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Comment by zokier

3 years ago

Its good to remember that oral traditions have been (and still are) huge part of humanity; in many ways discord can be seen as internet iteration of that age old part of culture.

If we are going to supplant oral traditions with a massive disconnected worldwide web (sometimes of lies), and replace learned knowledge with 'googling' as a skill- whats the harm in trying to 1. make technologies that will protect the information, or 2. generate a culture of preservation to protect such information.

  • Because, as someone else on the Internet put it so eloquently, information wants to be wrong. Sure, you can build your technologies and make your culture and it'll even work for a while, but the average person doesn't really care about all that infrastructure and the rules for preserving content. It's (one of the reasons) why search engines are pushing LLMs so hard - few actually want to search for stuff, they just want to put words in a box and get an answer. They don't even necessarily care if the answer is (very) truthful, just if it's useful!