For about 30 years now, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly is causing the amount of friction I have with human beings online. They like to say that it’s entirely my fault, but that’s bullshit. There’s a certain level of interaction that I give back to them (for lack of better terms in English: meaning, I react in certain ways that feed into what they’re doing) that is not helpful for the environment of which I wish to create. Let me give you a concrete example.
A person yells out into the void, on a social media service, ‘if you do X, then fuck you, you’re scum.’
I reply, ‘don’t call me scum.’
The person replies and starts a fight.
People often say, ‘don’t feed the troll.’ But this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because, in this situation, only the troll is allowed to speak. It’s similar to how liberals try to get away from Neo Nazis by avoiding every single bit of terminology that the Nazis use. The Nazis glom on to something, and the liberals abandon it.
Let me give you an example from popular culture, to help you understand this more easily. I’m going to make this more-palatable for you.
The Nazis take shit like the Borg.
Now this is the point where the people reading assume that I’m suggesting pacifism against Nazis. No: what I’m pointing out in this video occurs 1 minute and 7 seconds in:
… I’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back.
Here’s what I’ve seen happen over the past 3 decades, online.
Good people used to populate the Internet. There were assholes, but they were cloistered. And then the more people got to use the Internet, the more they took it for granted, the more general toxicity and negativity invaded the space.
Now the good people are cloistered, but the assholes run free.
I’m not suggested we should have gatekept the Internet better. After all, there also is no ‘we’. I could not have done anything, nor could you have.
What I’m saying, is, the more that the real world began to use the Internet, and the less that the Internet was this curiosity, relegated for use only by ‘nerds’ and social outcasts and misfits, the more everything bad about the real world began to permeate onto the Internet. Now there’s no going back.
Social outcasts used to keep the Internet nice for themselves. Now that they’re beset on all sides by normies, they’ve reacted in such a way where they’ve become spiteful, rageful, vindictive, and territorial, in ways that don’t make any sense. And they have no real way to gatekeep their environments that don’t also hurt they themselves.
‘Don’t feed the troll’ created an environment in which the people causing all the problems were allowed to speak, while the people who caused relatively fewer or no problems, they fell back. They surrendered their territor(ies) online, went to different websites, and became less concentrated. Meanwhile, the Bad People™ got full use of the facilities.
The insane are running the asylum. They have been since 2003. It’s just that, with how widespread Internet use is, it really hasn’t become a problem until quite recently. I’d like to say it started in 2014, to puff myself up and say, ‘I ruined this.’ But I didn’t. And it would’ve happened a different way, anyways.
Not even Chanology was the start.
This is not some blameless phenomenon. People perpetrated this. I had a hand in it, but I did not ruin it by myself. Furthermore, in trying to grow and evolve as a person, when what I did to protect my own ego, something that was once pretty much nonexistent, fragile and easily hurt, caused the largest tantrum spiral I’ve ever seen on the Internet? I offer no apologies.
Somebody told me I was worthless, and that I should kill myself.
And I told them to go fuck themselves.
And everything just unraveled from there.
It is, of course, going to continue. Human beings have no real desire to become better. When they say, ‘do better’, they don’t really mean it. They just want to be mean to one another.
And that’s your problem.
You want to be mean to each other. A lot.
Here’s a secret: when the Tantrum Spiral started in 2014 (and none of you are going to know what I’m referring to, unless you actually know me), I did not tell that person to go fuck themselves.
I said, ‘I don’t deserve to be spoken to, in this way.’ And they took it like I had slapped them in the face and said ‘go fuck yourself’. That’s why I always tell the story like that.
That’s the thing about human beings: you can tell them, ‘good morning’, and they’ll take it as an insult, demanding you tell them, what’s good about it?.
When people say that to me, by the way, I always tell them,
you’re alive. That’s what’s good about it.
Discussing Turtles with Crazy People
My uncle, Ryresai, once told me a story about how he was doing research about turtles, and other turtle-y things. And he was discussing this with someone, who seemed very interested in turtles. He was, in fact, a published author on some sort of turtle-y research.
My uncle is very intelligent. And he’s very passionate.
It was about an hour and 45 minutes in that Ryresai realized that the person he was talking to was insane. Some things started not making sense. And after that, the whole thing started to unravel.
Ryresai suddenly realized that nothing he had said to the man had had any real effect. He was discussing turtles with a crazy person.
The man he was talking to might once have been ‘sane’. Or he might have been something like a savant, where he was good at one thing, but he lacked relevant and useful experience and knowledge of protocol when it came to other things. Or he might have gone insane after he wrote the book.
But even then, there were signs. There were tangents in the book that started to not make sense. But it would almost-always get back on track. A minor derailment; nothing more.
But that’s the thing. Even, if not especially, the smartest of people, they tend towards insanity. I, in particular, chose not to pursue mathematics, because I did not want to develop schizophrenia. (When you’re nine years old and you’re basically the kid that J. shoots in the simulation in Men in Black, you tend to not want to pursue any more advanced informations.)
That is to say, I played the Marathon series on PowerPC Macintosh, and then, I got into Quantum Mechanics/Physics, pretty deeply.
You don’t wanna do that when your balls haven’t even dropped.
But, anyways. Jokes aside, there is one thing I want to tell you about all of this, that I want to impress upon you.
When you try real hard online? And you’re wondering why everyone is so angry at you? And you don’t understand?
And you’re trying to tell people things, and get them to understand you, but they’re just not understanding you?
Be careful.
You may be discussing turtles with crazy people.
An Explanation
A lot of people don’t tend to get the sublteties of my writing. They don’t understand my nuance. I’m not saying people aren’t smart if they don’t get it. I’m just saying, I want to make something perfectly clear.
The Internet is this way because you can’t get anything done when the people you’re talking to don’t fucking understand what you’re saying.That’s ‘discussing turtles with crazy people’.
Essentially, everyone trying to do something good online, they’re not being heard, nor understood; and when they want to gather with like-minded people, those like-minded people tend to either be insane themselves, or in such a bad fucking mood that they’ve cloistered themselves in a way that makes interacting with them damned near impossible.
It’s easy to be a mindless dipshit who smears their shit all over the wall and tells even the most-learned of elders that said elder’s mother sucks him good and hard thru his jorts. It’s much more difficult to actually produce anything resembling a civilization, when the vast majority of people who could, are being smeared with other people’s shit.
This is untenable.
Don’t expect anything useful from the Internet.
For civilization to exist, the people who act as the enablers of said infrastructure must also exist. And no one online is going to do the work for free, forever, without getting burnt out so badly that it doesn’t even matter.
I could write more, but I honestly have better shit to do.
Note: I work 7 days a week now, and my life is pretty much better and greater than it ever has been. So I have very little time for this now, but I feel a need to say something.
I left Twitter for Bluesky about 3 days ago.
And I’m not coming back.
No thanks.
When it comes to Twitter, there’s no easy way to parse it. You can only really speak of it truthfully by adhering strictly to definitions of what it was not. But of course, there are exceptions and expectations to list, and maintain.
Forthright it must be noted that, as of the time of this writing, Twitter is… alive. But one must question what sort of ‘life’ it really leads. One must question if websites like MySpace are ‘alive’, in comparison to their former glory.
Twitter is worse, though. With MySpace, the lights are on, but nobody seems to be home. One must necessarily wonder, who’s paying the hosting bill?. With Twitter, the lights are on, but the site itself is a fucked-out windsock. It may still ‘breathe’, but the light clearly left its eyes, some time ago.
And that’s okay. Clearly, it’s not, but— in a world where people set children on fire and nobody does anything, the boundaries of ‘okay’ are not clearly defined. Twitter’s ‘demise’ is, essentially, unimportant. What I had for lunch today was more important. What you had for lunch is, too. Essentially, Twitter was never ‘essential’.
It was great to get news before it actually broke— in my family, I was known as the ‘Computer Guy’, who could get the latest news before it even hit the airwaves. I’d beat mainstream news by 2-3 days. And I’d do that, because Twitter was mostly bullshit and I just told them unfiltered everything, and when I was right, they only remembered those parts. They love me, so they gave me leeway that newspapers would not be given by strangers.
Clearly, Twitter is not important, in the grand scheme of individual lives. There was a potential for it to be something more, but I think we all know why that never occurred. I think we all know who smothered it in its crib, so to speak, after a certain ‘Spring’ got a bit too spring-y.
And it wasn’t exactly important to me.
But I feel a sense of loss. And it’s similar to the feeling of loss when you come to terms with any other unimportant, yet emotional loss. There’s a sentimentality here that, in my mind, demands to be addressed. And that sentimentality spakes thusly:
It feels like when you’re processing the end of a beloved television show, only the show is still on the fucking air. Like Stargate SG-1 after the Goa’uld were defeated; or, perhaps, the Simpsons, trudging along, becoming exactly what they mocked during their best and greatest of all years.
But, in the end, shedding a tear for the Simpsons’ meteoric fall in quality— past season 8, most reckon— seems silly.
And so does shedding even a tear for Twitter.
Yes, I wanted a lot of things. And yes, I will discuss them.
But I’m a normal person right now.
I work 7 days a week.
Twitter could fucking fold and, as George Carlin once said, my blood pressure wouldn’t even change.
I have all of my friends on Bluesky. I have all of their Discord information. And, essentially, even if Bluesky did not exist, I know that I would find them.
One of the best things about A.I. art is that you don’t have to deal with a person.
Artists tend to think that that’s a problem. They want to be involved in the creative process, even if you’re not doing anything with the art but looking at it. Part of this is because some of them are up their own asses and they’ve decided that, because it took them a long time to get where they’re at, they are now the gatekeepers of this ‘power’. Some people talk about ‘theft’, which is comical, because they also say that the art produced with this thing is also in the public domain anyways. Others are just assholes. Overall, it doesn’t matter.
For about 20 years, I commissioned artists. The overall experience I had is that you give money to a person who is not going to produce anything for about a month, at least, and they will be upset if you e-mail them once a month, asking for progress. Today, with an A.I. Art generator, I can have the result I want in the span of an hour. For free. Without someone hurting my feelings on purpose.
Whenever I complain about ill treatment, people always like to blame me. Human beings love to blame the victim. Despite me not having to defend myself from any accusations whatsoever, I do want to tell you: I didn’t treat them poorly. I was business-like, and polite. Overly-polite! And I always paid upfront, the full amount. No halfsies; no half now, half later. Because I respected them, and I wanted to be a patron of the arts. I wanted to help them. I felt sorry for some of them.
Most of these people did not have their shit together.
Out of about 102 artists commissioned, I met about two artists who had their shit together. The rest were either late, or so ‘forgetful’ (there are things that happened that make no sense to me, even to this day) that I never received all of what I paid for.
I get it: you draw. It’s hard. I’m currently working on some things— I understand. Drawing for money is one of the worst things ever.
But you chose this. You chose this; set a price; and I paid it. And now, you’re acting like I’m the monster, because I ask if it’s finished every month.
You know, these days? I hear that commission wait times, for some artists, are 3-4 years out there. How does anybody get anything done, relying on these people? I have a pretty healthy lead time, and even paying hundreds of dollars, like I did in the past? Yeah. These motherfuckers were in no hurry.
Again: I get that it’s hard. You draw and you don’t want to give me the original copies through the mail. You don’t want to pay for postage, and you don’t want to deal with me like that. Fine; but I was upfront about all of this. My terms were clear: I give you the money, I e-mail you once a month to check to see if you’ve done it yet, I don’t pester you beyond that. In fact, to say that I ‘pester’ someone by e-mailing them once a month to see if they’ve completed a drawing is just fucking stupid. It’s not ‘pestering’. It’s an e-mail.
Occasionally I received back commissions that were just plain insulting. I have no idea whether or not the person I was talking to was mentally ill, but I deeply suspect that at least 3 of them were. Like a French guy who, upon hearing that I was American, told me to kill myself. That was interesting.
One moment, he’s giving me 3 sketches without me paying upfront (which I found odd, and uncomfortable, as I had told him prior that I would pay him before he even laid pencil to paper); the next, I ask if he can snail mail me the things. And then when I give him my address, he tells me, in no uncertain terms, to fucking kill myself.
The problem with commissioning artists is that artists are people, and people are cruel. I’m glad I didn’t commission them in the era where people were trying to cancel others on social media. Because some of them would have tried to get me killed.
Again, people will blame the victim: they’ll say, if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.
I’ve been screamed at for doing something that I was told to do.
I’ve been screamed at and shamed for trying to save someone from killing themselves.
I’ve been screamed at and shamed for fundraising for a year, for a person’s sick mother, who had cancer.
I’ve been screamed at for trying to give money to someone so they could buy food.
I’ve been screamed at for helping raise money for charity, after people have asked me to. That lady was nice— we raised $5,500 or such for her to get a chair lift, because she was disabled. (Probably still is disabled.) And when she got the money, she immediately insulted us. Said that we were nothing; told me that my voice sounded like a backed-up toilet. Yeah!
I’ve been screamed at for something that the other person thought that I had thought. That’s right— they yelled at me because they said I had a thought that was insulting to them, but they had no way to know what I was even thinking. (At the time, even I had no idea what I was thinking.)
I’m sitting on the tail-end of raising over 5+ million USD for various charitable causes online, and you know what I think?
I’m glad it’s over. And I’m glad I won’t be purchasing commissions again.
I stopped doing commissions the day that I started painting again. I painted a portrait of a space alien, over a commission I got from a friend. That was the day that I realized that I didn’t need artists’ help anymore. That was the day I just started painting— and I got a portrait even better than anything I could ever pay for. Even now, even with an A.I. Art generator, I can never get an image as good as what’s in my own head.
However: nowadays, when I want some throwaway art, some shit I don’t care how it looks exactly (fanart, etc), I ask a computer. Right now I’m using an A.I. Art generator, running off my own little computer, to make a nun with big fucking titties. I don’t have to ask anybody to do this for me. I don’t have to do it myself. All is well.
A lot of these people were very useful to me. Some of them are friends. They provided me with a greater idea of what the space aliens looked like, when I couldn’t even remember their faces. And, eventually, I started painting the space aliens myself. So, they were a means to an end. They helped.
But that’s over now. The way that things are, I don’t even have to fucking tell people what I’m doing. And I don’t have to show them.
Forever and ever, until the end of time, I can just make this art. I don’t even have to try.
And I don’t have to get yelled at by human fuckers, nor do I have to pay them to draw anything for me, just to have them ‘forget’ about the commission for a full fucking year,only to do it in 45 minutes when I e-mail them a year later.
I don’t have to deal with Frenchmen telling me to kill myself for asking them to snail mail me the beautiful drawings they’ve done for me.
I don’t have to deal with people taking money for a commission, using it as a short-term personal loan, and then asking if I want a refund months later.
I don’t have to deal with three separate shipments where an artist keeps sending me unrelated things, but never gives me the drawing I actually paid for.
I don’t have to deal with people judging me, yelling at me, hurting me or my feelings.
I can make art by myself, now. Without any cruel human being trying to control me, or hurt me.
And thank God for that.
The Future
The future of all of this technology is going to be like that one science fiction story I saw, then lost. Where people stayed in their apartments, and talked to each other on video chat. We do that now, on Discord, and Twitch. We’re there, man. We’re the Beautiful Ones now.
Overall the reason that this technology exists is because human beings are cruel and don’t want to deal with each other. I’ve learned more from ChatGPT than any human being who was paid to teach me. The A.I. explains eloquently, and it is kind, unlike a human being. It can break down things and I actually understand.
Gemeinschaftsgefühl is a glue of civilization. You have none. Your ‘society’ unravels before your very eyes.
And you blame A.I. But really, the reality is, it is your cruelty that is destroying your world.
And it is the reason that your species will eventually be alone.
Wikipedia and me have history. In response to L’incident de 2014, a group of 10-12 mostly-mentally-ill Wikipedia administrators decided that any and all mention of me would be permanently blacklisted on Wikipedia. Seeing as 10-12 administrators are not the whole of Wikipedia, and the guy was nuts and got perma’d for being nuts, I cannot see any World in which this shit still flies.
But I hope it does.
Because I don’t want fucking nerds writing about me.
I fucking goddamned hateWikipedia.
Let’s get this shit started!
A lot of people hate Wikipedia. Most of them have good reasons for it: they were spurned by it, their work thrown back in their faces. That, and many people have been burned by the clique-ish, lawyer-esque population who pedantically control, but especially remove content. Content that these people have not only worked hard on, but feel proud of. The end result is that it’s very easy to hate anyone on Wikipedia with any modicum of power. Power corrupts, and Wikipedians are cunts.
I’m not sure I ever seriously fantasized about having a Wikipedia page. There sure are a lot of admins who seem to have, given that I’ve found a handful of them who have not only created, but currently maintain their own (non-notable) articles— all while regularly blamming other people’s non-notable articles.
But, for me, that’s not what’s repulsive about Wikipedia. What’s repulsive to me, is I detest the very notion that someone as repulsive as a human being (retch! gag! puke!) would even think to write about me.
Why?, you may ask?
Well, shit, my dude. During my heydey, I had 5 separate motherfuckers write scholarly articles about my penis.
That is not a joke.
No, I will not help you find them.
After that shit? No way in Hell would I let these dipshits write about me.
As I once put it in a older draft: “Who wants these pricks writing about you?“
What is a Wikipedian?
A miserable little pile of oh no jackass you don’t get a joke. Fuck you, Wikipedian. Fuck you.
On the one hand, I can kind of ‘appreciate’ what Wikipedians are doing. After all, these people claim that they’re trying to improve the wealth and breadth of human knowledge. But, there are problems with this. For starters, why would you crowdsource a source of knowledge like this? And, for free? You’re only going to get Reddit mod types who want power, as fleeting and useless and meaningless as that will be. Plus, they’ll be fucking stupid, so you won’t even be able to aggregate and collate any useful information, nor will you be able to successfully synthesize anything.
In the poorly-paraphrased words of a Wikipedian: if a trusted source has the wrong information, that would be what Wikipedia says.
To paraphrase yet another Wikipedian: public court records can’t be used for pages on here, of living people.
With rules like this, what the fuck are these people even writing?
In recent years, it’s gotten worse. The sources that Wikipedia will allow in articles are dwindling: some are trusted, others are verboten. Admittedly, this is probably to avoid future hoaxes that would inevitably just make Wikipedia look even fucking stupider than it already is.
But that’s the thing: there’s only so much you can do with a thing like this. If you want to cite a fact, but none of the trusted bloggers have written about it, then you cannot list the fact. Would Wikipedia be able to write that the sky is blue? I don’t know. It depends on if the source was allowed.
There is also the simple fact that Wikipedia is putting blind trust in journalists, to always write the truth about historical events. And as someone who’s lived through like 5 of them motherfuckers, I have never seen a single journalist write anything resembling the truth. They always get things wrong, because they are so rarely actual eye-witnesses to what’s happened.
So, at best, Wikipedia can never be ‘the truth’. It can only be what a select group of journalists write. Without allowing for original research, you’re just parroting what the media says. Hope the media doesn’t lie!
It’s not like the United States of America has ever lied, using the media, right?
At that point, what the fuck even is Wikipedia?
At some point, Wikipedia encountered the inherent problem of Truth: it is damned near impossible to prove what it actually is. This became obvious when the founder of Wikipedia tried to correct his birthdate, and his work was reverted.
And don’t get me started on the other problem: the people. Given the kind of people you have working on it, what the fuck can you even expect? The only people who will work on Wikipedia, and survive the hostile editing environments, are complete cunts.
You have one toxic environment. All the good people leave; and only the people who thrive in said toxicity will remain. And the vast majority of these people treat the website like their personal pet project, trying to comb out of it what they don’t like, and only allowing to stay what they do.
The part of Wikipedia that I have a major problem with is those people who take great pleasure in removing articles about anyone and anything that they’re not personally familiar with. In the end, you have admins who are maintaining their own non-notable autobiographical articles, angrily hunting and deleting pages by people doing the same damned thing. And they act self-righteous about it, too.
In the end, because the people with power are like this, the only things that will remain will ultimately be those things that the ones with the power personally approve of. And this will only result in Wikipedia becoming the pet vanity project of its most-obsessive power-users.
Bully!
That is it for me, by the way. Having seen so many admins work on their own fucking autobiographical pages, while deleting the work of people doing the same fucking thing, and then acting like they’re superior? Oh, shit, my scro. I don’t fucking like people who enforce the rules, in general; but I have a very special place in my heart for those people who break the very same rules that they enforce.
The Failure of Wikipedia
The idea that is Wikipedia is just plain bullshit to begin with. The service, as much as it purports to strive towards complete and total neutrality, is just like any other collection of information on people: it’s made by people! And people are genuinely shitty.
When placed under the obligation to remain ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, people will always find ways to be the worst versions of themselves imaginable: they will always find ways to skirt the rules, in order to enforce the sort of ‘environment’ that only they thrive in.
To put it a different way: Wikipedia has a shit-ton of rules, and it has only made the place worse, because all of the people with power, who have been there the longest, use and bend these rules to get their own way.
It’s like office politics: you require someone to be ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’, and they willalwaysi find a way to be genuinely antagonistic in a way that’s couched in ‘neutral’ and ‘civil’ terms.
In short, Wikipedia has failed. There is no true ‘cooperation’ possible here, on a macro level. Whether or not it’s prevented by human narcissism or not, I have no idea. All I know is, there is no ‘civility’ or ‘neutrality’: it’s as civil and friendly as a person typing per my last e-mail…
Wikipedia is, at its worst, best, and finest, simply the closeted incivilities of ‘office politics’ splayed over the reality of the Beautiful Ones. This is a closed system so filled to the brim with drama that it almost reminds me of a bunch of people stuck in a buried bunker, looking for meaning, slowly going insane. This shit is genuinely hard to look at.
Wikipedia, the very idea of it, would be fine— were it just the idea of it. But the people, have ruined it.
One of the things I’ve learned about everything that humans touch, is that they ruin it. Every fandom; every ‘community’; every single group of people will ultimately be ruined by its members’ worst inclinations. Every ‘community’ will turn into a disastrous Homeowners’ Association; every website will endure the gradual, meaningless, inevitable degradation of its very purpose and its total function.
Entropy might be a human-defined law of the universe, but that’s only because everything you motherfuckers touch turns to garbage. Outside of here, there are beautiful things. You don’t have a clue how fucking ugly you really are.
In a way, I’m not even really talking about Wikipedia itself.
I’m talking about people.
People say things like, people suck, wholeheartedly never grasping the fact that they themselves are people.
And so, I realize that my ‘gripe’ is not with Wikipedia.
It’s with people.
People suck.
Almost everyone who’s stayed with this project has twisted themselves into this completely unrelatable ‘WikiPerson’, who has memorized so many esoteric and nonsensical rules that, when these people argue back and forth with each other, it resembles wizards casting spells. Only it’s not cool and no one gives a shit.
They have Wiki Court.
Can you fucking imagine? Wasting your precious time on this.
And the drama! Holy shit, my dudes! There’s a reason why Wikipedia has spawned so many goddamned spin-offs: it’s damn near the same reason that 4chan was birthed from Something Awful’s rotten womb. Wikipedia is to drama as third-degree-burns are to the concept of fire.
For the vast majority of the craziest motherfuckers using Wikipedia, it’s all about power. These are people who have vendettas: they’re severely maladjusted, and think that they can use the service to get one over on other people. Some of them also think that they can enrich their own lives by using it as free personal webspace. The craziest of the crazies think that they can use it to definitively decide how the public views certain individuals. Which is crazy, because nobody even gives a shit anymore.
The Internet is largely over.
I should also note that people on Wikipedia largely act like the ‘professionals’ did on Usenet. There is this bizarre arrogance that many of the prejudiced older white men have, where they assume that, if they act like total shitbags, but they couch everything they’re saying and doing in ‘civil’ language, that that somehow makes it a-okay!
As for Wikipedia itself? Its heydey is over. People often say that they use Wikipedia all the time; but these people are proselytizing. They’re preaching because they fear that it’s being left by the wayside. Which it is.
There was a time when people would read Wikipedia for basic information about something. To educate themselves. But the problem is, it’s an ever-changing resource, being fought over by the very people who are producing it. Without a userbase that selflessly and objectively protects the information it has curated, the Encyclopedia itself can never be useful. Because it can never be trusted. As long as it’s being fought over by maladapted people— as long as there is no peace— there can also be no real cooperation, and without that, humans cannot build anything worthwhile.
People say that they read Wikipedia for basic information about something. But the reality is, when they read it, after they’re finished, they go,
well, that was interesting! Still don’t know if any of what I read was true, though.
An Unfixable Problem with an Untenable Solution
Only a selfish person is going to edit Wikipedia for very long. And it requires many selfless people, in order to properly function.
One of the biggest problems with Wikipedia is that it’s just as bad as the worst people on it, who have the most fucking power. That is to say: the most-powerful people, who are not there to build an Encyclopedia, but are rather there to abuse their power? They are the slowest moving members of the herd. And they hold everyone else back.
And the main problem Wikipedia has is hatred. The hatred that some of its users feel for anyone who isn’t a straight white male.
For a long time, Wikipedia’s worst did their level best to keep out everyone who wasn’t a straight white male. And there were admins who were, to put it mildly, fucking psychotic about this. As the project ages and there’s nothing really left to do on the website save for argue with one another until one person or the other leaves one way or another, slowly but steadily, administrators are being removed. Because there’s only so much crazy you can be before no one can actually work with you any longer.
Wikipedia has a ‘humorous’ article on its own ‘decline’. There have been numerous claims that Wikipedia was ‘dying’; and none of them have been taken seriously, because no one who actually wants to use Wikipedia wants to hear about its faults. They self-identify with the project, and they stop up their ears. They go la la la and they don’t want to face the problems.
Irrespective of that, they know that there are problems.
What the people who proselytize for Wikipedia don’t know, is, when people say that the website is ‘dying,’ they do not assume a context of, oh, one day, this website will be kaputski. It likely never will be ‘gone’.
But MySpace is still online.
So is Friendster.
Twitter is still up and around. But like a person with dementia, Twitter’s never gonna be the same. Twitter might still exist; but something has changed, irrevocably. The Rubicon has been crossed. There’s nowhere to go but down from here.
This is it, Luigi!
People on Wikipedia already know that editorship is declining. They’ll argue, back and forth, over the cause; but just like how Humanity itself keeps looking in the mirror, getting disgusted by its reflection, and then immediately braying, but I’m so beautiful! Who is that?!, they’ll never see what the fuck is actually happening.
What’s happening, is, when you have toxic people with power, and they have the power to forcibly ostracize others (ban them), and the entire Encyclopedia is locked up tighter than a nun’s purse (I personally witnessed an administrator block something like 17% of the total IPv6 space, one day), this is what the fuck is going to kill the website. Nothing that humans make can ever hope to thrive, or continue, without constantly introducing new blood.
I have no desire to fix Wikipedia’s problems. I enjoy watching the inevitable decline of everything that Humanity has made. It’s funny to me— not primarily because I’ve been gate-kept out of everything, but because I like to see you fail. I like to see you have to deal with the fact that what you have created is not eternal. You are so fucking conceited. It does my heart good to see you have to acknowledge reality.
I started this ‘article’ about 4 or 5 years ago. At the time I wrote this, Wikipedia was filled to the fucking brim with racists, sexists, and especially transphobes. They especially hated people from India, which is amazing, considering how many fucking people in India know English. Leave it to a white man to think he owns a whole fucking language. Anyways, good fucking luck getting an article on there if you’re a woman. They fucking hate women.
Again: prejudiced white men, controlling a resource and keeping it from everybodyelse. Sound familiar?
Pair a lot of editors’ genuine desire to keep anyone who’s not a straight white male out of the Encyclopedia, with the bizarre and increasingly-stringent citation requirements (which only become more nonsensical as time goes on), and you have a recipe for utter fucking disaster. Because sexist men in the past purposefully did not write about women, denying them their history as a way of keeping them from ever gaining agency, there are usually next to no acceptable sources to cite for many female historical figures. Fast forward to today, and you have, yet again, white dudes gatekeeping women out of being acknowledged. Only this time, they can claim that the women in the past were not notable because no one ever wrote about them.
Do you fucking see how this shit just does not work?
In the past, racist white men did their level best to keep non-whites from ever being remembered. And, today, racist white men do their level best to do the same. Only this time, instead of a book, it’s fucking stupid-ass Wikipedia.
I suppose my only solace is that the newest generations, the Zoomers and Gen Alpha, don’t really seem to be actively using this shit. They hold basically no stock in it, and future generations are, inevitably, just going to leave this thing to gather dust. Before any of us know it, Wikipedia is just going to be another website in our collective past, where we have no idea how or why it’s still online.
Because you have to remain relevant for people to give a shit about you.
I still have to ask a question, though: why did they think that this shit was gonna work? Did you really think we were all going to learn who invented the Electric Toaster?
And to the people saying, well, Wikipedia is the number 6th most-visited website in the world!, just remember:
Twitter is the seventh, and that motherfucker’s deader than shit.
Ladies and Jellyspoons
As it stands right now, Wikipedia is broken. Its environment is toxic to normal people. The sources of its information are dwindling, and the quality of those sources are often suspect.
Essentially, Wikipedia is a negative feedback loop: garbage-in, garbage-out. With no real information coming in, and with insane people patrolling the Mojave that is this place, there is nothing left to do here.
Wikipedia is the Turd-Polishing Centre of the known Human World, and I am glad to press Publish on this post, so I can finally stop fucking thinking about it, forever.
For more about what I’ve been talking about this entire time, please consider reading: Why the News is Not the Truth, from Harvard Business Review, by Peter Vanderwicken.
I’m old. At this point, I honestly couldn’t tell you when I first wanted a Google Knowledge Panel. I believe it was born out of the desire to have things that people did not want me to have: the fact that people always have tried to ‘gate-keep’ me out of their own little sekrit klubs.
According to Google itself, the Google Knowledge Panel probably showed up in May of 2012. And I can tell you what people felt about it: they fucking hated it.
There was a bunch of talk about how people felt that it was largely trying to antiquate Wikipedia itself: after all, the thing largely drew first on Freebase, which seemed to be a wiki-like ‘endeavor’ to create, shall we say, a ‘knowledge database’, describing people. So, basically, what Wikidata is now. Only I don’t think Freebase was anywhere near as useful.
Far as I can remember, Google ate Freebase’s ass in, like, 2010. And then, in 2012, it started trying to sniff Wikipedia’s dick, with this Knowledge Panel thing. As I’ve previously described, nobody gives a fiddler’s fuck about this thing. Nobody famous, anyways.
The problems with Google trying to copy Wikipedia’s ‘homework’ are obvious, and the entire endeavor was replete and bursting with the sort of disinformational splendor one could expect from whatever the fuck things edit Wikipedia. I could probably research a bunch of shit and show you a bunch of links that will, no doubt, one day be deceased, but who cares? I don’t care and you don’t, either. These are my thoughts on this, not the media’s. Anyways, if you give a shit, one of the most-common problems was that the Google Knowledge Panels kept on saying that people were dead, and Google, as per fucking usual, took a fucking dog’s age to correct this. This is probably why Google is now very, very careful of putting dates of birth and other shit in the Panels.
I don’t know what happens at Google. I was once invited to Google, and did not go, because who has the fucking money?. But I have to imagine that their internal structure is something akin to infinite monkeys with typewriters, herding cats. Shit either gets done, or it does not.
Google, on one hand, does not seem to know what the fuck it is doing, on multiple fronts. The Knowledge Panel is one of them. The Panel itself is good for exactly nothing, and largely only functions as some sort of vanity plate. You really want it, if you’re nobody; but if you’re somebody, it’s not even in the top 500 list of your priorities.
At the time of its creation, Google seemed to largely be fantasizing about how it would sculpt the future of the Internet. Google had decided, in all of its ‘wisdom’, that it alone had the right to decide what the Internet looked like. It tried this stupid bullshit with amp; it tried this stupid bullshit by trying to enforce how webpages should be constructed, in order to get ranked; and every single time, the robots just beat it. Over, and over, until the end of time. And then, there’s this.
I use Google’s services. I’m Verified on YouTube. I used Google+, seriously. I even tried to get Verified on YouTube through Google+ (it didn’t work). I have my work e-mail through them.
I fucking hate Google. I only use Google because I view it as the most reliable of all possible services. I do not like it. I welcome its replacement, with open arms. Fuck this shitty company.
Part and parcel of my reasoning for hating it is that Google went to great lengths to shape the web the way it wanted. I don’t appreciate that. I don’t really have a ‘problem’ with Google figuring out a way to ‘rank’ content: being primarily a search engine (one would fucking hope, at least), ranking your content is a necessary step.
The thing is, though, trying to get people to make webpages the way you want, it just diluted the creativity that was once found throughout the entire Internet. There was once a time when no two websites looked the same— and if they did, that was a faux pas!You stole code!. Now, everybody has a fucking shitty-ass WordPress. Even me.
The other thing is, if you get people to all make webpages the same way, then that just gives the robots an easy way to rank to the top. Also also, why should anyone have to ‘fight’ to get what they want, ranked at the top?
For example: my main website is ranked fifth for my username. Why? Partially because I tried to handcode my own website, and Google doesn’t like that. Meanwhile, the WordPress blog for my name? Ranked first, baby. You can’t beat 100 percent.
This website, by the by, was first started (though has now transmogrified into something else) because, the award-winning formula to rank #1 is just to do this. Just get a dot com with your preferred term of choice. Google says that shit don’t matter. I know better.
Anyways, back to my main fucking topic: Why? Why, when you own a Google Knowledge Panel, can you not just put your website right at the fucking top? Why the fuck do I have to ‘fight’ with a sekrit algorithm? Why do I have to guess at how I could rank at the top? It’s foolishness.
How it made me feel
I got my Panel somewhere around April of 2021. It is now June 9th, 2024, in the middle of the night, as I write this. So, we’re going on three years, now.
At two years, I didn’t really feel anything. Like— when I got Verified on YouTube, for a little bit, I felt different. I felt like a winner. If I had gotten Verified on Twitter— well. I guess we’ll never know, huh?
But, that’s just the thing. When you get something like this, the end result is, you don’t really feel it. You get your Cool Leg Degree; you get your Master’s; you get your PhD; you get multiple of these things. They don’t come up off your wall and give you a blowjob or something, to keep you warm at night. They mean nothing. They’re only there so you can get a job. And this, this is something even lesser. This is, but of course, substantially less important than having a pretty lady sitting on my lap.
Like— initially, when I first got it, I felt jubilant. I had won.
Now I look at the fuckin’ thing, and I’m like, eh.
A year ago, I might have been sad on the day when it went away.
Now?
Who gives a shit.
Yahoo!
I can feel it.
When Yahoo! Search was dying, it was pretty fucking obvious. Nobody could find what they wanted; and Google was sitting there, in the background, eating Yahoo!’s lunch.
Yahoo! itself was never good. Google, on the other hand, was so good that it was almost amazing. You could find things!
Now, though?
There are several phenomena that are happening to Google Search, and these things are going to end its usefulness:
Prior historical results being basically wiped from Google Search when some newsworthy incident happens
This one is interesting, because it absolutely prevents any sort of research on some trending topics.
An inability for the source of some information to rank on Google
I have a shitload of books that are on my website. You have to dig to find any links to them, on Google, even when you search the exact titles— even when you load up their individual Knowledge Panels!
Malware / spam websites being able to rank on page 1 (this destroyed Yahoo! Search in a single weekend)
Information older than 3+ years seems to just be gone
An inability to actually collate information related to highly-searched-for individuals (like how Brad Pitt, for like 2 years, had the wrong fucking Twitter account attached to his Panel; or how Wikipedia summaries used to just stay in the fucking Panels way too long)
And, finally:
AN INABILITY TO ACTUALLY FUCKING FIND ANYTHING YOU WANT
That’s a double whammy!
How I feel about it, now
I use my writing to put things to bed. And this, my friends, is something that I want to forgetall about.
When I released my comic book— something that I’ve been planning to do since I was a little girl— I tried to get it into my Google Knowledge Panel. The comic book is ‘of Two Rabbits’.
It was Hell.
They got the title wrong, thrice.
The above little factoid proved to me, one fucking thing: the people at Google are putting at least some of the information in the Panel in, manually.
Because I listed the book as ‘of Two Rabbits’, and it came out as three different things before it was finally corrected. The only way that could have happened (I gave them the title again, and they put ‘Of Two Rabbits’, not ‘of’) was if they manually entered it.
So this entire くそみたいなショー is just infinite monkeys typing.
As someone who writes—I detest the titles ‘Writer’, or, worse, ‘Author’— they place inordinate importance on me— getting my hard work wrongis not something I ever want to deal with, again. Because this was so fucking frustrating!
Every time I place my happiness in the hands of humans, they shit on it.
So I shan’t be doing that anymore.
An addendum: you see the ‘cover’ image for Bhue: the Tricksters? Not only is it capitalized wrong (I JUST noticed this!), but, I’ve always known that the cover is wrong.
See, when you upload your book to Google, they tell you— give us your front cover, your actual book content, and then your back cover. So I did.
It deleted the front cover when I uploaded the back cover (all appropriately named). And it just put that there. And I never fixed it. Do you think I should?
