by pessimizer | 2025-08-07 15:17:41+00:00
I agree with everything you said, but don't underestimate the fact that we have been trained by the past couple hundred years to consume news in that way. News presented in a logical way would probably be off-putting to some huge segment of the public because it wouldn't carry the proper ritual air of "seriousness." Seriousness looks like a newspaper article.

For a related illustration: It's extremely dumb that Wikipedia has continued with the Voice of God tone that it borrowed from encyclopedias, for example, especially when people know that it is often edited by dimwits (and by purpose is open for any idiot to edit.) Encyclopedias had to pretend to be the Voice of God because you would only own one. That one would have cost as much as your living room sofa. It wasn't written by incel assholes, but people with lots of letters after their names who you assumed wore clean white coats.

Wikipedia doesn't have to pretend. Encyclopedias had limited space, so they had to leave out a lot. Wikipedia doesn't. Encyclopedias had to be conservative in what they included, because people were investing millions to print them, and once they were printed, you didn't get to change them. Wikipedia can print tons of things that turn out to be falsehoods, and balance them later with the articles that show them to be falsehoods.

The fact that Wikipedia doesn't feel obligated to include all primary or secondary sources that can be legally included is insane. Wikipedia should be nothing but a guide to sources, and the narrative linking those sources should be explaining their taxonomy of ideas; how they relate to and contradict one another, where ideas were introduced or expanded, etc. Instead, it's really obsessed with telling me who is "right-wing." Because as a Voice of God, it can't help but abuse its authority. Its addiction to that power is why it does not change, and why governments, NGOs, and random companies have found it so useful to control.

The reality is that it's working well for both the newspapers and Wikipedia. As entrenched institutions distributing knowledge through printing presses, their primary motivation after being obsoleted by information technology transforms into preventing the distribution of knowledge, and of casting aspersions on the quality of knowledge from other sources. Wikipedia basically says: "There are two kinds of sources, bad and good. The bad sources will hurt you. We include all of the good sources. There's no reason to go anywhere else."

They might as well include: "Therefore, we are worth the price of a sofa." They sort of still do, but now that pitch is made to intelligence agencies and weird foundations. And it's about owning that Voice. If you're not paying for Wikipedia, it means you're the product.

The reason online newspapers don't have links is because they don't want you to read the sources. They want you to passively accept what they are saying as true. Just like modern newspapers always have. To simply inform people would destroy their core value proposition, which is keeping people from being informed by others. They're not trying to expand the newspaper market in general, they're trying to expand their share.

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e.g. If there's a widespread conspiracy theory quasi-religion that has people feeding their children gravel will get rid of their autism, Wikipedia wouldn't think it should link to the publications of the people promulgating the theory, describe schisms between different groups of gravel-eaters, and the theory's apostates. It thinks it should spend a bunch of time telling me that they are right-wing, and that right-wingers do crazy things, and that everybody agrees that no one should eat gravel. If I'm lucky, I might get the name of somebody involved. At the bottom I'll get related links to "cults" "list of crazy right-wing beliefs." On the talk page: "Eating gravel to cure autism is insane and doesn't deserve the attention; can we just merge this into the 'Demographics of Trump Supporters' page?"

Reading Wikipedia I get the same feeling I get when you read histories from the middle ages or antiquity where they're describing something, let's say a card game, but seemingly have no interest in the rules. They describe the strategies being used, but leave out how many cards they played with and tons of other details. There's no way you could reconstruct it. It's because those histories were written by elites as a way of saying something like "the local peasants had a lot of color, and were smarter than one would think!" A romantic value judgement, a sign of approval or disapproval, not a description of what was in front of them, but a description of their feelings about it.

Thanks to those scribes, hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people could play the same card game for decades; it could be written about a dozen times; and to this day we may still not know how it was played. The fact that cultural elites can't see past their own eqos destroys history. Yet Wikipedia soldiers on, slowly becoming more entrenched in government than an encyclopedia ever was. Pretending to be authoritative. A zombie from the 50s, when a set of books sold door to door could contain all the information in the world.

sorry for the essay everyone, am procrastinating...