What would the common child of Facebook and Wikipedia look like? An answer to this question is provided by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales with his new social network WT.Social. Users can, similar to the Wikipedia, edit the contributions of other users and discuss about them.
The platform wants to counteract false reports and propaganda. The role of the community is to play a critical role in gathering information and acting as a vast community of fact-testers, rather than being just passive recipients of news, as Wales writes in an article in Foreign Policy magazine.
Wales is convinced that the Internet has not only influenced the media landscape, but also damaged it permanently and made many people doubt the credibility of the media. He writes that falling print runs and ratings have shaken up the business model of many media outlets. This not only made the competition with each other sharper, it also had a negative impact on quality. Quantity is common. He predicts the news portals even the unstoppable sinking.
The internet is not only a curse but also a blessing. Through social networking, users could be involved in journalism and work together to increase transparency, accuracy and quality. And this is where Wales sees the main task of its new network WT.Social. Not without reason, it emerged directly from WikiTribune, a news portal.
A first look at the network
The network is still in a very early stage of development, and anyone wishing to become a member will first be put on a waiting list after signing up unless they are willing to pay $ 13 a month or $ 100 a year. Then you get access immediately.
According to their own information, the network would like to finance itself in the long term through membership fees, rather than through the marketing of user data or through advertising. If you do not want to pay, you will receive access after a few days at the latest. Whether a post will be mandatory later, to comment the developers of WT.Social not yet. At the moment you can use the network for free without any restrictions.
WT.Social
Anyone who has been accepted, first welcomes a newsfeed, as you know him in a similar way from Facebook. But unlike those, algorithms do not put the feed together, but the posts of users you follow and groups you joined appear in chronological order. Similar to Subreddits on the discussion platform Reddit, these groups gather people on a specific topic. There are already groups on investigative journalism, e-mobility and climate change.
Much of the current posts are links to news portals. For example, users discuss an article in the British newspaper, The Independent, about a fake website that disseminates disinformation in the run up to the upcoming election in the UK. However, there are also contributions to WT.Social itself in the network. Also events are announced there. Almost impossible to find self-acting postings, as you know from Facebook or Instagram, or posts with pictures.
Each post has a large edit button. The number of times a post has been edited is shown by the version number displayed below the title. Each processing step is displayed transparently and provided with the name of the user. Discussed in the comments. Main language is English, also in the menus.
What could be the big advantage over other social networks, in which corrections can be made in the form of answers or comments, is so far difficult to predict - also because the editing function is still used with restraint. In most cases, the community limits itself to adding additional information, such as links, or correcting language mistakes.
Technically not fully developed yet
This is one of the reasons why the network, which now has almost 300,000 users logged in, does not look very lively. Another reason is the lack of features. Apart from the news feed, the groups, the editing function and the comments, WT.Social offers only one profile page. Technical errors occur from time to time and pages sometimes load very slowly. Even against spam contributions, there is still no adequate protection.
However, WT.Social is at the very beginning of its development. The team around Jimmy Wales is still small and looking for support. Further functions will be introduced piece by piece in cooperation with the users.
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In addition to the technical problems but makes the missing imprint as skeptical as the missing privacy policy. In addition, WT.Social requires the entry of first and last name as well as date of birth. The developers promise to never resell data, but so far you have to trust them in this point.
The new approach is not automatic
To make Facebook with its 2.4 billion monthly active users really competition, for a new network like WT.Social for the foreseeable future impossible. But as Snapchat and TikTok show, coexistence is possible if there are enough unique selling points. The approach of being able to work on any article to collectively combat disinformation and misleading contributions could be one such feature.
But, as Jimmy Wales himself says, building a community that actively participates and collaborates to produce high-quality contributions can be a long and rocky road. At Wikipedia, this principle works with a lot of voluntary engagement. But whether it is also applicable in a social network, WT.Social has yet to prove.
