Plaza Wikipedia
December 11, 2023
I've had the idea for a bit now of forking the Wikipedia app and trying to make it social. I really want to recreate the feeling of walking around a city, going into a cafe / bar / gallery that looks interesting, and then bumping into someone and talking to them. This experience feels like one of the joys of the real world that we've kind of ported over into the real world, but haven't quite replicated the joy of in the digital world.
You can "bump into someone" on Twitter by commenting on their post or in a thread with them, but it doesn't really feel the same. Twitter here acts as a market to "consolidate liquidity" of attention and people so you can maximize the interactions between users, which does work but leads to a certain type of behavior that we are all probably too used to seeing. People try to maximize engagement instead of trying to start more fruitful discussions.
To replicate the serendipity of bumping into someone on a street or cafe, we need to make the internet more multiplayer in general. We should be able to see who is on the same site as us when we're on there and we should be able to talk to them! Reddit implemented something in this vein (somewhat) recently where you can see how many people are live in the Reddit thread with you at any given moment. The live game threads on illegal basketball streams are not great, but I'm sure some people get some utility out of them.
Product page on Amazon? I should be able to talk to other potential buyers who are browsing the same digital aisle.
Stalking your ex on LinkedIn? You should be able to see who else is interested in them.
In all seriousness, I think that this sort of social feature would be great for places like Wikipedia or arXiv. There's a dearth of places where you can have intellectual conversation, and many nerds are introverts so it's hard to pull them out in the public setting of Twitter. Being able to see someone interested in the same niche content as you and then starting a conversation with them could be a great way to create many different salons of the internet.