I wrote a thing a decade or more ago I can’t find now, about the early history of Vox’s “explainers”. They were literally wanting to replace Wikipedia as a go-to.
The Economist pioneered that strategy of teaching 22 year olds to sound like experts to distracted executives and middle-managers. I think their standards are above Vox’s and definitely Vox Future Perfect’s (eg. I don’t think The Economist would have let SBF’s private foundation hire them to write a profile of SBF).
i read a bit about that. i couldn’t find quotes from the site employees saying they were trying to be wikipedia, so i didn’t mention it because id have had to digress. but almost everyone who talked about the launch mentioned their weirdass card system for linking other articles, and that it was wikipedia like. and all the descriptions sounded AWFUL, like it would just be throwing useless rotating shit at you all the time
there’s this: https://nymag.com/news/features/ezra-klein-2014-2/
While Klein is being circumspect about the operational details of Project X, he suggests that breaking-news squibs could be very short and attached to constantly updated background articles, a bit like Wikipedia entries written by professional journalists. Long features might be regularly freshened up.
especially amusing considering this, published only nine months after vox launched. not sure how much objective resource building the professional journalism would be buying you there, ezra
https://deadspin.com/46-times-vox-totally-fucked-up-a-story-1673835447/
ah but if you assume a perfectly spherical polity of uniform density in a vacuum at absolute zero,, klein will still be wrong
Ezra Klein so centrist, he could both-sides a Moebius strip
That is, an Ezra Klein bottle
isn’t that what the youth use to make jenkem
brava 👏
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yeah, it was so inept and un wikilike that you would hardly believe it, but they honestly thought it would compete.
At one point Yudkowsy raised money for Arbital, “an attempted successor to Wikipedia and/or Tumblr and/or peer review” Cw attempts to suck up to J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, John Paulson
Didn’t one of the Arbital head honchos have a psychotic episode after writing unhinged rants about rationality dojos making superhumans?
well, seems like that didn’t pan out, but I still have hope for my attempted successor to the automobile and/or trigonometry and/or Leonard Nimoy
I have incredibly vague memories of the early days of vox where I was impressed at the form they used? Like, I seem to remember them really embracing hypertext and linking to central pieces that provided some more context on the immediate story than would have been reasonable to include in the main article. Like, if you wanted a brief summary of how the situation in Libya got to the point where the breaking news hit it there was a way to get that information easily right there, linked in the article.
Of course, by now it seems like everyone has gotten far more competent at that and the editorial policies and ideologies behind Klein’s work have exposed themselves as deeply odious. There may have been a point at which he had one single good idea, but then that idea was completely tangential to the thing he actually wanted to do.
I have this Ezra Klein post burned into my brain
Second, fear of violence undermines liberal politics. Just look at America post-9/11. Or after the crime surges of the 70s and 80s and 90s — strongmen politicians win, punitive responses like mass incarceration and warrior policing rise, social trust collapses.
Really though, still trying to find the guy who did this? No self-awareness from the Iraq War-supporter?
that second link, man. at the top i was actually willing to buy his excuse (“i was just a college student”! sure. honestly, fine) but as soon as it got to the pollack part i went absolutely fucking feral. zero evidence of learning. what a fraud
