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Thursday, June 15, 2017

Alt-Tech options - Vox day

Jon del Arroz lays them out at The Federalist:
Where Can Users Get Unbiased Reference Information?

Infogalactic launched as an alternative to Wikipedia during the height of the toxic political climate of 2016. Wikipedia moderators at the time began deleting information that could paint conservatives positively, and replaced those articles with information from editorials with notorious left-wing biases. Vox Day, founder of Infogalactic, said these problems stemmed back to Wikipedia’s beginning.

When asked what he thought triggered the company’s censorship, Vox said, “anything ideologically or politically controversial. The 538 thought police, or ‘active admins’ as they are called, are hard core SJWs deeply committed to policing the Wikipedia content. For example, three of them squat on the page about me and will respond within minutes to remove anything they deem excessively positive.”

I found similar results across the Wikipedia pages of prominent right-wing voices. So what does Infogalactic do differently? “We are designing a very different system that allows the user, rather than the admin, to determine which version of the page he sees,” Vox said. “Our perspective filters will render the power of the admin entirely irrelevant with regards to content; we are utilizing a horizontal model rather than a vertical one. So, there is no reason whatsoever to engage in edit wars. It’s not applicable.”

The perspective filter is where Infogalactic shines as an innovative concept, allowing a user to determine what content he or she would like to see. The user can choose the liberal view on a topic, a conservative one, or even a variety of other factors. This gives users more agency about the information they receive. Infogalactic will have three different filters each with ten different sub-settings to allow robust user customization.

This provides much more freedom regarding the information that can be posted on a topic, and for readers, who can choose how to see the world, including how their opposition views their topics of interest. The end result, Vox says, “is more neutral, more objective, and more accurate.” All of Wikipedia’s current database has been uploaded to Infogalactic, and its hardworking volunteers have added what Vox approximates to be 1 percent of new content to its information databases.

The Brave browser has a built-in setting to allow users to switch default searches to Infogalactic, and will automatically search Infogalactic if a user types :i into the URL bar with his search. Other browsers have extensions that automatically switch Wikipedia searches to the Infogalactic page.
If you're not using Infogalactic - and Infogalactic News - yet, you really should be. We're now in Phase Two of five, so we're nowhere near full functionality yet, but we're already pretty much caught up with Wikipedia on a daily basis, as this page should suffice to demonstrate.

Jon also has a new book out from Superversive Press. I have to say, I like the cover.