this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
146 points (98.0% liked)

Ask Lemmy

27268 readers
1964 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I would imagine it was harder to get information on topics as you would've had to buy/borrow encyclopedias to do.

Were there proprietary predecessor websites?

Tell me about the dark ages!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] MudMan@fedia.io 7 points 2 weeks ago

In retrospect, that Encarta had its moment and MS didn't realize that they could have just turned it into a website before Wikipedia made it entirely redundant is a major loss. It could have been a for-profit staple like Facebook, but nope.

FWIW, I am looking at the encyclopaedia my family owned before the Internet. It's still here on my shelves, along with other collections of books in bulk. People would show up to your door and sell you these sometimes, and it wasn't always a scam. It served us well.

There was a trivia game show over here when I was a kid where the final round included a very obscure question (think "what was the name of the cousin of Stalin that was a film director in the 80s" or whatever) and were given ten minutes and an encyclopaedia to look it up. It was considered very hard and most episodes it resulted in failure.

You could ABSOLUTELY resurrect that format by cutting the time significantly and giving people access to Wikipedia. That's easy money right there.