If you'd asked teenage me in the 90s if the internet I loved then was going to turn into this, I'd have thrown my computer in the trash. As a convenience tool its grown leaps and bounds, but as a "place" it's turned into a terrible neighborhood.
Oh, how naive...
I certainly think more people are aware of things they wouldn’t have otherwise been aware of. It’s become more difficult for governments to hide facts from their citizens, and that’s been good.
It’s been a mixed bag and I think we should be careful of judging the Internet by the behaviour of companies like Facebook.
We’re also learning. Ten years ago I can’t imagine anyone quitting social media due to concerns about privacy, manipulation, the undermining of democracy or the amoral behaviour of Facebook’s employees, but that happens a lot now. As PG said, it takes time for us to “develop antibodies” to these things.
But secondly there's also the issue of social media mass manipulation, which MAKES (or strongly pushes) people to act like they do. This is completely separate to how "smart" the community is.
I guess I wasn't entirely wrong about having a lot more niche content, although in hindsight thinking that trash TV was a technological issue was very naive. If anything trash shows (be it on TV or the internet) are trashier than ever due to the increased competition.
(My parents wouldn't let me watch Green Acres, telling me it was trash. By the time I was an adult, it wasn't in syndication anymore. Eventually it shows up on Netflix, I watch it to see what I had missed. It's total trash. Didn't make it through a single episode. It's much the same for the rest, like My Favorite Martian, etc.)
Information back then was scattered, the tools to look for it (Altavista, Yahoo, Archie, Veronica, etc.) were rather weak in retrospect. Wikipedia didn't exist in the 90s, nor did GitHub, Thingiverse, and so on. A lot of things like online banking, stock brokerages, bill pay, video chatting, online gaming, and so on weren't as good as we have it now. None of that was accessible without being tethered to a phone or Ethernet jack.
What has changed is the arrival of platforms that started optimizing for engagement, impressions, views, clicks, targeting, and eyeballs, because all of that can be monetized.
The people who would be glued to the boob tube now are glued to social media, and instead of getting content fed from Rupert Murdoch and other media barons, it comes from whomever does a better job of paying for ad impressions, gaming social media, and creating clickbait content to get their viewpoint heard.
That's no longer possible nowadays.
The website counter was the like-button of those days.
[0] https://neocities.org/ [1] https://gifypet.neocities.org [2] https://neocities.org/browse
As for advertising... well, if you're going to start making money then expect to brush against regulations. At the very least, you may interest the taxman.
Not all of them bad ones. I suspect once we've finished adjusting to the new digital reality it will have, on balance, made us smarter.
If giving more people access to more information and a place in the cultural conversation doesn't improve things then the human race was doomed anyway.
At their base, social media platforms specifically engineer their desired behavior, powered by obscene amounts of money and technical effort, but largely independent of their users' own preexisting wants and needs.
Facebook et al. are the 21st century equivalent of a <blink> tag.
You see similar problems in places like /r/covid19 on reddit where people argue about IFR with few accepting the meaninglessness of the question.
Complexity is hard, but I don't think the world is better if we oversimplify things.
We used to pay people to take the raw facts and distil useful information. It was called journalism.
Clickbait and conspiracy pays more than actual journalism though.
We are in a "eternal September". It will pass (not literally eternal)
I would not go back. It is brilliant
I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is, and in addition it's meshed with the bugs in our code (confirmation bias springs to mind) to allow disinformation to spread, and people to seek sources that confirm their beliefs rather than actually inform them of the truth.
Unfortunately, advertising companies built low-effort dopamine funnels on top and plugged everyone up. This has amplified the more basal animal instincts humans come pre-wired with. Outrage, lust, want, and envy are being micro-stimulated in all of us, constantly, all for the objective function optimization of engagement and ad revenue. Attention has been hijacked, fears have been stoked, and people have been made to hate each other.
We've evolved as individuals and devolved as a whole.
the now-informed go and inform the uninformed, affecting everybody in a slow and gradual manner -- regardless of the individuals participation.
One didn't have to read in order to be affected by the advent of the printing press.
In the same way that some thought about radio, TV and now the internet.
In any case any issues with digital media giants aren't the result of the internet, but rather late stage capitalism.
You can safely bet money on that.
A few years later, Microsoft Encarta [0] was available on CD.
And a decade later, that was gone itself because of the internet.
The internet is amazing!
Easy to forget when we're wired for extraordinary to feel ordinary in time.
The internet did spread ideas. The spread of ideas can bring certain philosophical freedoms. 'Democracy' is too loosely defined in this context.
The entire attitude is really offensive to me only due to the sheer fact that I am amazed at the accomplishments we've made as humans in the short time that I've been around -- and the internet is one of those huge accomplishments that leaves me in awe every time I stop to think about it.
Previous history was widely categorized and considered by the data storage methods thought of during that time, and the dissertation of that information over the world -- the internet blows all previous methods out of the water by many orders of magnitude, while simultaneously lowering the barrier of entry to these stores of information down low enough to where even the most destitute human can usually find a method to participate.
Did the printing press have as many detractors? Have humans always expected the tools to do the entire job, rather than facilitating it?
'Can someone call up The-Internet and mention that they're late to a 3 o'clock democracy spreadin' gig?'
I joke, 'the internet' is a tool, a network -- not an entity. To anthropomorphize the tool into a lazy being that hasn't solved the promised problems would be silly.
but, you're right, humans have done a lousy job using tools, like the internet, to create equality; thankfully we seem to have a long enough future ahead of us to remediate such laziness on our own part.
In my area, every spring as the days get longer and the frost subsides my yard springs up weeds. Within a month the turf crowds it out despite its slow start. Every year the same thing - the weeds are just quicker on the draw than the grass.
I think we're in the spring dawning of massive global connectivity - the nodes are online but they aren't good at resisting infection, the networks are vast but not resilient to abuse, truth struggles against the speed and virality and appeal of propaganda - but humanity's good at inventing approaches and institutions to improve on those things.
Asteroids, pandemics, and climate change on the other hand....
Not to mention neither the right or the left which have the biggest voices seem to actually care about true liberalism. They both have very narrow world views that they want to force everyone else to behave by.
And the counterpoint of "but look how far we've come" isn't satisfying because we all advance due to the absurd excellence of the few (researchers, inventors, philosophers, organizers, etc...) and what you're talking about seems to require excellence from the many.
But I also believe that the internet can be the solution to that problem. A bigger bunch of the kids that come behind us are much much smarter than we are, and I think it'll be the same for them and those that follow.
Drowning in information, awareness, and interaction from such a young age is going to promote rapid and broader smartening and wizening. The nodes will have an opportunity to slide up the competence gradient now that its apparent and the resources to exploit it are abundant.
Youth won't be wasted on the young in an environment where the young are already wise.
Could you elaborate on this?
It suggests a constraint on humans' impact - an inverse correlation between will & power that yields a flattened curve when plotted against time - and implies that we're restrained by nature.
But if that constraint were broken...
A extremely elitist and arrogant comment. Where is your evidence?
So of course the racists, the sexists, and those without the capacity for abstract thought voted for him in droves.
We're long past the point where there is benefit in pretending that all ideas are created equal, and that my uneducated belief is somehow on the same level as your educated, evidence-backed opinion. To support Trump is to support the anathema of civilized society.
I can see we're not going to have a productive conversation, here.
Perhaps at that point it's more fruitful to name it and to confront it as a cancer on civil society than it is to recruit it or appease it.
If you're caught in a propagandist's net it would seem to do you better to reach your hand out to the folks who notice in hopes they could fight with you for your liberty rather than to compound your shame by insisting you're there for your own good.
The coup in Egypt was so swift that there was no time for then hypothetical Islamist dictatorship to form.
Better how? In the 2 civil wars, tens of thousands of people got killed, millions got displaced, and oil production never recovered. Since the country is so fragmented, they can't do anything about the ongoing pandemic. Even Obama refers to Libya has his greatest mistake.
The fact is that a country undergoing a revolution or even just significant unrest is very weak, and weakness will be exploited.
Whenever I feel afraid I go ping some of my IPv6 addresses or measure the pond temperature remotely, or the current rainfall at school.
If you can’t shake yourself away from the web bits, GitHub with its sheer volume of creative expression (even as unpalatable as centralized monocultures may be) is something to love about this current moment in intarwebs history.
Once one Lead gets in, only they themselves can promote another person to Lead. In my neighborhood, we had one thoughtful Lead, and one insane Lead. The thoughtful lead carefully deliberated about adding more Leads, while the insane Lead picked her cronies - and then eventually "overthrew" the thoughtful Lead.
NextDoor has terrible content moderation and no penalties for infringing users. It's absolutely vile, amplifying the most minority of opinions with no consequences.
No such alternative exists on NextDoor. Don't like the content or moderators? Your only choice is stop participating. I have no idea why NextDoor thinks that is good for their business model. Over time the site will just be populated with Karens.
The cynic in me thinks that Nextdoor is just proof that the fundamental thing that makes social media terrible - being a megaphone for egos, pettiness, and narcism - are not overcome by real identities and scope. In my group, there are people that like to stir the pot, and then there are people that love reacting to the stir.
I'll admit it was awful when I lived in Berkeley, but so were the people around me.
Nextdoor is great; lets me know what the neighbors are doing and helps me pick out great local services. Some dudes above pointed out you need some common interest for it to work: being a good neighbor counts as a common interest!
The reason it worked, was that you would gather based on your interests and there was no giant company optimizing things for clicks - that is also why the original reddit worked so well: there is a small space for your niche.
If this were interpreted by a court or regulator (perhaps as part of an EU anti-trust investigation) as a requirement to have new data automatically exported on an on-going basis, then that is very similar to requiring effectively federation between big services.
They could do whatever they wanted with their customers (pricing, who and how to serve, terms of service, etc.) when they were small enough that users could in practice leave them for a competitor just as easily as they could cut off service.
But if they allowed themselves to grow to into the millions of users, they would have to gradually transition to purely uninvolved, invisible infrastructure, like an underground water pipe. Their users would deal with smaller middlemen instead of the background infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider would have no way to impose terms of service or philosophical opinions or pricing controls or whatever, which only the middlemen would be allowed, and if the middlemen all conspire, the infrastructure provider wouldn't be able to deny service to a new middleman who offered an alternative.
Basically, the small players deal freely with small players, and the biggest players, instead of gaining leverage, would have to serve them more and control or compete less (or remain small and retain the full freedom of a small player).
Put a hard cap on a post's re-tweets/shares, and aggressively ban bots that try to copy&paste to circumvent this.
The problem with cutting and pasting isn't bots, it's people. Uncle Joe posting 5 links a day from <bad news source> is completely allowed under your system, and yet if there are a million Uncle Joes on your network (and there definitely is a large portion of the population like that), then you'd just be back to square one.
Remember spam chain e-mails back in the 0's? There were a lot of stupid viral ideas going around in them, but their reach was rather limited, and they were, generally speaking, not very successful in breaking into the social zeitgeist.
"15 million people liked this" is a lot of social proof. "Uncle Joe + a few dozen other people liked this" is not nearly as much social proof... And viral ideas live and die by the amount of social proof they have.
It's quite possible that what I suggest may not be the best possible fix. In fact, I'll go so far to say that it's not. But I have a hard time imagining that we currently live in the best possible world, such that no amount of tweaking the parameters of these sites will result in improvement. The current outcomes are horrible.
1. Bad ideas spreading does, in fact, harm me. For instance, bad ideas, in the vein of 'COVID is a hoax created by Bill Gates and Soros' and 'Wearing masks is tyrrany' are currently killing people, and are causing economic damage.
2. If speech is so meaningless that ignoring it makes it's impact on my life go away, why do people care about having free speech? How can it both be so meaningless, and so important at the same time?
3. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to ignore politics. Even if you don't care for it, politics cares deeply about you. When politics stops caring about me, I'll stop looking at 'the crap'.
Talking face to face with friends and family
It is my understanding that Telegram and Whatsapp are currently actively doing this kind of thing, to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation, according to the companies. I still disagree with this practice on principle. The effects of free speech on free people is increased freedom. If those using free speech are not themselves free, less optimal results may occur; freedom is an inherent good; free actions are judged on their merits and their effects.
Already on Facebook, I generally can't make a post that's shown to other people automatically who are disconnected from my friend group. Is Facebook limiting my free speech by doing that already? Hypothetically, if Facebook did stuff like decreasing the volume, er, show rate, to far-away people if my post is re-shared from my friends and so-on to very far outside of my immediate friend group, is that then censorship?
You will find it is a very nice place if you block Facebook and Instagram at your router and build and cultivate communities yourself.
I am endlessly tired of antisocial people complaining about the modern internet simply because approximately 100% of their society uses it now.
If you’re antisocial, that’s fine: seek out smaller, cultivated communities and protocols. But don’t hate on the fact that anyone can talk to anyone else now. That’s a feature, not a bug.
I think you're implying you would not have used the internet, but that seems unlikely. Since you are still here, you must have decided that the benefits outweigh the death threats?
Too bad that most people are a 'terrible neighbourhood'.