[sharkjacobs]

> The fact is that we can’t rely on any single website to hold the whole world’s knowledge, because it can be corrupted sooner or later. The only solution is a distributed architecture, with many smaller websites connecting with each other and sharing information.

This article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.

[theamk]

There is a non-zero amount of people who are unhappy with wikipedia's policy. The "rot in wikipedia" link gives some examples: "fields as diverse as Complementary and Alternative Medicine and progressive politics"

I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.

[arp242]

That article is upset alternative "medicine" quackery isn't taken serious. In particular it seems upset that it calls Gary "you can cure AIDS with a diet" Null's fraudulent bullshit exact that. It calls Stephen Barrett from quackwatch "a discredited former psychiatrist", which is a blatant brazen lie.

That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism.

I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.

[BizarroLand]

That article (http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/exposing-wikipedia/49-wi...) is a perfect example of radicalizing material.

It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!"

And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?"

Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail.

Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG!

(trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) )

Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators!

And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that.

How can you tolerate this injustice!?!

___________________________________________________________________________

And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible.

But then you look at the rest of the website:

http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?)

And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity.

And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl.

You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn.

Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.

[shuntress]

> no ssl certificate because?

This is way beside the point but there is nothing inherently wrong with unsecured plain http traffic if you aren't accepting user information over that connection (such as a name/password, auth token or whatever).

[BizarroLand]

True, but based on the remainder of the page, my guess is that they found some correlation between SSL and the Mark of the Beast or the New World Order or some other craziness.

[panopticon]

SSL also protects against certain classes of third party snooping and injection. It's nice knowing that every piece of networking gear between me and the server doesn't know what I'm reading. Hell, I've seen ISPs inject ads into non-secure pages.

There are also networking policies that prevent non-https connections, so you could be accidentally blocking out users on a strictly managed device.

[tootie]

To me, Wikipedia is the canonical answer for how centralization and content moderation should be done. They have solved the hard problems as well as anyone. Federated solutions basically sidestep the real problems by rendering them completely unsolvable.

[shuntress]

I would also add that the proposed solution here to the supposed "rot in Wikipedia" amounts essentially to "What if websites? and ... links?".

[ljm]

Taxonomy is also quite a complex problem and Wikipedia has put a hell of a lot of work into that, and disambiguation.

The proposed alternative here is to basically distribute the taxonomy? Anybody who's touched microservices for even a minute will know how hilariously difficult it is to co-ordinate not just the services itself but the teams around them, including both the tech and people level ICP.

[rglullis]

"Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Find me one example of institution that managed to go for any significant amount of time (say, longer than a decade) without facing corruption. I double-dare you.

[dghlsakjg]

Decentralized organizations (institutions?) are not at all immune to corruption and malevolent inside actors.

One look at the world of decentralized crypto-currency more than proves that corruption is not limited to institutions.

Corruption seems inherent to humans, the difference is that institutions are well aware of this, and frequently set up controls and systems to balance power and fight the most obvious forms of corruption.

[rglullis]

No one (reasonable) ever said that decentralization makes us immune to corruption. The argument is that decentralization reduces concentration of power and the potential damage that inevitably will occur when anyone in a position of power fails or tries to abuse the power they have.

[dghlsakjg]

Again, look at crypto-currency, there have been more than ample examples that prove that a single person can aggregate power and wield it in self-interested ways.

[rglullis]

It's the opposite: despite all the scams that have occurred in cryptocurrency, the overall system still continues to work.

Rug-pulls are inevitable, what matters is whether people are left with power to move on or if they are trapped into the corrupt system. How many people managed to leave the banking system after the crash of 2008?

See also: Reddit. Despite all the protests, the absolute majority of people went back to it and accepted the conditions.

[dghlsakjg]

Despite all of the corruption/scams present in deeply centralized institutions, the overall system continues to work. What is your point?

>Rug-pulls are inevitable.

That sounds like a pretty undesirable system where illegal, immoral behavior is "inevitable", hardly a replacement for the existing institutions. Especially since crypto intentionally operates (or attempts to operate) outside the jurisdiction of anti corruption and law enforcement powers. I for one would much rather be the victim of a traditional institution since there are balancing institutions that exist to hold them accountable. The fact that the only organizations that have demonstrated the capability of reigning in crypto scammers are incredibly centralized is deeply ironic to me.

Plenty of people are unbanked, about 5% of adults in the US, and plenty of people left Reddit.

[hirako2000]

In any case the point made was that centralized systems always corrupt. Challenge it and dare finding one example that didn't get corrupted.

Also it is unjust to name crypto/Blockchain as an example of decentralized system that gets corrupted. All corruption story in fact are centralized , but labelled as crypto, or touch the field of crypto but nonetheless are very centralized. E.g mtgox, bitconnect, Celsius, FTX.

If not centralized, flawed in design. Unintentionally E.g Ethereum before the split that led to ETC. Euler more recently. Many others. And Many are intentionally flawed, e.g terra/Luna.

[dghlsakjg]

You’re asking for things that you plan to “no true Scotsman”. If I name an institution you will claim it doesn’t count because it isn’t big enough, or that it actually is corrupt by your measure.

You have already done this with crypto. I.e. The corruption that occurs in crypto doesn’t count because those weren’t true crypto projects.

So in the spirit of the challenge. Tell me how the Adventure Cycling Association is corrupt?

[throw4847285]

I don't think concentration of power is the root of corruption. Corruption is usually distributed across an entire system, and even if there is a boss at the top, they're reliant on a lot of other people to stay in power (see Tammany Hall). What corruption needs is mechanisms which can be exploited to ensure that a system designed for the public good can be used to enrich individuals.

[kmeisthax]

Even nominally decentralized systems tend to create unaccountable power structures. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

[patrickmcnamara]

What's the argument here? If it is possible for something to be corrupt it shouldn't exist and should be replaced?

[rglullis]

Not replaced, but we should develop alternatives to the centralized systems that concentrate too much power to have a backup in case they fail.

[edgyquant]

I mean, it is a given…

[fsckboy]

sort of like you didn't even try to explain or make any argument why it might not be true?

Humans are selfish, fallible, lazy, unreliable, etc. what is every Shakespeare play about? what is the bible about? What is Greek mythology about? What are Aesop's fables about?