A couple weeks ago on Reddit, I ran across an AMA with Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. He’s starting a new social platform called WT.Social. Here’s his pitch.
It’s behind a registration wall, and in that AMA, some people are saying that they only allow in a certain number of people at a time. Wales confirmed, saying that they don’t want to overwhelm the system too quickly.
I watched this youtube (just the first one that came up in the search) about it. He says it’s boring, and there aren’t that many people there. Makes sense since it’s just starting.
I haven’t registered yet. I’m hoping that some people here might tell me if it’s worth it. Wales made it sound interesting. Anyone else think it’s worth trying?
I’ve been admitted. They push hard for you to invite others to join, which I am ignoring. I haven’t spent a lot of time on it yet. I’m not sure that I see much difference from Flipboard or another aggregator. I will continue exploring.
historically, facebook started out with no ads … eventually, the investors forced mark-z for drastic changes … hence, ads and data-mining. took a long time for members to realize their data was being ‘farmed’. you think wt.social will be any different? only a matter of time before revenue generators will be inducted … with or without members’ knowledge.
Of course any platform can turn heel and screw its user base, and it happens sometimes. But… Facebook never claimed that they would be ad-free, or protect privacy, or respect user data. Facebook’s only stated mission was to become worth a billion dollars, with the help of anybody who cared to invest. They never lied or concealed their intent, they just made an enormous amount of money by exploiting a legal/ethical gray area that most of us only saw in hindsight, and many still have no problem with.
WT specifically says it’s not going to do any of that, it will work on donations and not raise money from investors. If your goal isn’t to become filthy rich via profiteering, then this sort of project isn’t really that expensive or difficult. Wales made Wikipedia huge this way, therefore his track record is credible and his intentions are credible.
I will say… you can expect the site to be riddled with ads for itself, i.e. endless pleas for donations to keep the site running. A minor hassle, but again, this is how Wikipedia works and it’s not a huge annoyance.
I’m pretty sick of Facebook, so I signed up for WT Social, and have been admitted. I haven’t spent a lot of time there yet. I’ll follow this thread to help me better understand it, and may come back here when I’ve got a better sense of WTS and have some thoughts on it. It’s strange and somewhat puzzling at the moment, but it would be nice if it became a more trustworthy alternative to FB.
With people in the thread trying it (thanks for that!), I thought I probably should too since I started this.
I registered. It asks for name, e-mail, password, date of birth (need to be over 13) and language of choice. The next page asks you to pick the communities you want to join. They call them subwikis. They’re very similar to subreddits and the process is similar to the sign up at reddit. Most of them were technologically related with politics and photography thrown in. It looks like the Reddit crowd much more than the Pinterest crowd based on topics. On my list, there wasn’t a cooking or leisure subwiki.
Just my personal feeling that the male centered topics are more dominant than the female centered topics based on my first round of choices.
Then it says you’re on a waiting list but you have two choices to speed up the process. You can donate or send links to other people. I didn’t want to do either of those, but there are no other buttons to push, so I hit next.
That took me to the main feed which again looks pretty similar to reddit’s front page. That was confusing because wasn’t I supposed to be waitlisted? Maybe I can’t post or something. I haven’t tried it yet.
One of the first articles was this one on Medium.com called “Don’t Let the Trolls Discourage You from Writing”
It was timely for me since I’ve been thinking about this lately. But it also got me to thinking about how these articles are curated. It’s obviously just written by someone who likes to write and then shares his stuff on WT.Social, as he notes in the article. That means that a lot of the articles can be self-published and self-promoted. It makes me wonder if the different subwikis have different rules for this. I know that a lot of reddit has rules about what can be self-promoted because it can get overwhelming after a while to see so many links to blogs.
As to using real names for sign up, Jimmy Wales says this in his AMA:
He doesn’t say how he’d police this issue.
I also read an article on WT.Social. A professor wrote:
I didn’t find the feed to be anything like Pinterest. It was much more like Reddit to me so far.
It will be interesting to me to see how this goes. Maybe the conversation will impact the conversations happening at the SDMB about what makes a platform grow.
I look forward to hearing other people’s thoughts on the platform.
You use Search to find the subwikis of interest. For example search for Cooking returns 4 subwikis. Then you do searches for more specialized types of cooking. For example Cakes returns a subwiki. Leisure just returns Susie Bright’s Leisure Hours, so you look for specialties. For example Running returns 7 subwikis.
It looks like there must be thousands of subwikis–and most are close to dead.
PS: Use both singular and plural forms of words when you do a search. For example mystery returns 3 subwikis and mysteries return a different one from the 3 you get for mystery.
Thanks! Is there a way to find out how many members there are in a subwiki on a search? I tried searching on the word ‘food’. There are a LOT of subwikis with really specific topics in a list. But the only way I can see to find how many members there are is to click on each one individually. That’s a waste of time since, as you say, most of them are dead. On Reddit, they give you the sub count so that you can decide which one you want to try.
Also, is there a place where they discuss what they’re trying to do and where people give feedback on the process? There’s a subwiki called community management. That’s NOT the place. That’s supposed to be for online communities in general.
As an aside, the second link I’ve clicked on there so far is a self-published article.
Just a heads up. The default is to send emails for every post on subscribed subwikis. Depending on how your email is set up, that could be a lot of emails. My inbox was getting some weird stuff. You can change that in your settings on WT.Social to either daily, weekly or none.
Alright, I signed up, too. I’ve become annoyed enough with facebook to give this a try, and although I’m doubtful that they’ll achieve their goal of combating clickbait and fake news, it’s clearly something we need to find some way to address, so I’m willing to give this a try.