Online Communities Are the Best Thing About the Internet
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To reach its potential the most important single technology remains decentralisation. The average netizen should be able to serve and control his own data, even if he/she didn't create much of it in the first place.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where all real functionality moves to the Cloud and all our devices just become I/O thin clients. Saying that the average user won't care is frankly self-fulfilling and defeatist. How would they care if they are not provided alternatives to centralised services that are usable and compelling?
i was thinking of a full on decentralized future where every file and data (encrypted / hashed address) are sitting exposed on the blockchain ala ipfs, etc. where only thing preventing it being decrypted is just a key.
not sure how far we are away from quantum computing but it might make what is considered standard encryption process obsolete. it wasnt even that long ago where cracking md5, sha1 became a piece of cake.
In any case gossip is lossy and low-bandwidth, and people understand those limitations when operating on information from that channel. The same cannot be said for, say, comprehensive real-time browser history.
Please take a look at this and I would love to hear feedback: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
It doesn't allow anyone to reach anyone. You have very little chance of reaching people who spend time in non-English online communities (assuming you only know English). Those people have very little ability to reach you.
Furthermore, everyone is able to reach everyone, technically, but there is still a cost to doing so which everyone cannot bear.
It takes time (and for many, lost wages) to join multiple social networks and forums and write on all of them or to start a blog or to report news. And there is a certain class of people in the world who have that time and a certain class which don't.
The internet has always been a glitzed up version of our world, just with a lot more anonymity (which, many would argue has been a tragedy).
It's fine to pine for the 90s internet when nobody knew about your subculture much less tried to monetize it through advertising. But to actually get the spirit of obscure 90s internet on the current weaponized internet is a hard problem. The danger is that you implement some kind of nostalgic 90s interface and simply hope that nobody on the internet hates your subculture sufficiently to destroy it. After all, that's exactly what you did in the 90s and it seemed to work.
The problem is that now a) a plethora of attackers know exactly how brittle and easily gamed these services are, and b) all your users know it, too. And that includes knowledge about how certain types of speech can attract the ire of people with bot armies, exploits, etc. So your userbase either self-censors in order to keep under the increasingly automated radar, or it doesn't and raises the likelihood of attacks.
And that's assuming nobody ddos'd you to oblivion in the first place.
Anyhow, I think it's correct to characterize online communities as dangerous and unhealthy places, because at present their brittle designs make them hazardous to use. Until programmers actually solve some of the deep problems of designing a social networking for use over a weaponized internet (in the same way that git has largely solved that problem wrt source code management), I don't see any reason to change that characterization.
People with nowhere else to turn and no money to physically move to a safer location will certainly still use these messaging services. But the best of a series of bad options is still a bad option.
I definitely have to deal with more socially propagated bullshit now than at any time in my history. Perhaps ironically, much more of it seems to be coming out of academia and journalism than ever before. For example, I can't think of a time when fields as patently ludicrous as "critical theory" have been taken as seriously as now. I can only speculate as to the cause.
There is no 'battle for enlightenment', just people having access to way more stuff than ever before, and that is a big big win.
I guess this is sort of a "small town" vs. "big city" effect. I suppose the "small towns" of the Internet may still be out there somewhere, but under some conditions that keep them from growing into "big cities".
It's a huge deal, we've just accepted it as normal. If I were to create something online today, where users were allowed to comment, I'd be an idiot if I didn't predict it would get abused by spammers and trolls as quick as you could say "4chan". Anonymity was previously believed to be a barrier to that, but comments on local news sites and Youtube comments continually prove otherwise.
While our systems have become more centralized (Twitter/Reddit/Facebook) compared to connecting to your ISP's Usenet server, there's no real digital-social-etiquette training system for new users given by those centralized authorities because we've simply accepted the ramificiations to Eternal September.
If I try to make a new Reddit account to post a bunch of hate speech, Reddit itself does little to dissuade me from doing so. There's a huge amount of effort to dissuade bots from creating accounts, but other than drop a link to "reddiquette" during account creation, what does Reddit do to teach me social norms during account creation? Better yet, what could they do before letting me roam wild, hurtling death threats and hate speech until the post-per-second rate limiter kicks in?
Laughably little, that's what. Thats Eternal September's penalty.
The idea of giving an hour long lecture, followed by an hour long interview and training session, for every single person that wants an account on a site the size of Reddit, before granting them an account, is ludicrous on the face of it simply due to the sheer number of new users.
Moreover, Internet culture is not a single monolithic thing. /r/AskHistorians has wildly different standards of acceptability from /r/Nintento,and those are wildly different from /b/ or Facebook.
For instance, I personally don't do any social networking at all. But I immensely benefit from sites like wikipedia, or by other contents that I would have otherwise never read about.
So, I don't think you can say there's one thing that is the best about the internet. It's so many things. And that's great.
Edit: This is not meant to be a complete list, just one example of something incredibly valuable which eclipses online communities. IMO obviously.
Though for humanity as a whole, obviously access to information is the biggest deal. But why stop at education? People today have more awareness than ever about everything. In some cases, including things that average civilians would never have gotten to see, like government leaks, or videos of executions.
And neither of those things are always positive obviously. Not all educational materials are good, not all communities have a positive effect, and sometimes there's just too much information to find the signal in the noise.
So I think it's fair to argue either really. And, truth be told, it's possible we couldn't have had one without the other, given how much individual people have contributed to the internet knowledge stores.
I wonder how this worked in the past. Were people less "weird" that the people they knew IRL were enough?
Today, people seem to only want to hang out with people who are like themselves, who completely accept them. If someone has a different opinion or a different interest, they’re a predator trying to eat your herd.
With a computer & internet access, it's easier to stay isolated. Though I guess TV and radio, even newspapers and writing for pen pals also provides the same substitute sort of-interaction without actually having to interact.
For all the negatives (assuming we say 'all these people should just go out and socialize' - unfairly), I think online communities make a huge difference to those who are physically disabled, need to stay home to care for someone all the time, or are stuck in the arse end of nowhere.
There's still a certain sense of egalitarianism in internet forums. One commenter's opinion is (by default) worth the same as another's.
That said, in most open comment sections in modern times the actual 'community' part is underdeveloped. Everyone is so loud, there's always someone positively thrilled to play devil's advocate with maximal cynicism, always someone there to interpret a comment unfairly, precious little sympathy for the views of others.