alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Wikipedia as a doomscrollable social media feed
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This is a very neat idea. I am not sure why the page needs to load 40mb of data and make me wait 5 mins before the first view. I'd probably also add some ranking criteria to surface good quality articles that maximize the "I learnt something new today" factor. Overall kudos to the developer for original thinking.
I ran across a grammar mistake in one of the entries and clicked into the actual wikipedia entry to fix it. That was satisfying. Imagine being able to do that on social media.
Please fix the loading issue and I’ll return! I think you don’t need to pull all the data at initialization, you could lazily grab a couple from each category and just keep doing it as people scroll.
I wonder what the cognitive difference is between the link to link addictive clicking on wikipedia and doomscrolling? I assume doomscrolling is even more pernicious because it's the lowest possible level of friction. I'm sure somebody has done studies.
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.
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?
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.
Back when Wikipedia was new people had a tendency to spend all day in it clicking deeper and deeper. It was called "ratholing."
It was timewasting or avoidant behavior for sure, and often described negatively. But at least you were learning something.
Silicon Valley then spent the next few decades trying to understand that behavior so they could isolate it, strip all positive value out of it, and make it highly profitable.
Love the concept. Wikitok also exists [1] but the recommendation aspect that you're bringing you the table is a very intriguing original spin on it. I would be fascinated to see what a smart algorithm could discover on my behalf on Wikipedia given enough time.
I think it would be nice if you could do a non simple English version but nevertheless happy with what you've put together, and I've added a shortcut to my phone. Please don't let the negativity stop you from continuing to work on it.
I have been waiting for a project like this since last year when someone on Twitter mentioned it. I can finally doomscroll without my brain rotting.
Update, it does not run properly in Firefox on iOS. After it has loaded to 100%, the site refreshes.
I love the concept. But the long load at startup really kills it. Even clicking off the site and reloading makes me have to go through the download all over again.
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.
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.
Jeopardy training tool.
Took several minutes to load for me, and when my download got to 100%, the browser (safari on ios) refreshed the page and started at 0% again.
TIL:
The United States Virgin Islands are a group of islands in the Caribbean Sea. They are currently owned and under the authority of the United States Government. They used to be owned by Denmark (and called Danish West Indies). They were sold to the U.S. on January 17, 1917, because of fear that the Germans would capture them and use them as a submarine base in World War I.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Virgin_Islan...
With that domain name, I expected to see this Grok-based mutation of Wikipedia. I guess, the "x" just has a negative association with me now.
It took a while to load but once I was in I found it like reading a magazine. I was expecting it to be more of a Tiktok UX.
It's kind of like the opposite to my Wikipedia project Redactle.net which takes a lot of effort.
OP, since you're encountering load issues I would suggest narrowing your corpus to Wikipedia vital level 3 and caching all the content since it's only 1000 articles.
I was genuinely excited to try this and it sounded in theory like a lot of fun! Unfortunately yeah too slow to load.
> It is made as a demonstration of how even a basic non-ML algorithm with no data from other users can quickly learn what you engage with to suggest you more similar content.
Yeah, it got really sticky real fast. From the random (?) selection it starts off where I couldn't recognize anything but popular TV shows, it immediately over-indexed on that content and I had to fight for my life to see anything else in the feed that I would recognize and consider a good algorithmic pick for my interests.
Which is brilliant, because Instagram has the same issue for me - absolute metric tons of garbage and whenever there is a gem in that landfill of a feed that I interact with positively, it's nothing but more of that on my feed for weeks until I grow sick of that given thing. In conclusion, Instagram could have used this 30 line algorithm and I'd have the same exact experience when using it.
Algorithmic feeds are obviously problematic for turning several generations into lobotomized zombies, but they are also just not very good at nuance, so it is not even a case of something that's bad for you but it just feels so good. It's just something that's bad, but is able to penetrate the very low defenses in human psychology for resisting addiction and short-term gratification and there is no incentive to improve them for the sake of the user as long as they work for the advertisers.
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.
> you will likely see NSFW content. Please only continue if you're an adult.
Should be: Please only continue if you're not at work.
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)
I'm sorry but starting a 40MB download unprompted on a website is a bit rude, people roaming abroad might have half their data used up in 5 minutes or pay loads for this.
Very small suggestion: Can you make the entries actual links/anchor tags so that it is possible to copy link, middle-click to open in a new tab, and so on?
You know, I enjoyed this, it's nice to get some random, interesting stuff to browse on occasion.
This is more like neat-scrolling, I like it
Did you write your own summary parser for this? I wrote one in the past and found the wiki markup quirky to deal with. The wiki dumps do provide summaries but they seem to suffer similar issues.
I don't get it, it keeps showing me completely random articles.
This is really cool. And in only 500 lines of code is really impressive. I would have thought this was much more.
I wonder if this would be a "better" way to build this thing: https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/01/duckdb-iceberg-browser-s3...
DuckDB loaded in the browser via WebAssembly and Parquet files in S3.
This is unfortunately loading very, very slowly for me.
An issue I have with these apps that claim to be for doomscrolling is that you don't open apps like Instagram or Facebook to doomscroll, you open them to check messages or stories. The doomscrolling is an afterthought. These things assume you can realize you're doomscrolling and not only break out of it, but choose to hypnotize yourself in their app.
Built something similar for research papers: https://www.producthunt.com/products/soch
I've been meaning to do something like this for the books I want to read, and things I want to learn.
How does it actually work? Can you add an "about" page that goes into the algo? Or can you add more info on the readme on github? I'd love to learn more.
Is it down ? I can't access it right now
Man, this is the greatest thing I have seen on the internet.
Reminds one of Sesame Street - let’s put educational content in this new hyponotic medium!
Great idea, i find this is better than just doom scrolling X or Instagram
I am so lucky to be basically immune to short form video garbage like TikTok, but I am not immune to Wikipedia's allure.
I easily have over 100 tabs of wikipedia open at any one time, reading about the most random stuff ever. I'm the guy who will unironically look up the food I'm eating on wikipedia while I'm eating it.
No need to try to make it "doomscrollable" when it's already got me by the balls.
why does everyone keep making this exact same thing again and again
See also: https://www.wikitok.io/
And a plug for my own (fiendishly difficult) Wikipedia-based game:
This would actually be really fun if built around social feature like curators who could quote-repost the posts, popular/trending sorting and a threaded comment system.
> Xikipedia is loading... (3% of 40MB loaded)
I gave up after about a minute.
If you load it in Chrome, it loads MUCH faster
Nice loading indicator! People just don't know how to make those anymore. I think you mistitled your submission, though?
You can do this manually, obviously. The key is the starting point. The design of thermonuclear weapons is always a good place to begin.
I think what is interesting is that it is not necessarily the content of the brainrot that makes us underperform, but the act of swiping [0] and the context switching [1].
These attempts to make educational short form content still suffer from the same drawbacks, so I wonder how effective they truly are.
[0] https://cyberpsychology.eu/article/view/33099
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/09658211.2025.252107...