What are the best sources of information on the Internet?

cll7793@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 32 points –

Asklemmy has been a great place for information and resources. What are other some great resources everyone should know?

Kiwix is my recommendation. https://www.kiwix.org

22

I don't recommend it to others because it's a fucking minefield, but once you know how to identify someone trustworthy, youtube becomes a top-tier source of sources.

Unfortunately it's mostly garbage, and you have to avoid a lot of the entertainment stuff or the algorithm will pick up on that and start giving you more "entertaining", unreliable youtubers and fewer good ones.

I have the algorithm completely turned off because I lean FAR left but I was getting a lot of incredibly vapid, conservative, Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, Steven Crowder, Elon Musk hero worship, military hoo-ra pew pew pew! guns are cool, right guys!?!?!, defense contractor, anti-mask, grind culture, toxic masculinity BULLSHIT recommended to me.

Now, I get NOTHING recommended to me AT ALL other than the safest stuff from my subscriptions. I prefer it...but it's hard because it doesn't even track my watch history anymore unless I specifically add a video that I like to a playlist. It's easy to see how impressionable, smart young men can be propagandized into becoming anti-labor, card-carrying members of Y'all Qaeda, having this billionaire worship, utter horseshit shoved down their throats all day 🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢.

IMO, it's going to cause the downfall of society, having these dangerous sociopaths enriched and amplified by social media algorithms.

edit: this comment motivated me to start a new community for Jordan Peterson debunking. 😅😅😅

I didn’t know that you could turn off the algorithm?

Given they way they linked directly to all the things they say they despise, my guess is you can’t turn the algorithm off and this is a troll post.

Regardless of its danger, navigating it is the job of our generation, no less important than the tasks of those that came before.

In my experience, it's about the side content. The quickest way to get to Jordan Peterson is to google a lot of gaming videos. This is just basic demographics and marketing, ever since gamergate. Gamers are often teen boys. Teen boys frequently like bullying people. Gamergate was a bullying campaign.

All there really is to it. Since it worked and increased profits, they kept or reinforced it.

Breaking their market lock is the key step forward imo.

Breaking their market lock is the key step forward imo.

Very much agreed. That's why I started https://lemmy.world/c/jordanpeterson just now. ;)

The algorithm actually targeted me because I am into engineering (Mark Rober videos, smarter everyday, etc)...and youtube LOVES to talk about how great of an engineer mElon is despite his tendency to not even follow basic engineering principles like redundancy.

EVERY media outlet skews their content left, right, center, etc. Remember - someone is paying for that news to be generated, so they're going to want to have at least some sort of say in what does or doesn't get mentioned.

The secret is to not rely on any one single news outlet. RSS technology for example allows you to subscribe and monitor literally countless news sites and other content all sorted by folder or collections (for example I have current events, politics, general technology, 3D printing, space, etc - and each has dozens of feeds from big and small blogs, and news sites). When I view ALL news feeds, I get all content sorted by timestamp. No algorithm is sorting the data for me, just raw feeds of data.

Whenever a major event happens in the world, I see literally dozens of different spins on the same topic. Usually 90% of the time the headlines are close enough that you can really see the reality. Sometimes it's fun to see "extreme" spins from some extreme left or right sites or what content they choose to ignore. I don't subscribe to just the news sites that align with my views, I like to subscribe to everything so I do get every side of the equation. It also helps prepare me for when my father starts to spew clearly BS from certain media outlets known to embellish the truth with "alternative facts".

Every time I find a website with a well written article that I am currently not monitoring, I'll immediately check to see if there's an RSS feed available for me to add to my collection of curated feeds.

Sometimes I even get to see test posts from the news sites or articles with original headlines before they get rewritten lol.

My advice would be to research RSS feeds and learn how to use them. So you can educate yourself.

Pro tip - you can even use RSS feeds to watch and lurk on the fediverse!

never hear of kiwix ? How trustworthy is kiwix ?

Neither. It is open source, and it is a collection of resources. Such as Wikipedia, stack exchange, etc.

You are free to review the code directly if you don't trust it.