The Wikipedia Dilemma

11/13/23 • 42 min

Today, I want to talk about Wikipedia – not because I think it’s under any real threat from Elon Musk or other external forces. Instead, I want to talk about it because I think it’s something of subtly profound importance in the internet age.

In a moment you’ll hear me speaking to Alex Hollender who was a staff member at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs the show, who led the 2023 re-resign of Wikipedia. We’re going to talk about what it’s like to work for the online encyclopedia, what makes it great, and how you build something with a view to it being accessed by as many people as possible. I think the conversation is a really valuable one for anyone interested in the creation of a tool like Wikipedia, but also designers and developers curious about how to subtle tweak the user experience, and how UX can change how we experience a site.

And here's Ned Ludd's third addition to their manifesto:

"THE RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE

If it is known, then it is known. The right to knowledge extends to all peoples regardless of race, class, age or geography. The attempt to gatekeep knowledge is a construct of the ruling class and must be overcome. The internet is the greatest redistribution mechanism for knowledge that the world has ever invented. It is like Gutenberg’s printing press on anabolic steroids. But the right to knowledge comes with the necessity of screening that knowledge for inaccuracies and falsehood. This is one of the great challenges of the internet age. But first we need to tear down the walls that exist between consumers of knowledge and that knowledge itself. Long live Aaron Swartz."

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.

The theme music is Internet Song by Apes of the State, used with their generous permission. The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

For socials go to NEDLUDDLIVES.COM and spread the word.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And here's Ned Ludd's third addition to their manifesto:

"THE RIGHT TO KNOWLEDGE

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.

The theme music is Internet Song by Apes of the State, used with their generous permission. The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

For socials go to NEDLUDDLIVES.COM and spread the word.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Our Smartphone Addiction

I’m a smartphone addict. I admit it. I’ve just checked my screentime on my Apple iPhone SE and it’s 1 hour and 28 minutes per day on average, a figure that should be shocking except that I know, from those around me, that it’s not very much by modern standards. I won’t name names but I know people who have 6, 7, 8 hours of screen time per day. This is the point at which the phone becomes another domain, another life. You will spend a less fortunate person’s lifetime staring at that screen, lost in the colours, the attention grabbers grabbing out at you. Dragging you in.

It's easy to get a sucked into moral panic about smartphone use. But when the original iPhone was released in 2007, the world was a different place. George W Bush was President. Tony Blair had left office just 2 days earlier. But fundamentally, we were a world waiting for the excitement of possibility. This was still an era where people had been wowed by the capacity of iPods, their ability to perform as glorified external hard-drives. Given that we now live in a smartworld, where everything from dishwashers to toasters are wi-fi enabled and accessible via the cloud, the world in 2007 was different. The idea of a phone which also had a camera was still novel. One that could also play music and podcasts? Unique.

So we can hardly blame our past selves for getting sucked into the world of the smartphone. BlackBerry, on one hand, were building a phone for business, for men in suits who needed to email their mistress or dealer. Apple, meanwhile, were creating the omni-phone, the quintessential smartphone experience. Slick, modern, all-encompassing. The good folks at Samsung and Huawei won’t like it, but every serious smartphone since has essentially been an iPhone. Big, vibrant display, and an incrementally improving set of functionalities.

To address all this, I called up Joe Hollier, who’s the co-founder of Light Phone, a company that manufactures so-called “dumb phones”. Initially, they raised some $415,000 via Kickstarter from terminally online folk who wanted a way of scaling back their smartphone addiction. That was for the model one. They’ve released a second version of the phone off the back of $3.5m of crowdfunding. The Light Phone II, which is on sale now, retails at a slightly eye-watering $299 – but the cost isn’t the interesting thing. What’s interesting is the philosophy.

I’m joined for this conversation by my friend Toby Mather, who’s CEO of Lingumi, an edtech company specialising in language tuition for children. I brought him along in order to provide the perspective of someone who’s building a business off the basis of the opposite impulse: getting people to spend more time on their phones.

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.

The theme music is Internet Song by Apes of the State, used with their generous permission. The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

For socials go to NEDLUDDLIVES.COM and spread the word.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

The Infinite Scroll Doom Loop

This morning, upon waking – it’s currently 7:50am as I type, but not as I read – I lay in bed for the first half hour and scrolled through Instagram Reels. This isn’t something I do very often but it’s a pursuit that people around me – ahem – do quite a lot of. To be honest, I still predominantly use Instagram in the old school way, scrolling through my home screen of people’s grid posts, or watching their stories.

But then occasionally I remember the existence of Reels and a few minutes later I’m sucked in. I am served endless videos of dogs, interspersed with memes about the foibles of heterosexual relationships. If there is an alternative algorithmic universe for my Reels feed, I have not discovered it. I have learned that not all dogs can handle stairs and not all men can manage a diary.

Instagram Reels is part of a suite of apps, the most popular apps of the present moment, which include Twitter – or X, if we’re calling it that – and Chinese giant TikTok, governed by a UX principle called “infinite scroll”. Do you remember how there was a time in architecture, a couple of decades ago, when you’d build your $20m villa in the Hollywood hills and just have a beautiful, formal rectangular pool? And then, suddenly, any pool at any pricey mansion had to become an “infinity pool”? It had to give that sense of the pool’s surface being unlimited, in a perfect union with sky or sea...

Well, unlimited is the word of the century. Infinite scroll is a tactic that was deployed predominantly to keep users on the app. Watchtime became the most important metric for apps, and therefore they sought to avoid offering users the opportunity to switch off, to take a break. I’m sure that the internal self-justification involved attempting to give users a more “frictionless” experience, but the impact was clear: people kept scrolling until their fingers and brains were numb.

Infinite scroll is here to stay, I’m sure, but there are also the whisperings of a fight back against the ubiquity of this technique. Daley Wilhelm is a UX writer in the US, and someone who has written about how we can stop the infinite scroll. That piece got a lot of pick-up and suggests – just a whisper – that there is a counter feeling, a sense that maybe we should start to rethink our relationship with endless screentime.

The Ned Ludd Radio Hour is a Podot podcast, written and presented by me, Nick Hilton.

The theme music is Internet Song by Apes of the State, used with their generous permission. The artwork is by Tom Humberstone.

For socials go to NEDLUDDLIVES.COM and spread the word.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.