• Thorry@feddit.org
    1·
    18 minutes ago

    First we created communities that we used to share information and ideas. This allowed people to grow in their skills and in turn teach others what they learnt. This cycle kept the communities going, providing an important service for everyone involved.

    Then capitalism turned those communities into walled gardens, often using predatory patterns to increase engagement to the detriment of the quality. Being walled off made it harder to share the knowledge, leaving people with only a few larger holdouts of what once had been.

    Then we created machines to do the learning for us, finally killing off the concept of information sharing communities. These machines learnt from every knowledge sharing community that existed previously and became the place to access that knowledge. Without people coming into the communities, even the last holdouts could no longer sustain themselves. The ability to share and gain new knowledge was removed, causing stagnation for everyone involved. The ability to actually learn anything was also greatly reduced, having the machines apply the knowledge directly. The new machines can’t learn, can’t think, can’t reason or be creative, all they can do is remix already existing information and regres to the mean while doing so.

    But for a while there, a lot of value was created for the shareholders.

  • IninewCrow@lemmy.caEnglish
    52·
    5 hours ago

    Then we learned that if you wanted to get the right answer from people … all you had to do was confidently post an answer, any answer, especially if it was wrong … and so many people would jump on you so fast to tell you how stupid you were and give you the right answer.

    … and you also had to tie an onion on your belt which was the style of the time.

    • Ms. ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zipEnglish
      1·
      1 minute ago

      I’m studying right now and I’m the lead for a group project. I’ve been having a hard time getting the team to actually talk with each other and come up with ideas. Someone told me the other week “pitch bad ideas badly”. So I tried that with the title of our project I put down a shit awful name, told everyone about it, and within 5 minutes the team came back to me with an actual title

    • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
      6·
      2 hours ago

      Phishing legitimate answers out of people by exploiting their ego is still one of the most impressive things I haven’t thought of.

      Will try to keep in mind

    • 14th_cylon@lemmy.zip
      2·
      2 hours ago

      all you had to do was confidently post an answer, any answer, especially if it was wrong

      so called murphy’s law…

  • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
    7·
    3 hours ago

    What was the website? I just had books in '95 and later, Geocities wasn’t great for chat, IRC and network news groups were the best places to get help

    The web was pretty small in the '90s

    I spent my time in newsgroups in role playing game flame wars

    • pulsewidth@lemmy.world
      4·
      1 hour ago

      It was Experts Exchange. Then they paywalled everything like greedy idiots - hiding decades of useful community knowledge.

      Then everyone moved rapidly to StackExchange, which had coexisted but been quite small until EE did their thing.

      • BenLeMan@lemmy.world
        1·
        11 minutes ago

        Ah, software developing nerds and expertsexchange. A story as old as time.

        It starts with innocent questions, then thigh highs during long coding sessions and… you know the rest. It’s all in the name! 😅