[HN Gopher] Fans are better than tech at organizing information ...
___________________________________________________________________
Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 104 points
Date : 2025-02-22 09:56 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.com)
| Kinrany wrote:
| Archive Of Our Own is not just any group of fans of course, the
| very name of the website refers to them deciding to write a
| better version of fanfiction.net. The award reflects the main
| goal of the website, not something that happened by accident.
| ziddoap wrote:
| > _users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is
| there to help, but they don 't have to use it.) Then behind the
| scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else
| has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags,
| a process known as tag wrangling._
|
| This is what booru sites have done for ages. Danbooru is the only
| booru mentioned in the article (and just as a passing mention
| despite being a few years older than Archive of our Own). I can
| only guess that AO3 is a bit more palatable than boorus for a
| general audience.
|
| But this style of tagging really is the best of both worlds. The
| only downside is, as mentioned, the requirement for manual labor.
| I implement a similar system myself, obviously at a way smaller
| scale, for my own pictures. Basically I tag things as I feel like
| it at the time, and then every few months I "wrangle" the tags,
| as they do here.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| Exactly that, it's labor intensive, while tech tries to reduce
| labor intensivity by using magic or rules or whatnot. Related
| and larger scale projects are sites like Wikipedia or TVTropes,
| although Wikipedia makes use of a lot of automation as well.
| jchw wrote:
| It's mildly amusing that AO3 is considered more palatable than
| booru websites. Both AO3 and many of the boorus have content
| that would be hard for most folks to stomach. I guess AO3 has
| the advantage of being mostly text, (which seems to be
| generally less visceral to people,) but it is also nearly
| completely uncensored, since that's kind of the point of it.
| ziddoap wrote:
| Yes, overall I wouldn't describe either of them as
| particularly palatable to a general audience, haha. Your
| hunch is the same as mine -- text has much less potential for
| _instant_ shock. On AO3 you have to, sort of, go out of your
| way (by reading, or searching for specific tags, etc.) to hit
| the unsavory stuff.
| yapyap wrote:
| Even if you did find the unsavoury stuff on Ao3 it might
| take a while to get to it in the story whereas in an image
| you could be blasted with the sin of more than a thousand
| words all at once
| canadiantim wrote:
| Can't you just use AI to wrangle now instead?
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| You can totally use machine learning to classify stuff,
| that's one of the main things we've been trying to do with
| it, after all! But that automatic stuff often is entirely
| without soul and without contextual understanding. Useful as
| a starting point, perhaps, but the human touch is still
| needed to organize information like a human wants.
| McGlockenshire wrote:
| A lifetime ago, on Stack Overflow, I was one of those people
| that monitored tags. I nuked needless new tags as often as I
| could, replacing them on each post with more correct existing
| tags. I ended up with a set of huge search bookmarks with
| regularly recurring bad tags to help keep things under control.
| Burninating bad tags became a delightful passtime. But
| eventually I burnt out on SO as a whole and dropped out. That
| was a decade ago now. I recently rediscovered one of the search
| bookmarks and lemme tell you things got really bad in my
| absence. The New Tag Deletionist Cabal is no more.
|
| Every volunteer counts.
| CM30 wrote:
| I mean it makes sense. The biggest problem with the internet
| today is that all the big tech companies want to automate as much
| as possible, and that necessarily means quality and organisation
| will take a massive hit. Google services, Facebook, Twitter,
| Instagram and other social media services, Amazon and other
| marketplaces, digital storefronts like Steam and the console
| download game shops... they're all terribly organised and flooded
| with garbage because no one's manually doing anything to fix it.
|
| Meanwhile, you've got fanwork sites like this one which have
| better quality and organisation standards than any large company
| site, simply because someone gives a toss about whether things
| are easy to find and of high quality.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| The huge number of communities that have elected to move to
| Discord, an information black hole, seems like a strong
| counterargument to the generality of this claim.
| newsclues wrote:
| OSINT communities use discord to communicate and discuss
| information from mostly twitter and telegram and organize and
| share the packaged information.
|
| Information organization is hard and lots of work. Not everyone
| (or every community) has the same need to organize information,
| and not everyone has the ability or inclination to do so.
|
| Information getting lost on discord is a problem, but that just
| means the useful stuff needs to be archived elsewhere, and
| frequently there is another distribution network involved.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Accurate Problem description, which can easily be countered
| with .. [extra effort expended in idealized behaviours] .. [I
| could paste Lore Ipsum here everybody stopped reading at the
| idealization]
| pjc50 wrote:
| This seems to be a generational issue. It makes me sad, but I
| suspect it's because doing things "in public" on the Internet
| has become increasingly exhausting and people have retreated to
| gated communities. It's not a black hole, it's a "dark forest":
| you can't find their information because they're scared of you.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| It's not super new though, people had private forums in the
| phpbb era as well, which you could only read after login. Or
| think about IRC, private torrent trackers etc.
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| I dunno if there were that many successful private forums;
| locking off access to unregistered users back then was a
| really good way of ensuring no new users finding the place
| back then. Very very possible I just wasn't aware of
| private forums enough though. Beyond that though,
| information was still neatly catalogued into small focused
| threads whereas Discord's biggest issue is that stuff just
| vanishes in a gigantic chain of messages.
|
| Was a bit late for IRC's heyday but am I right in thinking
| it wasn't guaranteed that all users would have access to
| the chat history? That would create an impetus to log the
| information elsewhere.
|
| Private trackers such as what.cd tended to attract people
| with strong archivist streaks which I think largely
| resolved the issue there. Oink could go down and you'd know
| that a huge chunk of its catalogue would appear on Waffles
| within a few months.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| It was not just totally private forums but many big
| forums had private sections and subforums where the real
| meaty discussions occurred.
| 0xCMP wrote:
| https://archive.today/Ho1dM
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| People who care deeply tend to do things better than people who
| don't care. Large organizations only organize information to the
| point of short term marginal profitability. If being better
| organized beyond a point doesn't get you more money in the next
| few months/years, it isn't worth it to most businesses.
|
| Likewise, being extremely organized personally is probably
| unnecessary, but to each their own.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > better than people who don't care
|
| IME it goes deeper than that: caring is ruthlessly stamped out
| by crushing bureaucratic processes. Results don't matter, what
| matters is never being responsible for a mistake. Fans can fix
| minor mistakes - in corporate America, even the smallest
| misjudgment is fatal. The only way to win is to never actually
| do anything, but keep up the appearance of being busy.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I think it is more simple.
|
| They really do not care much about it. Lets say you sell a
| product. You have had 3 revisions of that product. Support on
| that item is very minimal. The current version is what you
| sell and that is it. The previous versions are just
| historical interesting things. Properly archiving it and
| cataloging it takes time and money. Does talking about your
| older items sell you more items? Maybe maybe not. It is just
| a thing you sell. Not any sort of historical artifact to be
| preserved. It is just how you make a living scraping the
| margin.
|
| But to a collector or 'fan'. All 3 hold importance to your
| collection. All of the details/metadata are mapped out so you
| know why v1 is worse/better/interesting from v2/v3.
|
| What is worse in many of the 'fan' cases is you find it is
| usually 1-2 people mapping that stuff out. They map out what
| _they_ find interesting. Many also get heaps of verbal and
| legal abuse from both the companies and other people on the
| net. So they bail out and whatever 'fan' site came out of
| it, rots. Like one project I found a few months ago. Tons of
| stuff mapped out but some errors here and there, no big deal.
| I have a set of patches ready to go to fix it. But the orig
| author has ghosted. They got tired of tons of abuse from
| other 'fans'. Frankly what I see in the previous requests I
| want nothing to do with it. So I keep my stuff private.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > They really do not care much about it
|
| Or rather, the people who do care aren't the ones making
| the decisions.
| datavirtue wrote:
| I released a complete and comprehensive software package
| for free around fifteen years ago. I was threatened,
| accosted and cussed out on the phone numerous times for my
| generosity. I have since taught myself to be greedy on
| purpose, obscuring and ignoring my true nature.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Process was invented as a means to get useful output from
| people who don't care. Of which there's an unlimited supply.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail'
| phenomenon all over again. Big tech simply isn't willing to
| engage with the detail, and increasingly expects the world to
| conform to its expectations. That said, this refusal is not new;
| my parents worked for a bank that was trying to adopt some IBM
| technologies in the 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't
| accommodate the bank's requirements.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > That said, this refusal is not new; my parents worked for a
| bank that was trying to adopt some IBM technologies in the
| 1980s, and they said that IBM couldn't accommodate the bank's
| requirements.
|
| That misunderstanding is something that causes a lot of grief
| in SAP introductions.
|
| When working with large enterprise software, customization is
| your enemy - and every time you have to customize something
| there, you should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your
| business processes instead. Often enough IBM, SAP or whatever
| have considerably more experience than you.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| And that customization kills you over time. Heck, a big
| reason a lot of banks and other big enterprises eventually
| move over to one of the big vendors is because they've built
| up a hodgepodge of now unmaintainable crap that nobody can
| touch.
|
| This is also why Salesforce was so successful and why it
| killed on-prem enterprise deployments in a lot of places. No
| longer a ton of different essentially unique versions to
| manage that make it nearly impossible to upgrade. Salesforce
| obviously supports customization but in a much more
| controlled fashion than was common at the time, and it's why
| it won out over Seibel Systems in the early 00s.
| robocat wrote:
| Customisation has other major costs.
|
| 1: It locks you into a vendor. The vendor strongly
| encourages customisation for this reason (and for other
| reasons that are mostly against a business' interests)
|
| 2: onboarding staff is expensive because they need to learn
| your unique systems. If you're using a package/service off
| the shelf you can often advertise for people with knowledge
| of the package/service e.g. AWS versus inhouse e.g. known
| payroll system versus custom.
|
| 3: internal costs to upgrade. With stock standard systems
| your upgrades are cheap because the costs are amortised
| across many companies e.g. mobile app development in
| 2010's. With custom systems you pay for everything. The
| costs are often invisible e.g. horrific Mobile support
| (watching friends fight desktop websites on mobile is
| painful). Another cost is that internal development teams
| are often shit and certainly can never compete with
| Darwinian best-available-on-market software.
|
| 4: shitty custom internal systems. Sometimes the
| customisation provides business benefits but we have all
| worked with crappy internal systems where the benefits
| versus costs were slim.
|
| Two examples of bad customisation requests:
|
| A) HR systems in small companies. For some reason HR
| managers demand fractally complex systems and they all want
| different things so developing common features is really
| hard.
|
| B) larger customers with demanding internal
| rules/regulations e.g. a client asking us to conform our UI
| to their UI standard. No way it was worth it for us or for
| them. Plus dealing with their UI despots would have been
| hell. I think their internal software teams decided to
| build inhouse instead (I bet the outcome was shit).
| 6DM wrote:
| Ironically at my company, our custom software made us too
| flexible. There was too many crazy left field demands that
| weren't really that useful.
|
| So when it came time to think about next steps. There was
| real appeal in being able to say, "No it's not supported in
| xyz software we just adopted". This prevents us from looking
| like the bad guy who's just getting in the way and should be
| laid off because we didn't want to spend 2 months
| implementing a hair brained idea that would only give us a
| net return of like four or five thousand dollars.
| BJones12 wrote:
| The #1 purpose of ERP software is to take the blame.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| We got one of our largest and definitely most complex
| customers not long ago. Being rather small, we pushed hard
| against any customization that we didn't feel was necessary
| due to business demands, and asked them to follow the way
| we'd successfully used with our many other customers.
|
| After the went live and the dust had settled, they thanked us
| and said they were glad we had pushed back. It had forced
| them to rethink how they worked but the result was much
| better and more optimized processes.
| BJones12 wrote:
| > every time you have to customize something there, you
| should ask yourself if you shouldn't re-think your business
| processes instead
|
| I've heard this as "the best flavor is vanilla". It referred
| to a hospital aligning healthcare business processes with
| industry-standard software workflows.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| That "refusal" is by design.
|
| Using standardisation to improve productivity has been the
| backbone of the industrial revolution ever since we first
| standardised screw threads in the 19th century.
|
| It's undeniable that we've lost some cultural richness in the
| process, but if that means I don't have to work a field for 12
| hours a day just to get enough food to survive like my
| ancestors did, then I'll accept the tradeoff.
| tmpz22 wrote:
| This is poignant in the age of LLMs. What cultural richness
| are we going to lose as a result? What societal cohesion are
| we going to lose? What wealth inequality are we going to
| create?
| Secretmapper wrote:
| There's actually something interesting here in my opinion,
| which is that LLMs do not necessarily need to hinder
| standardization.
|
| For example, we have standardized schooling/exams, because
| that's the proven scalable way we can have for children -
| essentially a factory spitting out different grade
| levels/seniority.
|
| But LLMs can break this standardization by being able to
| tailor student needs in a scalable manner.
|
| However this takes a huge amount of action, and that's
| going to be the pain point in the near future as we humans
| tend towards the easy/greedy paths.
|
| Cultural richness - LLMs are also very bad in this regard
| due to the bias towards majority viewpoints. This reminds
| me of a recent HN thread [0] discussing how AI is hindering
| the adoption of new technologies. In some ways, this
| happens because AI tends to favor mainstream perspectives,
| making it biased against "new" or "fringe" viewpoints.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047792
| bloomingkales wrote:
| We will only lose our culture if powerful people exert
| dominance. That's how cultures were withered throughout
| history, a dominant violent culture comes and pushes its
| wicked pursuit. It takes decades or centuries to recover
| your culture after it happens. Shout out to Native
| Americans, keep trucking, you'll get it all back (truly
| sorry about all this).
|
| People talk about the glory of Rome, but it was utterly
| vile. They either enslaved or exterminated whoever they
| conquered. If they had an LLM, they _might_ keep you alive
| and brainwash you with it. _Maybe_.
|
| Per gpt:
|
| _" In the military of ancient Rome, decimation (from Latin
| decimatio 'removal of a tenth') was a form of military
| discipline in which every tenth man in a group was executed
| by members of his cohort."_
|
| This was done to thwart desertion.
|
| This is similar to:
|
| - PIP.
|
| - Email me what you did last week or your fired.
|
| - Blanket 10% layoffs in high profit environments
|
| - Blanket 10% cuts in general
|
| I'm less scared about AI than the culture of dominance
| utilizing it. We are not the only people that ever lived on
| planet fucking earth, everything has been done already in
| some other form of matter. The wicked animals you see now
| days in power have lived many times over in past histories,
| we've seen these exact people many times. We simply get
| hoodwinked when they seduce us with casual talk about
| space, science, and the world. Decent people begin to think
| they are _just like us_. Nope, they are not like us.
|
| Sometimes you just have to connect the dots and accept it.
| History precedes us and owns us.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > I don't have to work a field for 12 hours a day just to get
| enough food to survive like my ancestors did
|
| Not disagreeing with your overall point but this isn't
| correct. Medieval peasants worked about 150 days a year, and
| while they were obviously very busy during planting and
| harvesting times, they had lighter workloads at other points
| in the year.
| derektank wrote:
| These studies generally don't include the large amounts of
| domestic labor that had to be done in addition to farming.
| Lots of food preservation, home repairs, tending to fires,
| etc that we simply don't have to worry about today in
| nearly the same way. There was a lot less work in winter,
| but there was also substantially less food and with less
| energy for recreational activity, a lot of people's leisure
| time was occupied with sleeping.
| mid-kid wrote:
| God I actually wish I could just focus on sleeping during
| winter instead of drudging on in the constant dark.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| I think there was a article here which stated that 1 person
| had to work for 1 month to get 1 pound of sugar or
| something. Today it is equivalent to 1 hours of work,
| something like that. You are narrowing your focus too much.
| The abundance is really the key here.
| 42lux wrote:
| I bet eggs were cheaper...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Not even close. Eggs were 6p/dozen in the 14th century.
| https://medieval.ucdavis.edu/120D/Money.html
|
| Laborer wages were 2p/day in the 14th century.
| https://thehistoryofengland.co.uk/resource/medieval-
| prices-a...
| smegsicle wrote:
| yeah but that's like walmart greeter tier labor and super
| nice farm fresh eggs
| afthonos wrote:
| Medieval peasants were required to work 150 days a year on
| their lord's estate. That was how they paid for the land
| they had to farm the rest of the time to survive. They also
| had to spin, weave, and make clothes.
|
| Reference: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-
| industry/medieval-...
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I've read a lot on this subject, and unfortunately I
| think that all sources I've read are introducing a
| particular bias, which is usually either "capitalism
| makes people work more!" or "y'all are crazy, people
| worked way more before the Industrial Revolution". For
| example, here is a counter reference to your reference: h
| ttps://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hour
| s_....
|
| My own personal take is that, first off, I'm not at all
| trying to make peasant life as some sort of panacea - far
| from it. If anything, life before the Industrial
| Revolution was certainly much more precarious: obviously
| tons of childhood deaths (not to mention deaths from
| things like smallpox and the plague), and all it took was
| a bad harvest to cause major famine. War was much more
| commonplace. But the lack of a lot of tools that the
| Industrial Revolution provided meant that, in many ways,
| there was simply less possible time to do productive
| work. When the lights went out, it's hard to do a lot by
| candlelight/torches. The work really did ebb and flow
| with the seasons. Yes, there was ton to do during the
| offseason, but I think the analogy with the modern world
| is that is like the time after a tough deadline and big
| release - lots of "OK, let clean up some of this code now
| that we have time".
|
| Plus, a lot of the tasks that your reference mentioned
| would have been clearly divided by the sexes. There is a
| paragraph from your link that states:
|
| > We might also point to the amount of household labour
| that had to be performed. Yarn had to be spun, cloth to
| be weaved. Cooking was over open fires: and that firewood
| had to be collected. Bread baked and so on and on. There
| was a recent report (rather exagerrated but still) which
| claimed that in the 1930s it took 65 hours of human
| labour a week to run a household. Today it takes 3.
| Things were worse back in medieval days.
|
| And nearly all of that work would have been done by women
| while men worked the fields. There was certainly much
| more total work to be done to run a household, but the
| division of labor was more clear cut.
|
| So again, I think the reality is probably somewhere in
| the middle. Life was certainly "harder" back then, but
| from everything I've read there was undeniably more
| "downtime", even if there wasn't a ton to do during that
| downtime. The "having to work 12 hours a day just to keep
| food on the table" that I was responding to clearly seems
| to be false from just about every source I've read.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| This is an urban legend.
| datavirtue wrote:
| And they were just farming. It had straight forward
| payoffs, rewards and risks (stress profile). Flash forward
| to where I have to constantly reassess my risk exposure in
| a corporate setting on repeat, daily. It almost makes
| communal farming based on biblical dogma and superstition
| appealing.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Society would be healthier if we retuned to seasonal labor
| (even in intellectual fields) and had agreed-upon travel
| seasons. Why must we all chain ourselves to the same
| geography year-round?
| jayd16 wrote:
| Sometimes bespoke subtlety is bad or superfluous and
| sometimes its innovative. Ideally, you streamline a golden
| path as best you can but its also important to leave room for
| new good ideas.
| drivers99 wrote:
| > This is just that 'reality has a surprising amount of detail'
| phenomenon all over again
|
| Ever since that was posted[0] a week ago (reposted, but it was
| the first time I saw it), I've been filtering almost everything
| I see or do through that lens. It's really eye opening.
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43087779
| waveBidder wrote:
| if no one has ever pointed you at Seeing like a State, it's
| about the political and economic implications of this fact.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State
|
| There's also Bit's About Money describing this effect in
| banks https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-
| bank/
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| And this has been true since states wrought the cadastral map,
| last names, the metric system and taxes on us.
|
| The main issue today is that the techologies shaping reality
| are in the control of private, non-democratic institutions,
| selling this power to the highest bidder (including hostile
| foreign powers).
| bobson381 wrote:
| I had a fleeting hope for a while that the sheer complexity
| of reality would thwart these forces, a la
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DystopiaIsHard --
| but I'm increasingly worried that the explosion in
| performance of machine learning plus the fact that much of
| the world's population has willingly handed over their data
| in service of convenience will just make it a cakewalk. What
| is the modern digital equivalent to the War Machine (e.g.
| Deleuze) that can fight this? is it possible? Am I
| overreacting?
| monknomo wrote:
| I saw someone saying that it is as though tech read Seeing Like
| a State and took the wrong lesson
|
| I think tech does have the drive to make things legible, and is
| falling into the same trap as described in the book where
| efficiencies or processes that cannot be described in the
| format desired at the top leads to them being discarded. And
| the legibility issues mean that the impact of discarding these
| types of things is not properly understood
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It's the complexity of reality sure - but that's not the only
| lesson.
|
| Another lesson is that users can be taught to use appropriate
| protocols if those protocols are specified and the users
| believe in the mission/purpose of the
| site/organization/association.
| esafak wrote:
| Sure, it works for your anime fan site, but what about when money
| is involved, like in a search engine? That attracts bad actors,
| who can use their power to abuse your site.
| AntiEgo wrote:
| I noticed the article didn't speculate on _why,_ but I think
| you nailed it. This system is probably incompatible with a
| commercial site. It requires too many volunteers.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Solvable with a combination of robustness and stochasticity. If
| you say need two randomly selected people to approve an edit,
| and you flag users who make too many attempts at making
| rejected edits (either one user, lots of bad edits or lots of
| users trying to make the same bad edit), the only way for a bad
| actor to reliably make undesirable edits would be to gain
| control of a very large number of potential approvers. More
| generally, if the cost to effectively manipulate the system is
| greater than the perceived reward from manipulating the system,
| bad actors aren't an issue.
| empath75 wrote:
| All of this is no longer true. A modern AI will still get tripped
| up on details sometimes, especially with recent fandoms, but it's
| not going to make mistakes about common fan fiction terms any
| more.
|
| > Another of the Tag Wrangling Chairs, Qem, also thinks that
| machine tag wrangling is unlikely, pointing to machine
| translation as a cautionary tale. "There are terms in fandom
| which, while commonly understood in context among fans, would not
| be when you take it out of the fandom context," Qem says. For
| example, seemingly innocuous words like "slash" and "lemon" do
| not refer to a punctuation mark or a citrus fruit in fannish
| contexts, and tag wranglers are already well aware that machine
| translation can only manage the literal, not the subcultural
| meanings
| ziddoap wrote:
| The problem isn't just knowing the fan fiction terms, it's
| being able to alias the hundred different variations of those
| fan fiction terms correctly.
|
| AI sucks at this. It will alias incorrectly, it will alias when
| it shouldn't, it will create a new tag when it should be
| aliased, etc.
|
| There are several cases where the human reviewer needs the
| context of the story (or image, in case of boorus) to make the
| correct call on whether to create a new tag, alias a tag,
| recognize a misspelling of an existing tag, etc. AI is not a
| good fit (yet, at least).
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > At a time when we're trying to figure out how to make the
| internet livable for humans, without exploiting other humans in
| the process, AO3 (AO3, to its friends) offers something the rest
| of tech could learn from.
|
| > AO3 (AO3, to its friends)
|
| What was that supposed to be? Is that a typo?
| pjc50 wrote:
| Somebody probably wrote it expanded (Archive of Our Own), but
| it got automatically shortened again by search and replace.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The upsetting part isn't that fans are better at organising
| information, it's that companies and governments are so
| incredibly bad at it.
|
| Limiting this to "tech" isn't really fair, because most other
| organisations isn't doing much better. Right now the entire world
| is trying to avoid collecting, creating and organising
| information by feeding it through AIs, which pretty much depend
| on organisation having done exactly that in advance.
|
| There's a huge potential of business and organisations that will
| do the dirty work and focus on information creation, collection
| and organisation internally. Just think of customer service, when
| was the last time an FAQ or self service guide provided any
| value? It happens so rarely because business don't care to keep
| things updated or even spend money on good writing. Nope, better
| to invest in an AI chat bot than updating your website.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Businesses count on middle men to do all that, so that they can
| focus on the things they know how to do.
| mrweasel wrote:
| To me that sounds backwards. Who knows your business better
| than you and your staff? How would anyone from the outside be
| able to manage your internal information better?
|
| I mean based on experience I don't think your wrong. I've run
| into so many businesses who feel like they need to hire
| consultants and bring in outside help and products to get
| back on track because they honestly don't know how their own
| business work and don't have the skills to fix it. So on the
| surface they are "doing what they do best", but they're
| missing the middle part so they not actually doing their
| best.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Customer service is a different set of skills. Anybody and
| everybody can learn customer service if they want to, and
| get rid off the middle men with some effort and some
| investments. But most companies simply don't want to invest
| in it and leave it to middle men instead.
|
| Also, most business owners do not have a clue of what
| they're doing. They inherited the business, or caught a
| ride on low interests etc. That's why there's still fierce
| competition and newcomers eating their lunch.
|
| I agree with you that it is completely backwards!
| ks2048 wrote:
| Reminds me of Google's old motto, "Organizing the World's
| information" (is it still?). Even at their best, Google was never
| really "organizing" as much as "making it searchable". e.g.
| YouTube - for a given band, why can't I browse a list of their
| past concerts (with dates and locations) and see all videos from
| each?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Funnily enough, that was the domain of Yahoo! with its
| directories.
| esafak wrote:
| And people realized it was easier to just search, just as
| they are now realizing it is easier to just ask, and have an
| LLM synthesize all the search results.
| Daniel_Van_Zant wrote:
| Is there any effort to organize scientific literature like this?
| I know journals often generate tags for papers but those can
| often be quite poor and restricted to the field The journal is
| in. I would happily join a volunteer effort to create tags and do
| some tag-wrangling for scientific literature in my research area.
| kuharich wrote:
| Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20156791
| fungiblecog wrote:
| No surprise here. People who care will always do a better job
| than people who are getting paid but don't care.
| rfwhyte wrote:
| Of course anyone other than "Tech" (Corporations) is better at
| literally anything than "Tech." "Tech" doesn't care about
| providing utility to it's users, only extracting as much profit
| from them as possible, which is almost universally in opposition
| to the interests of users.
|
| People who build things because they care about them and want to
| maximize the utility they provide actually design systems that
| allow users to effectively and efficiently access information or
| complete tasks, "Tech" on the other hand designs systems full of
| anti-user dark patterns solely intended to force users to view as
| many ads as possible or buy whatever service "Tech" is selling.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's because fans actually care about the data! Corporations do
| not care about data. Corporations will never put in anything
| beyond minimum effort to get it right. Usually they won't go
| beyond a good guess.
|
| what.cd was another example of this.
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/remembering-whatcd-the-inter...
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