Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by camgunz | Hacker News Reader

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I mostly buy Eternal September, or as rephrased by David Foster Wallace:

"[The internet] is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests."

Like, the internet is banal because we're (the rich world) all on it. It's not a weird little niche anymore. So it's now subject to all the (rich) world's problems. Racism is a problem on Twitter not because of content moderation difficulties or the lack of sufficient compute power to run sufficiently intelligent AI, but because it's a problem off Twitter too. Getting nickel and dimed, scammed, deluged by ads, or tricked by dark patterns is a problem on major platforms because it's a problem in meatspace too. We all know this, because our main fear with AI (the latest and greatest tech) is that it will soon also have all of these problems, and just amplify them even more than the internet did. It totally will!

But FWIW I think cool things are happening. Wireguard and Tailscale are cool. I hate to admit it, but some Blockchain stuff is cool. MLS is cool. ActivityPub is (maybe) cool. You just gotta get out of the browser.

You list social issues and then list a collection of privacy-oriented technology as if it's a solution.

Those two domains are orthogonal. Perfect privacy won't make racism or banality go away. It may make it harder to be targeted by ad farms, but it will make it easier for scammers and other bottom feeders to infiltrate and exploit online communities for personal and sometimes political ends.

Instead of being flooded by spray-and-pray spam, users in online spaces will be targeted by more sophisticated attacks based on estimates of psychology and interests derived from their public posting profile.

The DFW quote sums it up nicely. There is no technological fix for a lowest common denominator culture which rewards predatory greed over sincere mutuality.

It was just a random list off the top of my head. I don't think there is anything privacy oriented about blockchains (which publish and store your transactions publicly forever) or activitypub (which literally publishes your activity to other people). They weren't meant to seem like solutions to humanity's problems.

The rest of your post I agree with; mostly that was my point.

Gemini:// is a protocol that currently feels a lot like the geocities-era web. It is not yet September there. You’ll find how to get in if you try hard enough.

Gemini threw the baby out with the bath water by disallowing in-line images and styles. It's not like GeoCities because there's very little if any ability to express yourself artistically with the medium. Half of the "Geocities" pages people harken back to were themselves artistic content.

None of that is really possible with Gemini.

In-line images are up to the user agent. A Gemini client can permit the user to turn these on. Besides, Gemini being a protocol that aims to be hostile to tracking, made it a bit harder to include tracking beacons/pixels by not allowing those to be downloaded by default.

Agree on the lack of style. I think it would be nice to give the user agent at least a hint in the form of a color map.

Images can be inlined by the user agent.

> You just gotta get out of the browser.

I agree with this. The internet is a great tool. The web is extremely problematic and growing less useful over time.

Too many people think that the internet and the web are the same thing.

Firewalls pretty much have made the internet and web the same thing, as discussed on HN in many threads. About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS. The internet's usefulness as a tool has been greatly compromised because of this.

> About the only services on the internet that are not wholesale blocked are DNS and HTTPS.

Really? I'm so happy and fortunate that hasn't been true for me. If the only thing I could reach was the web, well over half of the usefulness of the internet would evaporate.

So what are you using?

Is that true for personal internet connections, or just corporate ones? I've never felt any kind of big restrictions on what kind of traffic I send from my home connection.

This is a gift. Technology to keep corporations out of your space is usually a lot more expensive and a lot less reliable.

Yes, I struggle with that all the time - and not getting bogged down into yet another explainer that they are not the same thing!

What is MLS?

Messaging Layer Security: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messaging_Layer_Security -- basically TLS for messaging apps

Are you saying that racism is only a problem in rich countries?

That quote really nails the problem.

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