For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window once companies started pressuring people use their real identity, and that became the norm.
It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.
Then the scammers discovered the internet, and everyone had to dummy up about who they are.
Then the corporations got involved, and decided to use "AI" unmask everyone and sell that information back to the scammers.
I wonder what the next move is. Maybe we should all go back to blatantly stating who we are to make the corporations' information gathering worthless.
Credit ratings from the 3 major providers are used by banks to assess credit worthlessness of personal loans. Naturally, the more data these firms have on people the better they can rate (perceived) risk. These 'data controllers' serve banks and corporations who make their billions on loans.
Disruption is not welcome. Anyone remember occupie wallst ?
Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.
> Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.
It depends on how you look at it. They'll all part of the larger financial/banking industry.
It was a mixed bag then and a mixed bag now. In usenet, some people were very open and some were already anonymous. On webboards, anonymity was more common but plenty of folks still put out their real name.
One of Facebook's selling point, how it got a significant fraction of the US population online at all, was presenting the (false) impression that you could safely use your real ID online.
And talking about this stuff, it's important to realize that until say 2008-2010, you had a process of more of the population getting online, so those online in the 90s were by definition outliers and didn't have "typical for everyone" experiences.
Google doesn't stop at your name and address, in fact that's not even what they are mainly interested in. Revealing your identifying information would just open yourself up to harassment, especially when a tech company leaks the top 10,000 list of the most-likely-to-buy customers of some embarrassing product.
Well yes, that would devalue your name/address details, so they'd shift to more invasive approaches like reading your emails and messages, bugging your person and/or home, tracking your financial transactions, etc.
Not really. I mean, yes, on one hand, yes. On the other hand, places for open-topic discussions explicitly allowed fake names and nicknames.
The best timeframe on the internet I can remember was when everything you needed was a nickname of your choice and an email account somewhere.
If anything went wrong, you could just drop everything, get a new pair of nickname/address and start anew.
I use Facebook for this 75-80% of the time. A few IRL friends communicate with my account but it's mostly about common interests with people spread across the world. I did this in various web boards before Facebook but Facebook is better, more people with my common interests are gathered in one place, better debate happens, discovery is easier and so-forth.
But that's how I've systematically worked to use Facebook. I run a group where I enforce civility ruthlessly, banning all trolls in an otherwise troll-heavy part of the site.
Facebook is a factor because it allows better interest-discovery than other sites and it's easier to compete with admins who allowing trolling just by creating a group and being better (where starting a competing web-board was hard).
This might not be how most people experience FB but remember, the board users were only a small fraction of the population also.
Edit: Hot tip, Facebook doesn't make much of an effort to enforce real names. A little, certainly but not much. Most people today don't get the value or need for anonymous accounts. That was true before Facebook too but then the majority simply hesitated to get online at all. I'm not sure if this is a matter of education or psychology, whether this will ever change or not.
It's certainly easy to say that until you get requested for an ID, being locked out all your activities and friends until you compromise your privacy.
When everyone's identified, only the crazies and extremists truly speak their mind - they don't care about offending anyone.
You might end up with a mix of crazies and extremist "thought leaders" with packs of quiet followers - a suppression of the moderates and deep thinkers.
A minimum of pseudo anonymity that holds people accountable for what they say is an important part of enforcing a healthy community of people making good faith arguments.
What really devastated so much of the pre-social-network internet is erosion of this practice, in my opinion.
The point is that they aren't stored anywhere and disappeared once they were finished.
Over here I've been told that I can't have more than one account to post things I don't want associated with me in public. Give that I have a more than even chance I will work in some regime that takes offense to many things I might say, e.g. that I theoretically support LGBT rights, I just don't talk about anything remotely controversial.
But people with real knowledge eventually grow tired of sharing that information with a userbase that is happy to discuss which programming language has the best Hello World, whether Good Eats or Food Wishes is better for someone that has grown tired of ramen noodles, how to get into starting strength, which JR pass to buy on a first trip to Japan, etc.
The discussions don't seem shallow when the topics are new but they hardly ever get in depth because of the fact that the posts are fleeting outside of information contained in the sticky. There is very little point in having anything besides shallow discussion because it is ultimately a waste of time to constantly rehash the actual relevant and deep information you just posted a couple days.
This is when the users are in more or less well behaved forums. You go into some of the more trolly boards and the conversation just degrades even further.
Reddit has its own issues with people posting stuff just for likes and refusing to disagree for fear of losing internet points, but the actual content on the site is far superior to 4chan at this point, even though they started off by basically stealing all the interesting meme content from 4chan. There is actual useful information all throughout Reddit, even though I don't particularly like the community as a whole.
I would really like to hear why you think either site comes close to the discussion on hackernews however. This is easily the most civil and well moderated large site I've been on in a long while.
So I'll go ahead and do my simple maintenance routine that can be communicated in a 5 x 4 table while redditors read high school tier essays about how calorie io is a flawed paradigm and long-term weight loss isn't possible.
I ended up getting 100% on that coursework.
4 chan is like a piggie bank. You get out of it what you put in.
First, size. Although I can't speak to "modern" (say, post-2012) 4chan due to lack of firsthand experience, prior to then many of the smaller boards were actually quite nice places for serious discussion of their subject matter. /out/ (outdoors), /m/ (mecha), /n/ (transportation), and even some of the text boards like /prog/ were all fairly high quality due to their strong, persistent board cultures that discouraged pointless shitposting and encouraged actual contribution and dialogue. In each case, the ratio of new contributors to old hands was low enough to allow these board cultures to perpetuate and maintain quality. For example, when a community is small enough that many participants will have personally witnessed the debunking of a set of claims, reposting the same crap will be minimally effective. This dynamic breaks down at size, and it's easy to see how increased traffic over the years leads to the erosion of communities that rely on their small size for their quality.
That's where the other factor comes into play: quality of moderation. Despite being much larger and faster than the aforementioned slow boards, /a/ was quite good for a long period of time, largely thanks to very aggressive moderation. Low tolerance for off-topic content (especially anything with the scent of /pol/ on it) enforced a strong culture of topical, relatively thoughtful discourse. As one of the handful of places where you could discuss anime way too seriously without being hampered by those troublesome Naruto-watching non-elitists, old-/a/ produced a mind-boggling amount of in-depth textual analysis, especially of popular and controversial works like the F/SN VN. This was in large part due to the differences between the predominant pseudoanonymous forum-based model and the anonymous discussion model that aimed to address the deficiencies of the former. For example, a blight of old forums was circlejerking around the opinions of established members. Some guy, possibly a mod, would have a pet theory or position and everyone else had damn well better fall in line because he's got 20k posts and/or will ban anyone who disagrees. Crap like that wasn't universal, but it was a major issue with a lot of forum communities. Minus the persistent egos, discussion was allowed to progress. I think we let nostalgia blind us to a lot of the problems that afflicted old forum communities - the reasons that led folks to anonymous imageboards in the first place. Eventually, though, the pattern of strong moderation that enabled high-quality anonymous discussion fell by the wayside.
What caused that, though? Having spoken with a variety of janitors over the years, the common thread is that the ability to trivially ban evade via mobile connection (especially ipv6) DHCP pools basically destroyed the mod team's ability to quash bad actors. Ban evasion was always a problem, but prior to the emergence of phoneposting it took a lot more effort and was easier to combat. Banning known proxies and tor exit nodes is a pain, but banning mobile carrier IP ranges is a non-starter. This led to a general sense of resignation, which in turn translated to less-aggressive moderation and a decline in quality.
What I'm really getting at is that discarding the lessons learned about what makes an anonymous discussion system good or not just because the overall experiment didn't pan out is unfortunate, and that all hope isn't necessarily lost. For instance, an anonymous community with a barrier to entry (say, a SA/metafilter-type entry fee, where your ability to post anonymously is contingent upon not getting your paid account banned) could address the issues of size and moderation while maintaining the freedom-of-expression benefits of the anonymous model. The hard part there is bootstrapping - nobody wants to pay to participate in a yet-unpopulated community whose moderation model/community culture isn't a guaranteed personal fit, but opening it up initially to develop a userbase exposes it to the Gab/Voat problem.
It didn't work. It just deterred me from commenting at all, and when I did comment I think I was more terse and condescending than usual. I'm not sure why, but I wonder if maybe in anonymous forums I kind of just assumed a lot of the stupid things being said were by edgy teenagers. I was inclined to be patient with them or write them off since I just sort of assumed they were too young to know better and would grow out of it. But once you see the profile pictures of the people posting, and they're grown ass men who really ought to know better, it's much harder to be nice because you know these peoples' horrible beliefs have consequences.
Although to your last point, I don't think following thought leaders is such a bad thing. I mean, we have been following crazies for as long as humans have history.
Trivialities are fine. I just wish there was a language (as in, spoken language not profanity) and NSFW filter.
Boy those ad designs on the new layout sure are starting to look like regular posts. I’m sure it won’t get any worse, right?
Agreed; it seems like I'm having to re-opt out every day, at least once a day. I haven't figured out if it is a setting in the subs' that I read (maybe something in their themes?) or something on my end.
That adage about boiling the frog by slowly upping the temperature so it doesn't notice probably applies here
not on iOS
I got my first modem in 1985. I racked up a $300 phone bill my first month calling bulletin boards exchanging messages and software with people all over the world. My parents took my modem from me until I paid off the debt.
I’ve been on dozens of forums with topics I’m interested in over the last 3.5 decades. I’ve used every kind of internet communication including Usenet, irc, web, etc.
There’s no reason to miss the early days. Those special interest forums are still out there with lots of activity. Just look for them! I’ll take today’s ease of communication any day over having to dial up with a 300 baud modem to a single-person-at-a-time BBS.
That's an issue in itself. Google used to have a "discussion" search feature you could use to find a search term in forum posts. Now, that feature is gone. Social media content is highly prioritized and incentivized.
Forum discoverability was better in the past. Now, if you search for a community, you'll find a half-dozen Facebook groups, its Twitter feed, a subreddit, its G+ counterpart and YouTube videos.
Just be careful, because if you are using Facebook with Tor, you run the risk of outing your real identity from things like your social graph, search queries, likes, and other metadata.
You can’t be anonymous from Facebook or from Facebook users (with or without Tor) without violating its ToS and worrying about being blocked and asked to prove your real/authentic identity if you piss off some random person online or get flagged by one of its bots that check accounts periodically.
In the case of Facebook you will probably not get flagged even when you are a complete jackass, anonymous or not. Twenty percent of the userbase would disappear
I’m not sure how I feel about this…
Be careful... some cell providers use IPv6 these days. T-Mobile US gives me an IPv6 address and a 192.0.0.x CGNAT address.
There are many great forums, and Reddit is still reasonable despite the trouble.
Some sites, Quora, Facebook, et al. are using real name policies with mixed results.
Facebook is mostly a negative for me, though I do enjoy a few private groups.
Quora, of the real names experiments, has actually been a reasonable experience. 8 was early to the platform and many of us early on made strong efforts to set good norms around real names. A lot of that worked well.
It is working a little less well at big scale, though like I said, not bad. Sometimes more authoritarian than I prefer. The new spaces feature is a big test. Could be real names Reddit. Hmmm...
Having tried all extremes, I frankly still prefer pseudonyms. Handling trolls and such is not too big of a deal, and minor league for me personally.
The number one thing one can do to innoculate a community against trolling is to educate members on agency in dialog and model strong norms as to how that can work.
(People have more options than the usual righteous indignation and when they use them, trolling becomes largely ineffective as does "bitings" of varioys kinds)
Avoiding the bigger venues leaves one with mostly the same basic experiences that have always had value.
Typed on mobile, plz forgive typos
That's what HN is to me right now. Yeah it's not truly anonymous but almost everyone here's a stranger to me and I have some wonderful discourse with like-minded perceptive folks any time I visit.
Also reddit to a lesser degree but more experienced redditors than myself this is diminishing I don't fully understand that point
It was one of the default applications installed in all computer in the labs at University. And it was very common at the time to use its search function to seek out random people and chat.
I wouldn't get too rose colored glasses about that era of computing though, flame wars were nothing new (and there's still probably some Usenet flamewars that continue to rage uninterrupted for decades.)
Heck, I wrote a Dutch online book about Slackware with a guy I didn't really know the name of until after a couple of years when he told me he just used a pseudonym.
For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window
To me it is the introduction of likes (which are really a hack to make people more addicted through social confirmation) destroyed social networks. Shallower posts (party pictures, family announcements, memes) to get more likes, so people post them more and more. Genuinely interesting posts are buried by algorithms. Since comments can be liked as well, people write comments to conform with group biases (and are more likely to be upvoted) rather than to be useful.
tl;dr: to increase engagement, social networks have turned into popularity contests. As with other popularity contests, they are usually vain.
The idea of "engagement" as a key metric for some of these services is bizarre. When Netflix changed from 5-star ratings to like/dislike to "increase engagement", the usefulness of ratings on the site plummeted. I will take a single, considered review over thousands of mindless "+1" clicks any day of the week.
Emoji "reactions" are like that too. They're fun to click on, but are all noise and no signal if you actually want feedback.
I'm not sure how true this is with cheap(ish) subscription services. In many cases, the Planet Fitness model might be more apt. They rely on inertia and apathy to keep the subscription payments coming, but they actually rely on people not using the service very much and actively discourage "power-user" usage patterns.
That's true, but it's also true that in the next town over, you can be anonymous again. The difference with social media is the profile follows you everywhere.
You can be anonymous in a city.
It's the writing style - it feels like a cheap thriller written for teens. Too many characters and cheap tricks to 'educate' the reader about technical mumbo-jumbo.
Of course, this is my very subjective opinion. But having read enough PKD and Gaiman, my expectations are different than may be majority of the readers.
Now we realize that real life social structures were 1) seasoned 2) nicer and social networks are reinventing all the problems, but amplified by speed and scale. And also weird companies interests and paradigms, that weren't meshing well with us.
I'm getting fuzzy ..