New Version of AltBase Released

submitted by AltBaseGuy[M] from self.AltBase

Check it out

Most new features were on the back-end / administrative side, so aren't very exciting. But, there are some neat new ones as well as some aesthetic updates that hopefully make it easier/more intuitive to use.

List of updates:

  • New "Cloning" feature for Claims and Images - a very useful and necessary feature for getting lots of things from one source. It creates a "clone" of an existing entry's tags and sources so you don't have to tiredly add a bunch of the same tags/sources over and over again.

  • New "Reporting" feature - allows users to report content that doesn't belong on AltBase. Not exciting, but necessary if we get many more users (or malicious saboteurs). Reporting a claim or image will automatically remove it from visibility until its reviewed by an administrator

  • I've removed the need to type "#" when searching tags

  • You can actually remove tags now

  • Administrative features/pages for reviewing submissions, banning users, etc.

This was the largest update to the platform since AltBase first got on the web, and is bound to be a bit buggy, so please let me know if you run into any errors. While it might seem underwhelming, the update took a lot more time than expected, and was necessary for AltBase to handle a larger user base.

Next steps I intend to take are adding more content and taking a more active approach to marketing Altbase and spreading awareness. I will probably start writing articles using AltBase to that effect.

The next big version update will depend largely on user feedback. I think the site doesn't look great - but it's intuitive enough, and it works. If I get a lot of people asking for or recommending certain UI changes, then the next big update will be an overhaul for that. Otherwise, I plan to take AltBase to its next stage, which will be dedicated to dossiers on individuals and institutions.

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[–]SamiAlHayid 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (5 children)

Any progress made on 'individuals and institutions' yet?

Hopefully you can include the following features:

  • Ability to hyperlink text. For example, if I write something such as:

It is debatable as to whether the concept of Gemeinschaft significantly shaped the social thought of German sociologist Max Weber.

Hopefully I can turn 'Max Weber' and 'Gemeinschaft' into a link to a 'Max Weber' individuals page and a 'Ferdinand Tonnies' individuals page, respectively.

Here, 'Max Weber' would lead to 'Max Weber'. 'Gemeinschaft' would lead to 'Ferdinand Tonnies'.

  • Link to a particular part of an individuals page:

If I click on 'Gemeinschaft', not only should it go to the 'Ferdinand Tonnies' page, but to the 'Gemeinschaft' section of the 'Ferdinand Tonnies' page, so that the reader does not have to scroll all the way down to that section.

  • Categories page:

If I click on 'German sociologist', a page with every entry under the 'German sociologist' tag appears, with links to their respective pages. 'Max Weber' and 'Ferdinand Tonnies' would both have such tags and therefore links to their individual pages would be printed on this screen.

In conclusion, 'Max Weber' would lead to 'Max Weber' (individual), 'Gemeinschaft' would lead to a 'Gemeinschaft' section on 'Ferdinand Tonnies' (individual), 'German sociologist' would lead to 'German sociologists' (category).

[–]AltBaseGuy[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (4 children)

Any progress made on 'individuals and institutions' yet?

Yes. I have some idea of how this will look like and be architected and am already started on the dataset. Basically, individuals, organizations, and "lists" will be their own records. Individuals will be tagged to organizations and lists with a supporting source.

The starting dataset is the real challenge. I've decided ISGP's list of 1500 NGOs is a good place to start. The list has over 8k individuals and 1.7k institutions of interest, and I trust the reporting as accurate. Once I've parsed through the list there, I'll have a really good starting data set. I also intend to add a few other individuals and orgs that aren't included (hopefully with a digital copy of CoC, but I don't know of one that exists atm)

Ability to hyperlink text.

Yes. One of the big issues I will have to solve for is creating a wiki-style bio page (basically) for individuals, institutions, and lists (e.g. "Journolist", "Frankfurt School", etc.). I haven't tried anything like that before. But, the idea is that the "bio" would function as a kind of wiki page and be editable/changeable like the claims and sources entries are. There will also be auto-generated links to wikipedia, metapedia, and possibly wikispooks. The intention is that (at least, to start) AltBase only includes essential/otherwise unreported info on the subject matter, and list of institutions/affiliations that function similar to how the tag function works now. Very similar to exactly what you describe

[–]SamiAlHayid 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

Sounds great. Yeah, I think there needs to be a distinction at the very least between individual and collectivity. For example, the former has a birth date whereas the latter has a foundation date. I don't think one is reducible to the other. Because concepts, ideas, theories, etc. can only come from individuals and/or collectivities (this does raise a question about concepts, ideas and theories whose founders are unknown, but most of these long predate modernity and are unlikely to warrant pages) they seem to me to be reducible to those two page types (e.g. 'Freudian-Marxism' would best be a section of 'Frankfurt School' and not as a section of 'Karl Marx', 'Sigmund Freud', 'Theodor Adorno', etc., though those pages would have links to 'Frankfurt School'; ideally, going right down to the 'Freudian-Marxism' section without having to manually scroll).

There then at very least needs to be a distinction between lists and the other two. For example, a hypothetical page about 'Antifa' really needs to be a list of organizations pages, e.g. 'Rose Bay Antifa', 'Portland Antifa', and probably has no content other than those hyperlinks.

This would help at the very least to reduce pages that:

  • Have too much data on the page because they are trying to address too wide a scope. For example, if I want to read 'Rose Bay Antifa' but it is a section on a bloated 'Antifa chapters' page, I would have to load the 'Portland Antifa' content as well.

  • Force people to scroll more than otherwise. I also do not want to scroll past the 'Portland Antifa' content if I only want to read 'Rose Bay Antifa'.

Hopefully it will take the shape of a large number of specific pages rather than a lesser number of more general pages.

Events might be a tough one, though, because I don't think they are reducible to these three categories. Furthermore, many events are happening which are totally unreported on. And I'm sure someone will want the functionality to document, for example, Antifa or BLM protests that occurred on a particular date, and indeed these are practically all unreported on and therefore 'hidden' from the public, even though they are on video (e.g. riotarchive.com, YouTube channels like 'Adapt Ahead') and so facts can be gathered on them. However, multiple organizations are involved and it would lead to a large amount of content duplication if the event information was copied onto the pages of all organizations known to be involved.

[–]AltBaseGuy[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

I think maybe explaining how the data will work might help you visualize.

Basically, "Instutions", "Individuals", and "Lists" are their own tables, and there will be different fields within those tables (e.g., the Individuals table will have fields like "name", "birth date", "death date", "ethnicity", etc.) Same thing with the Institutions table - "institution-type" (e.g., "Corporation", "Foundation", "NGO", etc.)

The Institutions, Individuals, and Lists tables will all have corresponding tables that "link" them to the others - e.g. 'individuals-institutions', 'individuals-individuals', 'individuals-lists', and 'institutions-lists'. Within each of these linking tables there will be a column or two that specifies what the relationship is. For instance, in the 'individuals-individuals' table, there will be a field like "relationship" in which you would tie Individual "Les Wexner" to Individual "Jeffrey Epstein" and say "Funder". That same field between George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush would be populated with "Father" or "Son". In the 'individuals-institutions' table, you would tie "Andrew Jassy" to institution "Amazon" and the "title" field would be "CEO". There might also be a "year_start" and "year_end" field in that table. Some fields would also be optional, depending on the table. For instance, in the table 'individuals-lists' Individual "Les Wexner" would be assigned to the List-item "Zionists" - and there probably doesnt need to be a lot of other fields or substantiating information for that. But there could be more, if we wanted them. Individuals, Institutions, and Lists will each have their own dedicated "view" (like ClaimView and ImageView works now) and the relationships to those things will appear like #tags do now - except ones that you can click on and navigate, so you can get more info on that person/institution/list (depending on which view you're in).

Actually, I'm not sure how helpful that is lol. Basically, I intend to satisfy the desired requirements you lay out here. The database tables might seem complicated, but they aren't actually, and, as a normal user, this won't be apparent in a (hopefully intuitive) UI. I don't know exactly how the pages will work yet, but, to start, individual items probably won't have their own dedicated pages (unique URLs). Instead, they would need to be searched for in the database (just as images and claims do not have thier own "page" right now.) That is to say, there will not be a static url for each entry (contrast to wikipedia, that does have a URL for each entry). I recognize that is a drawback, but I am not sure what else to do in lieu of not creating literally thousands of individual pages for the entries I am adding.

As usual, this has turned out to be a lot more work than I originally expected. Van Der Reijden has so many different formats and ways of referring to the same person. Some duplicates and misspellings, too. For instance, Zbigniew Brzezinski has like five different ways he is referred to - e.g. "Zbignieuw Brzezinski", "Zbig B.", "Zbig", etc. Also VDR will inconsistently put a title in front of a name (e.g. "Dr.", "Baron", "General"), and sometimes not. This isn't really an issue for people that "I know" but there are literally thousands of people in his list I have never heard of. So its very hard to parse through the list in a programmatic way, which means a lot of manual work (and don't even get me started on the wikipedia scraping).

Anyways, once I have a good list of discrete individuals, then I will have a super-solid starting dataset. I'm looking forward to getting there and also having a useful web UI to show all of it.

[–]SamiAlHayid 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I think I can follow this, though I haven't looked at a SQL database in years and will have to look at and re-use most of what I did in the past when I do some web design stuff in future.

If I had the time, I was thinking of drawing UML diagrams to figure out how I'd attempt such a task myself. But, for starters, I cannot even find a non-commercial program that does this.

Institutions, Individuals and Lists definitely seem like they should be separate tables within the database.

I think what you mean by 'field' is what I know as 'column'. Yes, each individual, institution and list would be one row. The first column would be a primary key (int), and then the rest of the columns would mostly be varchar. Of course, varchar seems like the lazy option and is more 'abusable'. It might, for example, make sense to make birth date/death date three ints ('day' would have a drop down box from 1-31, 'month' would have a drop down box from 1-12, 'year' would have a drop down box, rather than one varchar, since it lowers the chance of incorrect entries). No one can add an obviously unwanted/incorrect date like '99 99 9999' into the database that way.

I think the 'linking' tables sounds correct, because entries like 'Funder', 'Father', etc. would often be blank if they were to be added to the main Individuals table. So I think there would be a lot of NULL entries and it would also clutter the page for the addition of these to the database with various text boxes, etc. that will in most cases be unused. For example, if one was to add 'Noel Ignatiev', whoever his father was is likely of no consequence, will have no AltBase article, and may not even be public knowledge. Therefore, one would leave it empty and the database would have plenty of these empty cells in there. And this is probably the case for the vast majority of individuals. The linkages really need to be on a separate table, and the linkages added separately to the individuals themselves. Then, the database will not have as many empty cells in there.

I don't have any remarks on the rest, but it sounds to me like you are on the right track.

[–]AltBaseGuy[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I mostly agree with what you say, but I think this discussion is a bit overly-technical. For most fields ("columns", yes). I just used varchar for most of them and might amend them later or add more columns. For now, it's just a test/sandbox data set. The immediate goal is just to get a starting data set for these three dimensions (person/institution/list) and then flesh out what we really need from there. Things like birth or death date don't practically matter for how we want to use the data.

The starting data set is basically done, which I'm relieved to say, since it took me a lot longer than expected. Fun facts: There are no more than 7,376 individuals in VDR's list (some of which are duplicates or nicknames and need to be reviewed) and there are 23,258 discrete individual-institution relationships. The average person appears three times, and the person with the most appearances is Henry Kissinger, at 112 (plus more, once we count the "Henry K." s discretely, as these could also refer to Henry Kravis or Henry Kaufman, who appear 20 and 2 times, respectfully) I already counted all Jews with an appearance over 2 times, imperfectly, but I estimate that Jews account for about 22% of the overall representation of the 23,258. Researching some of these individuals has led to some interesting discoveries - for instance, did you know that Sumner Shapiro, Rear Admiral in the US Navy (a rare case, Jews almost never appear in US military positions), was instrumental in getting Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard's security clearance? Although he later stated

"We work so hard to establish ourselves and to get where we are, and to have somebody screw it up... and then to have Jewish organizations line up behind this guy and try to make him out a hero of the Jewish people, it bothers the hell out of me".

Really interesting stuff. Wish I could catalog everything at once

There are a few glaring shortcomings of VDR's list. The first is that there is an almost complete lack of interest in the media industry, which you think would be of paramount importance in assessing who is behind manufacturing the false and obviously biased narratives we see every day, and consequently why the population behaves like it does. Especially if your focus is on "conspiracy research" and bias against things about elites getting exposed, journalists assassinated, etc. Ofc, the basic answer to "who owns the media" is "Jews" (60-80%), and VDR has a very ant-anti-semitic slant so this aligns to his complete disavowal of "holocaust denial" and his very bad justifications (practically dogwhistling) for not investigating it:

Ever met a Nazi or Holocaust denier in real life? Most haven't, but online, they're everywhere. Ignore the many discussions about concentration camp Auschwitz. Instead, read about Babi Yar and the eastern European extermination camps of the Nazis and the Ustasa, or look up the visual evidence. You'll get the point.

Jew-hating - in its "deniable" form or not - is super-effective at pushing ordinary people out of any conspiracy discussions and at forcing censorship measures. Thus, like an ever-spreading virus, it remains

I half-ways agree with the sentiment, but ultimately the truth just is what it is. I think VDR is on-the-level and not a Jewish shill, but sometimes he begs the question.

As of now, most all of the data is in the database and I'm trying to figure out how to present and expose it. I'm going to add more people that aren't just in VDR's list, notably from CoC, Dissident-Right circles, and the media. To start, I'll probably create new pages that have no links to them in the existing UI, but expose them here. This way, interested people who come here will have the link can check them out and give feedback, but they wouldn't otherwise be accessible to casual lurkers.

Much more I could write about a lot of stuff, but I wanted to give a general update. Very much appreciate your interest.