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Posted by rebane2001 5 days ago

Show HN: Wikipedia as a doomscrollable social media feed(xikipedia.org)
439 points | 141 commentspage 2
renegat0x0 4 days ago|
- https://wikispeedruns.com/

- https://sixdegreesofwikipedia.com/

- https://www.wikitok.io/

sebastiennight 4 days ago||
I was not aware of WikiSpeedRuns, that's a fun one (and then the 2nd link you shared basically allows you to check how well you did)
aizk 4 days ago||
Thanks for the shoutout :)
morgengold 4 days ago||
I abadoned facebook since I couldnt stand the feed experience anymore. Recently learned about using https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr in combintation with extension https://www.fbpurity.com/ which give me a chronological feed of groups and people i actually want to hear from. The most astonishing experience is how calm I feel consuming this cleaned up feed. Almost all negative emotions seem to stem from the uncontrollable feed experience.
strich 5 days ago||
I was genuinely excited to try this and it sounded in theory like a lot of fun! Unfortunately yeah too slow to load.
sebastiennight 4 days ago||
I've been waiting for someone to implement this well! I think in the future we might even have tiktok-style influencer videos generated from wikipedia content, who knows.

I've been swiping a lot for the last 10 minutes and I'm not sure how much it's learning. I have some feedback.

- I have never liked or clicked a biography but it keeps suggesting vast amounts of those

- It does not seem to update the score based on clicking vs liking vs doing both. I would assume clicking is a solid form of engagement that should be taken into consideration

- It would be interesting to see some stats. I have no idea how many articles i've scrolled through or the actual time spent on liked vs disliked article previews. If you can add such insight it would be interesting

- A negative feedback mechanism would be interesting as well. There is no way to signal whether I'm just neutral towards something (and swipe through) or actively negative about it (which is a form of engagement the doomscroll would actually use to show me such content once in a while)

- since this website has already shown me multiple pages about things I'm learning about thanks through it, it might benefit from a "share" button (another engagement signal) as HN folks are likely to want to share on HN things they've just learned

- Would you be willing to make the experiment open source?

Gander5739 4 days ago|
It's opensource insofar that the javascript is not minified or obfuscated. You can see it at https://github.com/rebane2001/xikipedia too.
sebastiennight 4 days ago|||
I want to try reimplementing it for Wikipedia in another language, would you mind sharing how you went from the 400MB Wikipedia export to the .1x (40MB) file that is downloaded here?
rebane2001 4 days ago||
Yeah I plan on putting the code for that on GitHub soon too.
rebane2001 3 days ago||
Added now!
sebastiennight 4 days ago|||
Perfect! Thanks for clarification. I thought there was server-side preparation of the content, but it seems from the other posts that it's all local, and I commend you for that.
eimrine 4 days ago||
Everything is unclickable on the first page for me, the word "Estonia" is typed in grey font on the dark-gray layout, I can not do anything except of selecting text.
dnpls 4 days ago||
Funny that I selected some subjects such as art, technology and human sexuality, and after a bit of scrolling, I get an article on Technosexuality. TIL.
with 5 days ago||
It's ironic that doomscrollable social media feeds are built for low attention spans, because this website is the opposite. Gave up after 20 seconds.
knorker 4 days ago||
I assumed that obviously this is very clever performance art to show how even the healthiest food can be turned into brainrotting sludge.

But then I look at the comments, and it really looks like some people want this.

Now I'm depressed.

rebane2001 3 days ago|
Yeah, that was the intention.
stck 4 days ago||
I don't get it. It shows the intro paragraph of some articles in card list and that's it? Clicking the card takes you away from the feed, instead of creating e.g. some kind of a path of interest.
KolmogorovComp 4 days ago|
> instead of creating e.g. some kind of a path of interest.

You need to like them to update the weights of the algo, it works well

dwringer 4 days ago|||
I just kept scrolling, hoping it would learn from how long I paused over content to read it the way FB's seems to, but it seems you're right, in this case "likes" are required.
gpvos 4 days ago|||
Ooh, it's indeed fascinating how quickly you can end up with a focus on a singular subject.
icameron 5 days ago|
Page crashed after downloading and extracting. On safari iPhone that’s a few years old, latest iOS. I was really interested in trying / why I waited Ed: tried again it crashed at 66% loading (after 100% loading)
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