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Comment by _madmax_ | Hacker News Reader

At this point in time I think I am comfortable saying the web is more detrimental to humans than Television ever was.

If you just stick to the sites that are public domain without ads, it's an amazing place.

And of course the "purple app" that everyone is talking about (https://www.farcaster.xyz/) is incredible.

I mean that's sort of like saying that TV is great as long as you stick to public access channel available over-the-air from 10:30AM to noon. Isn't that describing an extremely small niche of website? Almost everything has ads. A lot of sites have login walls, many (maybe even most?) have paywalls, especially once you step away from personal blogs.

You are the first person I've heard mention FarCaster.

Disclosure: I'm often wrong about these things.

    user: breck
    created: August 24, 2007

What? I don't care how old your account is. It's still first I've heard of a thing "everyone" is talking about.

Which is a surprise right? Given how popular it is on HN:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Looks like a solution to the problem that ActivityPub doesn't do enough to enable blockchain scams.

Why not just use something running on the activity pub protocol? The fact that farcaster isnt even interoperable with various fediverse projects makes me doubt their intentions in this space.

I remember when Arab Spring was happening and thinking how amazing social media was going to be.

And then Facebook started taking money from governments, and the messages organizing grassroots movements became extremely short lived and started to lose reach.

I certainly remember waves of American newscasters declaring Twitter as a force for democracy when regimes were falling in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia. America again leading the way in global freedom, etc.

They weren't as enthusiastic on January 6th, 2021. That was Twitter-led too.

Twitler-led.

The web was great back when it was mostly read-only. You could comment and share, but only via email, so only to people you likely knew. Yes, I remember chain mails from 1997, but those were rare, maybe 2x a year. You probably saw that many dumb posts in the last 5 minutes of scrolling Twitter/FB/IG.

Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.

> The web was great back when it was mostly read-only.

???

Justin Hall's call to arms "HTML is easy as hell"[0] was written nearly 30 years ago. The cycle Hall promoted is non-centralized, noncommercial and read-write.

0. http://www.links.net/webpub/

By read-only, I mean sans the comment sections that turned into outlets for mass spam, verbal abuse and misinformation.

It's almost like tools/technology comes with both good and bad sides, TV and other things included. Internet has made humans more connected than ever, which means both the good and the bad from being connected becomes amplified.

"Television is more detrimental to humans than telephone ever was."

"Telephone is more detrimental to humans than radio ever was."

"Radio is more detrimental to humans than telegraph ever was."

How is telephone and telegraph detrimental?

I guess courriers and letters are next? Excess is detrimental.

I believe the OP's point is that almost every new technology is greeted with accusations of being worse than what came before and what it's assumed it will replace, whether or not that actually proves to be the case. The examples may seem facetious, but they're all real.

I do think a case could be made that the changes in communication driven by the internet actually are different, but it's not the change itself, per se, as much as the speed of change. Pre-internet these changes were generational, and they generally took a generation (or more!) to be fully adopted and integrated into society. Now they're coming every decade or less, sweeping through the world in a matter of years.

My point is, I don't think people really said that about telephone and telegraph. Not every new technology was taken as being worse, so dismissing problems of Twitter just because it's new and "people hated everything new" isn't really good.

> I don't think people really said that about telephone and telegraph

A quick Google search will show that they did in fact say these things about the telephone and telegraph

> In 1858, People Said the Telegraph Was 'Too Fast for the Truth'

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/in-18...

> “The telephone is the instrument of the devil”

https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/communication/h...

What if it is, but you can’t tell any more, because you don’t know how the world looked without it?

History shows that there is constant, consistent progress no matter what technology people say will ruin everything.

It's going to take a lot more time and a lot worse crap on the internet to have a greater negative impact than FoxNews has had over its last 10 years. So for that reason, TV is still far worse for humanity.

On the positive side, internet has given us access to a lot of valuable information (for those who seek it out), whereas TV only makes available what the media companies want you to have access to.

I am always amazed when I see (justified) criticism of Fox News without mentioning CNN and MSNBC as equally culpable for a decline in American society. To not see this has to be the result of political partisanship or willful ignorance.

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