz wrote:
| i think to change this, you have to start with a basic,
| fundamental respect for the liberal arts, the humanities, and for
| human beings in general. and that means you have to pay people in
| money for the emotional and mental labor of organizing
| information. and stop trying to replace them with algorithms to
| maximize clicks and watchtime.
| BrainVirus wrote:
| _> Ever tried to look up some news from 12 years ago?_
|
| I have a better one for you. Ever wondered _why_ it 's so hard?
| Why web protocols have nothing related to archiving? Why web
| browsers are a hellscape for aggregating information over time in
| a meaningful way? Why this continues to be true, despite
| countless Microsoft and Google engineers writing all these
| heartfelt posts about knowledge?
|
| If your answer is "because it's hard to implement" than you
| understand nothing.
| doliveira wrote:
| From my admittedly limited understanding, the failure of the
| semantic web is one of mankind's biggest missed opportunities.
| Now the knowledge graph is just locked behind Google's neural
| network layers and only being used for ads.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| The idea behind semantic web was inspiring and great, however
| it required considerable work on the part of people creating
| stuff for the web and that was never going to happen. Maybe
| it could have happened in some things like academia based or
| knowledge based websites, but on the larger scale it was
| doomed.
| hobofan wrote:
| (Warning: Personal plug incoming)
|
| I fully agree, especially when it comes to the "semantic"
| part of the semantic web. Reusing and publishing ontologies
| that define those semantics always seemed like an
| afterthought of the semantic web, when it should be part of
| the foundation that things on the semantic web are built
| on.
|
| In most other parts that make up a website (JS and HTML) we
| figured out how to make reuse (mostly) work by replacing
| flimsy web references with package management. Ontologies
| never had something like that, and thus were stuck in an
| early 00s era of software/ontology development.
|
| Where I work, we are building Plow, a package manager for
| ontologies (https://github.com/field33/plow) as part of our
| tech stack to improve that situation and allow people to
| build applications with large-scale stable semantics at the
| core.
|
| As part of building Plow we are aiming to make the process
| of creating and sharing ontologies easier and with that
| also lowering the barrier of entry to that domain.
| gnramires wrote:
| Maybe something like a 'WikiInfo' (or another better name :)
| ), that contains a hierarchy of (potentially all) known pages
| and topics? I think the only way to tackle this problem is
| collaboratively and distributedly.
|
| You could add for example a 'Newspapers' topic, and then say
| 'The Springfield Times' and then have 'Articles by date',
| 'Articles by topic', etc. like a huge database (browsed
| hierarchically like "WHERE dates BETWEEN '20121211' and
| '20121213'", etc.). The primary datastructure could be a
| database, and users can add hierarchies as queries to the
| underlying database -- a collaborative index (in the literal
| sense, like a Homepage of the internet) is shown. Any unique
| 'object' (like a specific newspaper) gets an UUID and a row
| in the db. I don't know how modern dbs handle sparse data,
| but that'd definitely be a requirement (i.e. each object can
| have a handful of millions of possible properties, like
| publication date, location, author, colour, etc.).
| gnramires wrote:
| I've looked online and there's WikiData[1], which I didn't
| know and looks very nice. Although it seems to be more of a
| plain database, not concerned with Indexing. It also
| doesn't seem to contain objects such as all newspaper
| articles (without the text body of course), I wonder if
| that would be accepted data. Maybe we could build upon
| WikiData as a backend and present a hierarchical index.
|
| As a humble suggestion, I'd divide all information in: (1)
| News (all news articles), (2) Publications (books, blogs,
| magazines, etc.) (3) Ideas and things (countries, planets,
| people, theories). Any object can belong to multiple
| categories/classes. I think it's not important that
| categories be perfectly devised, only that they contain all
| objects, and objects can be found reasonably well within
| them. The main point of objects would of course be a link
| to an actual web page that contains what you're looking
| for.
|
| Please, someone do it! (I have way too many projects right
| now)
|
| [1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
| seydor wrote:
| > The web we have these days is in a sorry state
|
| The web is one of humanities greatest inventions, right up there
| with Gutenberg or even more. It's a shame that people focus on
| politics and miss the rest of the web. There are two webs, one is
| a medium of mass manipulation, just like all media before it, the
| other is the library of all human knowledge, ever, everywhere.
|
| The printing press precipitated major societal changes, but the
| internet has yet to. We still follow the rules set 400 years ago,
| voting some humans to rule us every 4 years, and have not
| questioned the system under the current situation , where
| everyone can create and access information everywhere, instantly.
| The internet will take us to new politics , we just have to
| invent it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| vmoore wrote:
| Just going to leave this gem of a video[0] here. Whilst I agree
| the web has been walled gardened into various silos like social
| media, and people think Facebook and Twitter are the Internet,
| it's still read/write. The blogosphere is still ticking along
| nicely and last time I checked it's thriving.
|
| Yes, people have gamified Google and search to get traffic and
| the blogosphere of old has largely been co-opted by profiteering
| gluttons, but there's still hope. Surf Hackernews enough and
| you'll find little gem posts that don't have an ulterior motive
| and are not 'monetizing' their content and sprinkling it with
| affiliate links and ADs. They just want to vent, exchange techne,
| and share knowledge.
|
| Then there's Wikipedia which has remained AD-free for as long as
| I can remember (apart from their donation banners which I don't
| mind). Wikipedia is the coolest thing ever and my IQ has probably
| gone up a few notches over the years because of it. It is the
| closest thing to getting home-schooled without going through
| formal education, and you can verify all the claims made in its
| entries by going to the footer section and reading various
| citations usually written by esteemed scholars.
|
| The web is in a sorry state due to the commercialization and
| walled garden silos, and also because of the proliferation of
| smartphones which are mere consumption devices IMHO and not
| designed for producing any meaningful or substantial content,
| apart from maybe uploading photos/videos to Instagram or writing
| tweets etc I can't write a blogpost on a phone because I have bad
| dexterity, and I typically have to have 100+ tabs open to verify
| claims, provide sources, do cross-referencing, find relevant
| images etc...all something done best on a workstation PC or
| laptop.
|
| Some context: I have professionally blogged for more than five
| years but due to reasons I won't go into here, I have stopped.
| I'm thinking of jumping back in, only this time armed with the
| wisdom of my previous blogging shenanigans. Failure is an
| opportunity to start again more intelligently!
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE
| trinsic2 wrote:
| Good point about smart photos being hooked into the web, and
| trying to use them to create some well thought out then is
| really difficult. And as far as the web goes it's really up to
| us how that plays out, so I think yea, there will always people
| that choose the quick way around the net using mobile, but I
| think that is a by product of living out of touch with the
| world anyway.
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