Some random anecdotes from my time on the Internet:
20 or so years back, I joined The WELL. I only lasted a couple months. It was impossible to have an interesting conversation without longtime members popping into the thread to "helpfully" point out that this had already been discussed back in 1988, 1993 and twice in 1997, with links to the relevant threads. I figured, if The WELL wants to be an information archive rather than a social space, that's fine, but Wikipedia is less expensive, better-curated, and easier to search.
About 15 years back, I gave up on contributing to Stack Exchange, and about 5 years back I largely stopped clicking on SE links in my search results. Similar story. The culture of preservationism meant that the site tended to favor pre-existing information and opinions. Back in the day, it just made the site uncomfortable for newcomers. More recently, it's also undermined the site's merit as an knowledge trove due to a tendency to favor out of date information.
Also about 15 years back, I became an admin on a Web forum. I observed firsthand that having a searchable record of posting history was a social negative that largely served to fuel flamewars. More Internet-savvy users were very adept at searching through the post history to dig up dirt on each other, hunt for evidence of people's opinions changing over time in an effort to try to call each other hypocrites, etc.
The rise of social media has only made this worse; Twitter mobs' ability to dig through a target's history for ill-considered or easily-misconstrued tweets that they can use for character assassination purposes is truly a sight to behold. And it has created a situation where more level-headed, continent people tend toward circumspection or even avoiding posting altogether.
On the professional side of things, at work I find that the usual corporate information troves - Confluence, ticketing systems, and group messaging - are rarely useful as an information trove, precisely because we hoard everything. It makes actually finding the information you're looking for in these systems darn near infeasible. Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") is only true in the short term. In the longer term, 90% of what remains is compost, because it only ever had ephemeral value. Digging the reasoning behind a 5 year old technical decision out of a 10 year old Jira system is like looking for a chocolate chip in a cesspit.
Unfortunately, we've collectively painted ourselves into a corner in this department. Once upon a time, we curated information because we simply didn't have the physical space to keep all that paper indefinitely. Cheap digital storage and keyword search has tricked us into thinking that there's no cost to storing everything, though, so over the past quarter century or so we've gotten rid of all the secretaries, librarians and archivists.
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Some random anecdotes from my time on the Internet:
20 or so years back, I joined The WELL. I only lasted a couple months. It was impossible to have an interesting conversation without longtime members popping into the thread to "helpfully" point out that this had already been discussed back in 1988, 1993 and twice in 1997, with links to the relevant threads. I figured, if The WELL wants to be an information archive rather than a social space, that's fine, but Wikipedia is less expensive, better-curated, and easier to search.
About 15 years back, I gave up on contributing to Stack Exchange, and about 5 years back I largely stopped clicking on SE links in my search results. Similar story. The culture of preservationism meant that the site tended to favor pre-existing information and opinions. Back in the day, it just made the site uncomfortable for newcomers. More recently, it's also undermined the site's merit as an knowledge trove due to a tendency to favor out of date information.
Also about 15 years back, I became an admin on a Web forum. I observed firsthand that having a searchable record of posting history was a social negative that largely served to fuel flamewars. More Internet-savvy users were very adept at searching through the post history to dig up dirt on each other, hunt for evidence of people's opinions changing over time in an effort to try to call each other hypocrites, etc.
The rise of social media has only made this worse; Twitter mobs' ability to dig through a target's history for ill-considered or easily-misconstrued tweets that they can use for character assassination purposes is truly a sight to behold. And it has created a situation where more level-headed, continent people tend toward circumspection or even avoiding posting altogether.
On the professional side of things, at work I find that the usual corporate information troves - Confluence, ticketing systems, and group messaging - are rarely useful as an information trove, precisely because we hoard everything. It makes actually finding the information you're looking for in these systems darn near infeasible. Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") is only true in the short term. In the longer term, 90% of what remains is compost, because it only ever had ephemeral value. Digging the reasoning behind a 5 year old technical decision out of a 10 year old Jira system is like looking for a chocolate chip in a cesspit.
Unfortunately, we've collectively painted ourselves into a corner in this department. Once upon a time, we curated information because we simply didn't have the physical space to keep all that paper indefinitely. Cheap digital storage and keyword search has tricked us into thinking that there's no cost to storing everything, though, so over the past quarter century or so we've gotten rid of all the secretaries, librarians and archivists.