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Comment by lyu07282 | Hacker News Reader

I find it a bit ironic that you link Wikipedia to make that point. The greatest encyclopedia in the world, a great demonstration of the potential of collectivist projects. I still remember when it was launched and everyone thought it was crazy and impossible and laughed at it.

I would also draw a distinction between web3 and torrent technologies. Torrents work great, and it doesn't even give its users a monetary incentive to seed, people do it anyway. But web3 makes everything transactional and builds everything around individualist monetary incentives, and yet no useful application was ever (so far) conceived by it. So perhaps torrents and the wikipedia (and similar projects) work because it doesn't built everything around the free market libertarian fever dream.

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Sure, Wikipedia is great, like finding moissanites [1] in the mud: great, but you are still in mud.

Perhaps I am too doomy, but as we see every day, and now with the GPT advances, almost every hour, a bridge being built between the information space, the decision-making space, and the 3D space of the physical world, and this bridge being restricted to only certain entities, it makes one wonder: would a Wikipedia even be possible today?

[1] Diamonds are a De Beers invention and a monopolistic violent endeavour, moissanites are cheaper, no artificial scarcity, and better looking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moissanite

I'm not sure I follow your reasoning.

Wikipedia works thanks donations.

Voluntary donations are the free market libertarian equivalent of involuntary taxation.

Web3 doesn't work because there's not enough value being provided, party because paying micro transactions is too unfriendly. That's a hard problem and it's lack of success is a clear demonstration of the market working as intended and not rewarding something useless.

The socialist equivalent is a government owned web3 which we all have to pay with taxes and we're increasingly close to getting this.

People volunteer on Wikipedia, they write and edit articles, they do content and user moderation, etc. Everyone can edit Wikipedia, everyone can make a Wikipedia account, there are 42 million registered accounts, nobody is working and spending their time on Wikipedia for monetary gain, how does any of that possibly work and work so incredibly well? According to everything libertarians believe this should be completely impossible and yet it works, because libertarian, free-market and neoliberal ideology is WRONG.

Nobody except for paid editors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3APaid-contribution_... andhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editing#Editing_services

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