“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • Fucking thank you. Yes, experienced editor to add to this: that’s called the lead, and that’s exactly what it exists to do. Readers are not even close to starved for summaries:

    • Every single article has one of these. It is at the very beginning – at most around 600 words for very extensive, multifaceted subjects. 250 to 400 words is generally considered an excellent window to target for a well-fleshed-out article.
    • Even then, the first sentence itself is almost always a definition of the subject, making it a summary unto itself.
    • And even then, the first paragraph is also its own form of summary in a multi-paragraph lead.
    • And even then, the infobox to the right of 99% of articles gives easily digestible data about the subject in case you only care about raw, important facts (e.g. when a politician was in office, what a country’s flag is, what systems a game was released for, etc.)
    • And even then, if you just want a specific subtopic, there’s a table of contents, and we generally try as much as possible (without harming the “linear” reading experience) to make it so that you can intuitively jump straight from the lead to a main section (level 2 header).
    • Even then, if you don’t want to click on an article and just instead hover over its wikilink, we provide a summary of fewer than 40 characters so that readers get a broad idea without having to click (e.g. Shoeless Joe Jackson’s is “American baseball player (1887–1951)”).

    What’s outrageous here isn’t wanting summaries; it’s that summaries already exist in so many ways, written by the human writers who write the contents of the articles. Not only that, but as a free, editable encyclopedia, these summaries can be changed at any time if editors feel like they no longer do their job somehow.

    This not only bypasses the hard work real, human editors put in for free in favor of some generic slop that’s impossible to QA, but it also bypasses the spirit of Wikipedia that if you see something wrong, you should be able to fix it.





  • That’s because every company’s strategy aiming to monopolize is to:

    1. Make a product that’s genuinely better than what’s on the market for some role. Sometimes by undercutting competition at a loss, sometimes by making things very convenient, etc.
    2. Once you’re big enough, make sure as you keep growing that new competition can’t pop up to challenge you. Kick the ladder down behind you, and make sure to start greasing the palms of lawmakers so they can’t challenge you in step 3.
    3. Once you’re so big that you’ve monopolized the market and can’t be challenged no matter what you do (both because of ladder-kicking and because everyone uses you by default), do what you’ve been wanting to this whole time and go from “boiling frog”-pace enshittification to “welp, this sucks, but now I have nowhere else to go” enshittification.

    It’s why people who say “Oh, well I wouldn’t mind it if X had a monopoly because they’re way better than those other companies” are so painfully misguided.


  • I think all of the current rules’ benefits greatly outweigh the (not extremely restrictive) burden they put on the poster:

    • Rule 0 is there exclusively to protect posters.
    • Rule 1 just says that /c/leopardsatemyface should be “leopards ate my face”. This community would rapidly lose any meaning without it and become a generic “Trump bad [he is]” community; there are still posts that are like “Trump did something bad” or “large cats literally mauled a person” despite it being the first actual rule.
    • Rule 2 is more like Rule 1.5, saying that the onus is on you to show that you’ve met Rule 1. This one isn’t often enforced and exists so readers and I don’t have to meticulously research why this is relevant (or, for me, get appeals claiming some convoluted ad hoc chain of logic for why a post actually does fit Rule 1).
    • Rule 3 is rarely enforced – only for the worst sources. There are a million other garbage dumps for the Daily Mail or no-name, fly-by-night LLM news mills.
    • Rule 4 exists for equitability for visually disabled users, who can report posts so I can then ask the OP to add it to the one reported (instead of removing it) and any posts going forward.
    • Rule 5 exists so that multiple posts of the same article don’t clog up the front page (this has happened, and I removed them without realizing there was no rule against it). LAMF is predisposed to it because it’s popular for crossposts. The part about “no top 100” is there to prevent users from lazily recycling what they know works (there’s almost no chance in hell they aren’t doing this if they aren’t breaking the “within 1 year” part). This is the rule most likely to blindside users, but reposts are a cancer for a community.
    • Rule 6 exists solely to make it easier for people to post, because they know for sure that non-US and non-contemporary content is allowed.
    • Rule 7 exists so I don’t have to duplicate basic things like bigotry, misinformation, etc.

    (Didn’t downvote you btw)






  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtoFediverse@lemmy.worldMissing project?
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    10 days ago

    it shouldn't be that hard?

    OP, what’s your background to make you think that way, and if you’re qualified enough to make that assessment, why aren’t you getting to work building the ground floor of something potentially highly lucrative?

    The response to “It shouldn’t be that hard” for FOSS is invariably “PRs welcome”.



  • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldMakes sense to me
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    16 days ago

    Yeah, and to be clear, I actually really like trivia! The front page of Wikipedia has a section called “Did You Know?” (DYK) that has six or seven pieces of daily trivia. These are also researched and follow a similar format. The key differences are that: 1) the corresponding article is right there if you want to immediately verify what’s been said, and 2) this article lets you understand the full context of the trivia if you want.

    In this case, the most egregious part isn’t the trivia itself; it’s the kind of culture around trivia that it foments.