Internet Classic is Going to Miss Reddit
With the IPO of Reddit, a useful part of the core of the Internet is likely soon to be a poisonous place for people.
Reddit is about to try going public, and to monetize itself through “advertising, more e-commerce offerings and by licensing its data to other companies to train their artificial intelligence models.”
That is too bad, it will be one less useful part of the Internet very very soon. I call the useful internet Internet Classic. Internet Classic uses the resilient, fast network to inform and edify me. It does not sell me to others.
I just recently had a very satisfying experience on the Internet. Internet Classic.
Early social media
On Facebook, a friend posted that they very much enjoyed a particular ancient saga. It was a purely text post that was delivered to his friends by the platform, the process that made Facebook popular in the 2010s before Facebook sold ads.
I managed to not buy The Last Zipped Hoodie You Will Ever Own in the time it took me to read his post, though the thought of what attributes The Perfect and Enduring Hoodie would have unfortunately embedded itself in my head. This could have been from Reddit or a list-serv, or anywhere folks post personal thoughts.
My friend reported that this saga had all sorts of juicy cultural tidbits. I also love a good saga, so I set out to find it.
Sidenote You might think that I am pretty geeky to read ancient Norse sagas, but I really think you would enjoy them. To our modern ears, they are strange and wonderous, like a straight faced Monty Python sketch.
Project Gutenberg
I went to Project Gutenberg and searched for the saga. I did not find an exact match, but I found Saga of Halfred the Sigskald: A Northern Tale of the Tenth Century by Felix Dahn. I presumed that Dahn was the translator and that the publication year of 1888 was the year he translated it.
Project Gutenberg was launched on one of the first computers attached to the pre-Internet ARPANET. It provides legal, free texts of books that have moved into the public domain, that is to say that their copyrights are expired. It is a great source for reading material, particularly of different cultures and times.
I downloaded and started in on the saga. Something was weird about it from the start, however. There is a first person narrator, which goes against my memories of sagas. The hero takes regular trips to Greece, which seemed rather remarkable.
But man was it a ripping yarn. sorrow, violence, beauty, might, symbols, a good riddle. The sex was a little repressed but all in all it was vast, personal, and compelling.
Then there was the twist at the end. (of course, I won't tell you as I don't want to ruin the read) That was very un-saga like. I grew suspicious of the authenticity of this so-called Norse saga.
Wikipedia
I turned to Wikipedia and sought the person identified as the author. Turns out Felixwrote the damn thing in 1888, harkening back to the sagas for inspiration and setting. Also, it turns out the guy might have been in inspiration to some terrible people. How great to know!
Wikipedia has been volunteer-powered, user contributed, and non-monetized since it was launched in 2001. It has gone through some iterations, including an awkward time in the early 2000s when user contributions were quite partisan for particular people and topics. Now, renewed governance and the committed corps of editors maintain the entries with care and a passion for accuracy.
It has also created a powerful platform for group contribution that maintains attribution and epistemology. You can download the software that runs Wikipedia and make your own!
Sidenote Don't know what epistemology is? It is "how you know what you know." Basically, who do you trust and how did you build that trust.
Epistemology is a good thing to think about when one is internetting. I am flummoxed by Instagram and TikTok for disallowing links in comments. Although they are an image sharing platform, those images are now delivering information and forming opinions (14% of Americans get their news from TikTok).
"Without the ability to find out where that information came from, I have a very tenuous epistemology. Unless of course I find that what I am reading confirms my own bias. Then it is fine, whatever it is. Disinform me, please.”
It seems obvious to me why Instagram and TikTok do not allow links. Links would move you out of their monetized platform. It would reduce the value your eyeballs have for the customers of TikTok and Instagram: advertisers.
I am not deep into the ins and outs of making popular social media posts, but I have found that Facebook and even LinkedIn posts are more successful when they do NOT link out to additional information. Some of that effect is because of user behavior. We tend to not like to lose our place, even in the choppy information chaos of a social media feed, so we just don't click a lot. I suppose that when most of us open Facebook or LinkedIn we are not mentally preparing for a long challenging read.
I still need to talk about algorithms
Corporate algorithms are considered private intellectual property, so I can't see how Meta has automated preferences for my feed. From what little I understand of how publicly held companies whose stock value is based on their future ability to monetize rather than their current income, I would suspect that they are incentivized for me to stay on the site. My feed would favor posts that don't have an off ramp with a sign above it "this way to demonetization of your eyeballs."
As a result, information you collect reading Facebook is hard to trust. I came across an image (not text I could copy) from a group I was not familiar with that said the history of Black navigators had been erased and that Abubakari II has landed in America before Columbus. This seems very possible to me so I looked it up… on Wikipedia. While it is possible that Abubakari came to America, “No uncontroversial evidence of pre-Columbian contact between Africa and the Americas has ever been found” attributed in Wikipedia to a scholarly article in a peer reviewed journal. It is so important to bring to light that which racism has obscured, but to further propagandize seems to just damage that effort and confuse people further.
In comparison to the information I get on Facebook, Wikipedia is awesome and trustworthy. It is more accurate than any other source you can compare it to, updated with changing facts extremely fast (famously the Queen of England’s death was noted in minutes from the announcement), and so critically — you can see when and how it was changed. Try it with any subject, click View History on the top right to see how the information you are reading got there.
A lot of the edits you will see is Wikimedians removing promotional and false information.
ChatGPT = Wikipedia without attribution
Wikipedia is so awesome that most of what you get out of ChatGPT was vacuumed out of Wikipedia — however ChatGPT and its black box algorithm won’t provide you the epistemology of where that information came from.
Remember Internet Classic?
As the Internet emerged in the 1990s, I was at the age where adopting technology was a hopeful thing. I sat on the edge of my bed with my dad and sent an email to my brother several states away.
I remember laying out on the rocks by a reservoir in my college town, discussing how wars could be ended by greater understanding, if we could instantaneously learn what another person on the other side thought and wanted. I do remember one woman who was with us who was not so sure that was how it would work out.
Internet classic still exists, and it continues to get better. It does not have an army of marketers who fear for their stock prices foisting it on you, but it is there.
In fact, I think Internet Classic is growing.
My understanding is that Reddit is also a home of Internet Classic, the place where one to one and one to many conversations of some degree of civility can be found. I also understand that it has evolved from an era where I heard a lot about how it was poisonous and mean. That there is new governance as well as some learned behaviors that improve the overall experience. I look forward to a reason to learn more about Reddit, though sadly it will likely soon degrade when it must become not just profitable but massively profitable.
Although I published my previous essay on Medium (a deliberate choice related to the content, which includes some more sauciness on algorithms), I am happily putting this one on Substack, which to me seems to be a new Internet Classic platform. It allows me to publish in a way that is easily found and linked to as well as develop two way relationships with others. It is monetized by users who pay directly for writing, not for advertising or an opaque algorithm that I am not allowed to view.
Some proposed criteria for Internet Classic:
Utilizes hypertext so objects are findable and can link freely to elsewhere. Content can be attributed and attributor.
Incentivized or chartered for accuracy over volume.
Edifies the user, does not monetize them.
I am increasingly convinced that no model which monetizes the user as the product will create better people or better outcomes for us. I am curious about a movement for Internet Classic that could carve out space, attention, power, and innovation.
Never a huge reader of reddit - seemed like a Craig's list of thoughts and the disorganization created noise and nuisance for me. Not withstanding, it's going public is much to brood over.
It is ironic how teachers pooh-poohed Wikipedia. It certainly does not eliminate the need for further research, instead, for me, it was an anthology of where to go to find more details. A list of citations that could be the portal to any rabbit hole. But that's just me. And I always found the editors a hair-breadth behind any updates we did on corporate pages. Despite our attempts to be faithful to the adage to not be promotional, our sentences were heavily parsed.