The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
maggieappleton.com
maggieappleton.com
1. I wonder how much of this is also driven by 'cancel culture', invasive media coverage, etc? After seeing stuff like how Scott Alexander's life got upended a bit after the New York Times covered Slate Star Codex, I wouldn't be surprised if many niche communities decided that making their discussions and ideas publicly viewable wasn't worth it.
Why open yourself up to real life consequences from a puritanical culture when you can limit discussions to those you know share similar views?
2. I also suspect the feeling that third parties were profiting from said information without really crediting the source may have had an impact too. I know a few communities that didn't share info until one of their own members had covered it on YouTube because they were sick of large channels and websites repackaging the info and getting credited as the 'source'.
Or with people who may have wildly different views from you, but whom you trust to disagree amicably and remain tolerant of those views.
I started a private discussion board a few years ago for just this purpose: it became impossible to have a good-faith discussion of almost anything on the open web. Within the boundaries of a private community, you can have some expectation of safety that you can't have if the audience is the entire world, as it is on Twitter (or even HN). With that safety you can disagree more with less fear of consequences, which is how it should be (and was, before all this shit).
In the case of places that are not self hosted, like Discord communities, closing off is often a means of survival against a mostly automated moderation system. I've seen several relatively large Discord communities be wiped out by small groups of obsessive and sad people going around and reporting out of context posts until one finally pops the server and gets it deleted.
When I was growing up, we sent out a christmas letter once a year to everyone we knew. That comprised of family (near and far), local friends (each parent had like 3, and I had a couple), and longterm close friends (each parent had two). Basically everyone in my whole family did this, and everyone I knew did this too. This is an analogy for what facebook is to most people, but twisted.
Twitter is more of a "stand on your soapbox and scream and the passersby". Both of these services are something that, before the open internet of 2010-now, people did once or twice a year and maybe 5 times in their life (respectively) unless they are activists or politicians.
Meanwhile, gossiping with your friends at a lunchtable at school or work is as old as time, and the "cozy web" feels like this.
TLDR facebook and twitter are communication methods that are unnatural for the standard human to use more than once or twice a year.
If the hierarchy is "public visibility", then I believe the dark net to be more visible than a private WhatsApp group.
And there really is nothing cozy about data-hoarding closed mega-corp software like Discord and Snapchat. As convenient as they are, 'cozy' is not the word.
The writer likely just thinks "LinkedIn and Facebook == Bad!" and "My two Discord servers with my friends == Good!" and just made huge generalizations from there.
... but not for long, and it's not the expected common-case continuously-observed scenario when one walks in the woods. The point is that such a thing is a transient, unstable configuration at one layer and the expected configuration at another layer.
Is there something meaningful (in terms of linear continuity) on the y-axis of a forest? Or are you looking for a continuous function to apply where the metaphor isn't asking for one?
Your comment seemed sensible to me, until I realized that it's likely because we are both old and think about trolls as being on 8chan.
But if you look at pretty much any time since about 2015, the most notable trolls have been large public figures with an extremely wide reach, saying the same sort of things that get a rise out of people on 8chan and Reddit. To take the most recent example, Elon Musk's upending of Reddit can be seen at least partially as an instance of a large public trolling. On a more distributed plane, phrases like "own the libs" are common enough in the public consciousness to be used by angry 45-year old commenters on Facebook who have never been to 4/8chan.
That is why trolls are at the top of the diagram, because it's a diagram as of 2023 -- whereas you're thinking of trolling from 2013 or maybe even 2003.
No thanks. "Personal" and "Blockchain" don't belong in the same idea. I want to be able to delete my things. And I don't want to have to run (or pay to run) nodes to do...whatever it is that proof of stake needs to avoid a 51% attack on my "personal Blockchain".
And before someone says it, no, I don't want anything I do stored immutably on Ethereum or any other chain. Keep crypto away from my social.
It's the main reason I don't take my participation here very seriously and can only treat it as anonymous throwaway content.
A permanent record of every social interaction in my life is both a huge privacy risk (an advertiser's dream!) and completely unnecessary. I don't want to censor myself when talking with my closest friends because I'm worried about everything I say and have ever said becoming irrevocably part of the public record. I want to choose a technology where that isn't the default.
I do feel the annoyance of people trying to shoehorn "crypto" terminology into personal stuff, but I think there's probably a reasonable non-cryptobullshit way (like WebMentions, which are used on the author's site) to get what the author actually wants, which is a way for me to control the data I want to make available to the wider internet, and to delete them and leave gaps when I chose to do so.
Ethereum is a Dark Forest (2020): https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
HN's indexed, registration is open, and its size/influence have grown enough that I regularly see people here trying to grind ideological axes. I've found myself retreating from it along with the others.
As they say, "Not gonna die on that hill."
Talk about dark and cozy.
I'm determined to get you there
In this context, it should be kept in mind that the desired outcome of a panoptic monitoring system controlled by an authoritarian power, be it socialist or capitalist in nature, is self-censorship by the target population and its retreat into hidey-holes (which the authorities still have access to) which either provide a false sense of security or limit the spread of objectionable ideas and knowledge. Going along with this program is unwise: give the authoritarian power structure an inch and it'll take a mile, and then you end up having to deal with the Gestapo/STASI system.
Additionally, the psychological pressures imposed by such a system lead to widespread mental illness in human beings. Relevant xkcd:
Look at cloud services in this light and of course you’ll be more careful about what you post! You will also not be surprised at the fallout of data breaches. “Millions of social security numbers leaked!” Well of course: you sent yours to the internet when you signed up for that credit card. “My nude photos are getting passed around!” Of course they are: you sent them to iCloud (the internet). “My private DMs got anonymously sent to my ex-wife!” You sent them to the Internet.
We've reached a point now where the average person feels some anxiety about their future employer seeing an unsanitized public blog, but future employers aren't poking into a Discord and de-pseudonymizing usernames. Nor is my worst enemy; he's a meathead and lacks the savvy to do that, nor the competency to hire someone to do it for him (yeah, I said it, and you know what you did so don't act like it ain't true, name redacted!).
We've gone past the generation that thought if we lived with our private lives in public everyone would realize that everyone is human and be chill about that and we've built the infrastructure to have public selves and pseudonymous selves that (for most people) won't get cracked because it's not worth the hassle. Sure, nation-states and criminal syndicates still have the resources and incentives to do that kind of cracking, but we can only hide from them by staying all the way off the Internet, and we've definitely reached the point where that leaves one with a massively de-enriched lived experience.