This article doesn't even try to explain or convincingly make this argument, it just takes it as given.
I am afraid that the new clone would be mostly full of pages about "Curing Cancer using Magic Healing Crystals", because people writing amount more conventional knowledge would prefer traditional wikipedia.
That article is the classic "Wikipedia criticism": butthurt they can't spread their favourite flavour of shit on Wikipedia without criticism.
I'm not saying Wikipedia is perfect or doesn't have problems, but that is definitely not a good description of anything.
It starts off gentle, "OMG guys, look at the sketchy things this person who is typically portrayed as "One of the good ones" has been doing!"
And then it ramps up, "they claim to have 100,000 editors, but it actually only has 30,000. What is up with that?"
Insert picture of Wikipedia icon colored red with devil horns, pitchfork and tail.
Then: Big Oil has been paying people to edit its articles! There are companies who exist to edit Wikipedia articles and they work for the bag guys! Wikipedia makes millions of dollars a year! The CIA edits Wikipedia! BIG PHARMA! And another bad guy ALSO PAID TO HAVE WIKIPEDIA EDITED OMG!
(trust me, here's a reference number to a link below that we all know you will definitely read and verify the authenticity of ;) )
Then Washington! The "Phillip Cross Affair"! Dictators!
And once you are sufficiently outraged, also, here's this poor little guy, just a little guy, an everyman, just like you, being picked on by the big bad evil wikipedia editors because he's right and they're wrong and they don't like that.
How can you tolerate this injustice!?!
___________________________________________________________________________
And it all makes sense, inside of its bubble. Outside of verification, this is terrible.
But then you look at the rest of the website:
http://helenofdestroy.com (no ssl certificate because?)
And the rest of the webpage is pure distilled "covid, conspiracies, bill gates, commoncore, newspeak, prince andrew, coronapocalypse, biden, New world order, China blah blah blah blah" insanity.
And you see exactly where being radicalized leads you. Desperately searching for the truth at the core of every lie, ultimately burying yourself under a mountain of bullshit in hopes of finding a pearl.
You're not gonna find a pearl. At best, it's going to be an undigested piece of corn.
Caveat Emptor, don't buy the bullshit.
This is way beside the point but there is nothing inherently wrong with unsecured plain http traffic if you aren't accepting user information over that connection (such as a name/password, auth token or whatever).
There are also networking policies that prevent non-https connections, so you could be accidentally blocking out users on a strictly managed device.
The proposed alternative here is to basically distribute the taxonomy? Anybody who's touched microservices for even a minute will know how hilariously difficult it is to co-ordinate not just the services itself but the teams around them, including both the tech and people level ICP.
Find me one example of institution that managed to go for any significant amount of time (say, longer than a decade) without facing corruption. I double-dare you.
One look at the world of decentralized crypto-currency more than proves that corruption is not limited to institutions.
Corruption seems inherent to humans, the difference is that institutions are well aware of this, and frequently set up controls and systems to balance power and fight the most obvious forms of corruption.
Rug-pulls are inevitable, what matters is whether people are left with power to move on or if they are trapped into the corrupt system. How many people managed to leave the banking system after the crash of 2008?
See also: Reddit. Despite all the protests, the absolute majority of people went back to it and accepted the conditions.
>Rug-pulls are inevitable.
That sounds like a pretty undesirable system where illegal, immoral behavior is "inevitable", hardly a replacement for the existing institutions. Especially since crypto intentionally operates (or attempts to operate) outside the jurisdiction of anti corruption and law enforcement powers. I for one would much rather be the victim of a traditional institution since there are balancing institutions that exist to hold them accountable. The fact that the only organizations that have demonstrated the capability of reigning in crypto scammers are incredibly centralized is deeply ironic to me.
Plenty of people are unbanked, about 5% of adults in the US, and plenty of people left Reddit.
Until they don't. You are comparing the worst of decentralized systems (rug-pulls) with the average-to-best-case of institutions that centralize power (western democracy governments) when we should be talking about the extreme cases: autocracies and dictatorships.
> hardly a replacement for the existing institutions.
Why do people can only think in binary terms? No one is calling for the "replacement" of the institutions. The idea is to build decentralized systems as a hedge against the centralized one.
You are repeatedly giving the "so you are saying..." line and it's starting to feel like you are purposefully misunderstanding the point.
> Plenty of people are unbanked
For their own choice or because they were excluded of the system? Wouldn't it be good to have an alternative that we could have as hedge against them?
> plenty of people left Reddit
Not enough to cause it to implode, and not enough to bring a critical mass to any alternative.
Also it is unjust to name crypto/Blockchain as an example of decentralized system that gets corrupted. All corruption story in fact are centralized , but labelled as crypto, or touch the field of crypto but nonetheless are very centralized. E.g mtgox, bitconnect, Celsius, FTX.
If not centralized, flawed in design. Unintentionally E.g Ethereum before the split that led to ETC. Euler more recently. Many others. And Many are intentionally flawed, e.g terra/Luna.
You have already done this with crypto. I.e. The corruption that occurs in crypto doesn’t count because those weren’t true crypto projects.
So in the spirit of the challenge. Tell me how the Adventure Cycling Association is corrupt?
But your tactic won't prevent me from calling an Irish, what's truly not Scots. I will get to that.
No what I have said about crypto was clarify that those accused of corrupted decentralized entities in fact aren't decentralized. And the distinction is non obvious because many centralized entities mingle with decentralized technology. It doesn't make those decentralized, they have all the attributes of centralized systems, often trying to disguise as decentralized themselves. See we offer a spot btc exchange, non custodial. But still centralized. Yet they don't say it. And are happy to seed confusion. why the disguise? Because decentralized systems are getting known of being corrupt resistant, so it's always good to pretend having that stamp of merit. Especially when your trust is needed for doing business.
It's a bit like open source , see, one can't simply disqualify the qualities and properties of open source using the pretext that a growing list of projects fail the test, given how many projects we've seen pretending to build open source software that same fallacious argument could be made, but would it stand correct?
Ok I won't write for too much about blockchain, crypto entities and their relation (or contradiction) with decentralization, nor which qualifies as what, check for yourself, if you don't then no argument I could make in a post will convince you anyway.
About the Adventure Cycling Association, I don't know if it's corrupt. I had never heard of it. See, it's not that it's an Irishman, a Scotsman, or an English. Maybe it's bushman. I don't know exactly but it seems to me like it's part of a pretty decentralized domain. First it's not even an institution, I think, but Let's not get into the definitions as many wouldn't even agree as to what an institution is anyway. It's an organisation, that we would all agree with. and that charity organization looks closer to an entity, part of a decentralized cloud of cycling associations.
What would make the adventure Cycling Association centralized ? If it finds a way to have monopoly or quasi monopoly on Cycling activities. Or on Adventure Cycling activities. Or such activities in a certain locality that isn't limited to some irrelevant private park.
What makes centralized systems centralized? They require a level of monopoly or authority over a matter. Reasonably agreed to be extensive.
Examples.
Facebook. It qualifies as centralized because it reached such a massive network effect that it owns a certain monopoly in what it does. Sure there are other social media networks with some significant overlap in functionality but it has this sticky effect that makes jumping boat to alternatives, difficult. That's voluntarily exclusivity of sorts.
Reddit. That one is interesting, as it has some obvious decentralized properties, but some other and very strict properties that are totally centralized. Reddit made decisions on their own that applied to all. The backlash was worth of note, also that users for the most part stayed. Had Reddit been truly decentralized? A system that would have allowed some or all subs to "fork" off that decision? We would have seen a flocking of many subs onto the "classic" regulation. Anyhow not calling Reddit corrupt here but I hope you see what distinguishes decentralized from centralized structures. Here also Reddit has a very strong sticky network effect so users who didn't like it could hardly move out.
Governments. I can't skip this mention, those institutions despite being often democratic are generally pretty centralized, they have an executive administration exercising exclusive power over some of the matters of an entire nation. They don't have full control, but even for the rest, representatives form a tiny minority of the population, yet they legislate on their own, for so many. And the many don't have the choice but follow. That's not voluntary exclusivity.
The USB alliance. That's centralized corrupt institution. They have monopoly on questions regarding the USB spec and come up with all sort of financial impacting desires and mandates. Using law enforcement in attempts to get makers to oblige and pay the cartel. not voluntary exclusivity.
Power absolutely corrupts and most absolute power corrupts most absolutely.
As to the Adventure Cycling Association which I had never heard of, nor heard of any cycling associations having acquired some exclusive control over anything to do with cycling, they may or may not be corrupt, but they aren't centralized institution.
If you believe they are, then you and I are also a centralized institution discussing matters of corruption. Perhaps your see the ridicule. But hey, if you and I got control over hackernews we would truly have centralized powers over this community and it would be being corrupted to impose a certain view on the matter.
Hackernews and its moderation may have acquired certain influence and stickiness, they could get corrupted, it depends on how absolute their power is and over what. But they've so far showed decent attitude. Does it make it an example of institution that resisted corruption? Well no, not a Scotsman. Quite young and having been well guarded against abuse, sort of a niche.
My 36 cents, in the hope to have made you see something you had not distinguished from the rest, necessary to make sense of this non trivial issue. Not expecting you to entirely change your mind, it is a difficult thing to do given how much of a shaking certain sort of belief system would need to endure.
> I don't see how your qualification is correct as I haven't said no true Scotsman yet. Prejudice already?
> As to the Adventure Cycling Association which I had never heard of, nor heard of any cycling associations having acquired some exclusive control over anything to do with cycling, they may or may not be corrupt, but they aren't centralized institution.
Called it.
Humans are selfish, fallible, lazy, unreliable, etc. what is every Shakespeare play about? what is the bible about? What is Greek mythology about? What are Aesop's fables about?