Victim of Communism
You’re describing a single centralized warehouse for physical media. You’re neglecting thousands of other information repositories and alternative methodologies for conveying information.
And as people convert ancient scrolls to modern hard cover books, you’re screaming “nobody reads books! This will never work!”
No one uses this.
Estimated annual revenue of around $100M. That’s half of Wikipedia’s. Someone’s using it.
No one uses them.
Quora alone has 400 million monthly active users.
Look at the rest of the internet. Literally every space, every niche, every congregation of experts has rotted away
None of that is true. Your institutional knowledge hasn’t keep pace with the modern net. And your nostalgia has biased you against anything novel or unfamiliar.
You’re rotting. The net is doing fine.
Well, unfortunately, there is no project like that with Wikipedia’s critical mass. Most attempts with any attention are rather horrific. See: Grokipedia.
Idk if you even want the kind of attention Wikipedia achieved, given how it ultimately became the target of endless waves of scams and influencer operations.
That said, the Wiki format has been prolific in a way even the core website has not been. The core data for Wikipedia has been harvested and replicated across a thousand different boutique iterations. A lot of what made things like Grokipedia and Conservapedia and the rest flop is that these projects tried to administer the sites even more tightly than the original. And it’s an enormous project, so that loads a phenomenal amount of work on a handful of people.
If Wikipedia dies, nothing good will replace it.
That’s an absurd presumption. Just straight off the bat, you have the old Encyclopedia Britannica. You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors. You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts. You’ve got physical libraries. You’ve got digital libraries. You’ve got LLM compositions of libraries.
The biggest flaw most of these have is the same one any search engine after Google had. “Why would I go here if I can just go to Wikipedia instead?”
But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.
Wikipedia is valuable because its a reasonably sane default reference for billions of people
It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.
What you will experience is not merely a lack of oxygen but a surplus of boot on your neck.
Questionable leadership or not, it is a lighthouse in the information dystopia of the 2020s, which literally helps hold society together.
It pioneered a novel mechanism for collaborating on a project with minimal trust between contributors. But it was also riddled with bias and vulnerable to exploitation and as prone to cultivating disinformation as a universal source of truth.
Rather than fixating on the site as some last bastion of Web 1.0 nostalgia, we would do well to do better than Wikipedia.
Organizations like the Internet archive project have, imho, done as much or more than Wikipedia because of their commitment to accumulating primary source material. Managing that catalog and incorporating it into an encyclopedia of knowledge is much more than just stuffing a hard drive full of editor arguments and dead links from the old site.
We should probably all be downloading the website and printing off the important stuff
Sort of defeats the fundamental purpose of a collaborative online encyclopedia.
If I want a massive hard copy of collected human knowledge, I just go to the public library. I don’t need to print my own.
But if I want to look something up on the fly (much less check down a bunch of citations), a thousand dead trees worth of printer paper isn’t going to deliver the goods.
This is probably the most recent version I’ll ever need.
Assuming nothing historically significant happens after that download, sure.
I’ve got an ancient encyclopedia from the 1950s that my dad owned. Let me tell you how useful that’s been over the years.
In a sane system, he wouldn’t have so much to lose.
But he’s sitting on a functional monopoly bolted onto a surveillance state with infinite money. So he can keep fucking up forever.
He wrote a creepy stalker website that became the foundation for a massive network of college educated socialites to communicate.
And then he sold their conversations to marketing firms and intelligence services.
critical thinking is an old paradigm that most of humanity is unwilling to interact with
Critical thinking is a mechanism for digesting large amounts of information over time, in order to make informed policy decisions.
If you don’t have useful information, you don’t have spare time, and you don’t have any actual input into policy, it lacks value.
I see folks consistently trying to make this an individualist problem. “I figured it out because I think critical! You didn’t because you’re a dumb-dumb!”
But more often than not, it’s two people talking past each other, working off different bodies of data (of debatable quality) that they’ve incompletely digested. And then all they know how to do with their conclusions is yell “You’re an idiot!” at people who disagree.
How do you reach large numbers of people to form a consensus? How do you collaborate with them towards a tangible benefit?
Curiously enough, Facebook used to provide a mechanism for this purpose. And the fact that it doesn’t anymore - that it is largely a trap for weak, confused, vulnerable people to scream at one another while they get scammed - speaks more to the profit engine of the service than the core competency of any of its members
Zuck can only be interrupted into making an even bigger mistake, so no need to hold back.
Half the joke is that Reddit was ground zero for AI slop even before AI had gone mainstream.
The company got harvested back before the AI firms were overly worried with cross-contamination.
If it hasn’t already moved onto the garbage heap, alongside it’s precedessors, it’s not long now.
Scamming AI companies is a virtue
raise your prices to astronomical amounts
Prices for Recreational Books, 1997-2026 ($20)).
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, prices for recreational books are 4.81% lower in 2026 versus 1997 (a $0.96 difference in value
Between 1997 and 2026: Recreational books experienced an average inflation rate of -0.17% per year. In other words, recreational books costing $20 in the year 1997 would cost $19.04 in 2026 for an equivalent purchase.
The “evil thing” is to sell a back catalog of physical books that they can’t move on the retail or wholesale markets.
Idk why people are heavily invested in books moldering in a warehouse. It’s not some kind of virtue that we have this staggering overproduction of physical media that we’ve horded for nobody in particular.
If doing this thing just results in people screaming at them, of course they’re going to take down their advertisements. But of course they’re going to keep doing it. Why would they stop? Who else buys a bunch of first print draft copies of books that never sold?
i have a rare first edition that i absolutely treasure. single run, too. it’s a local therapist’s little comic book he drew.
Cool, I guess. How many of these did the AI company destroy?
My niece wrote a ten page short story, had it bound, and added it to her school’s library - a project every kid in her grade level did. If she doesn’t claim it before she graduates, it goes into an archive. And eventually on to a dump.
if someone took my copy and pulped it
If they snuck into your room at night, sure. If they walked off with it from a yard sale, idk if you get to complain.
you want a specific used book, maybe you might have to spend ten to twenty to a thousand
Show me the thousand dollar copy that an AI company destroyed and we can revisit this.
Nothing in the article identities an actual valuable work being destroyed. They’re just “rare”, which can be anything from unpublished manuscripts of failed writers to drafts of screenplays that never got produced to limited run publications that never sold a copy.
Early iterations of the community did try to incorporate these features.
But simply tapping the sign that reads “Go read the wiki on this solved issue” doesn’t generate the kind of traffic and community participation that repeating the same copypasta every month or two does. Also, god forbid one of your mods does something like…
post something unPC in a Politics community
argue with content from a native advertiser
piss off an admin… somehow
sign in from a device in a way that triggers an automated unchallengeable ban
fail to constantly scour your community of shitposts
Plenty of the old subs have been hollowed out, transferred, or otherwise denuded of their professional contributors for some stupid reason or another. And now the site is so aggressively policed that you can’t really join (much less re-join once you’ve been booted) to add anything useful.
This has been the OG Wikipedia’s fate as well, with mods getting older and links going stale and new contributors all getting hyper-policed for fear of bots, marketing accounts, and shitposters.
Small forums full of active users are more reliable for useful information than big forums full of lurkers and attention whores. That’s not unique to Reddit. Just very obvious, given the long and deplorable history of the platform.
Real “I grew up doing content farming in the early 2000s” energy.
Nobody uses anything but Wikipedia
Nobody I like use anything but Wikipedia
Uh-huh
If you’re interested in art, fashion, or any number of other hobbies, absolutely.
But if you want to host other media on their systems, it works just as well. I suspect you just feel embarrassed to use other websites.