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I'm not sure that GP meant entirely private communities - rather something like, for example, Discord communities, or online forums, where people can still join, but it's not entirely "public" in the sense of Twitter or the like.

> Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web): that it would be open and really big.

The many forums that existed fulfilled both of those. Open to read for anyone, really big in aggregate and mostly small and private communities of participants.

Some of them even still exist.

> kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer

Small and private does not necessarily imply exclusive. There are such communities where you can easily join or lurk.

> or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence

And that still works for me like that. They might not be visible on the first results page but once you start to research a topic in depth you can find them.

> that it would be open and really big.

I think that was the aspiration, but nobody realized there were so many people who thought 5G caused corona (and similar lack of thought process) until it was too late.

To rephrase it differently: it was not anticipated that the great majority of people cannot handle the amount of information, which is required for thoughtful decisions, that they happy to accept obvious contradictions to avoid self-reflection, and that they lack even basic suspicion of information's validity. We were naive to think that they can choose, or even want to choose between options, that they want to be free from central agencies to tell them what to think. We really thought that The Long Tail would happen in everything.

But hey, those people won greatly, who can and want.

>so many people who thought 5G caused corona

literally nobody thought this, perhaps except a handful of oddballs. If you want to make your case for describing the state of the internet, please avoid nonsense exaggerations like this.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/technology/coronavirus-5g...

oddballs, i agree. but a dangerous group of oddballs.

> Across Britain, more than 30 acts of arson and vandalism have taken place against wireless towers and other telecom gear this month, according to police reports and a telecom trade group. In roughly 80 other incidents in the country, telecom technicians have been harassed on the job.

that is not a small number, we discuss smaller things on HN. And these are only the cases that have manifested in to arson or harassment, so includes zero couch conspiracy theorists.

>literally nobody thought this, perhaps except a handful of oddballs.

So not literally nobody?

Given that the original comment implied that the reason we could not have an "open and really big" internet is because of the handful of oddballs that thought 5G towers caused Corona, yes, it might as well be literally nobody.

The number shouldn't matter though. We can have an open and big internet regardless of how many people believe in ideas that seem to be batshit crazy to the average person. Who cares what someone else chooses to think or believe?

you can still have an open and really big internet with these people, the question is if it remains anything like the bastion of great thought the "open and really big" part implies (along with the example provided in the original post I was replying to)

A coworker of mine tried to convince me of this during the pandemic. I guess she realized I was a bit more antic establishment than normal and thought I'd like that hypothesis.

It was a small minority, but there were (and are) absolutely people who believed this. They also usually explain it poorly, I think their idea really is that 5G radio signals caused disease but it gets morphed into a claim that 5G somehow created the virus that caused the disease.

Ok but then how is this relevant? Crazy uncles have existed long before the Internet.

> literally nobody thought this

Well it seems relevant because the comment I replied to was minimizing the number of people who thought 5G may have caused covid to a miniscule number of people. I raised my experience because I only know a small number of people and did in fact know someone in real life who believed this and sent me plenty of links and whitepapers making the same claims.

Is my anecdotal experience statistically significant? Absolutely not. But I also hesitate to believe that the number of people who bought into the idea was so small as to effectively not exist.

Crazy uncles were unable to find other crazy uncles and coagulate into the fatbergs of information flow before the internet. Now the algorithms push them together.

But again, who cares if someone else or a group of people think something you find to be crazy? If they act on it that's totally different, but we have laws for that already.

A single crazy in a sea of normalcy will be diluted. A congealed group of crazies, however, has political and social power.

I get that crazy ideas can spread, but what is the actual concern? Are you worried about people believing the ideas, or people acting on them? If the latter, are you worried about them acting in ways that aren't already illegal?

One recent example is QAnon and its popularity throughout the Republican party, all the way up to the former president. Once a crazy idea reaches critical mass and gains political power, legality becomes irrelevant. Nazism was similarly insane and conspiratorial, and we all know what happened there.

The Nazi Party wasn't particularly popular in Germany until the great depression, but I've never seen it described as having been viewed as insane or conspiratorial by Germans of the time.

Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party? Would you want to see anyone believing QAnon conspiracies banned from voting, even if you are correct that the ideology has taken over much of the Republican Party? I'm not sure that banning most voters in one of two parties we have would go over well, nor would it leave us with a democracy or much of an election process.

> The Nazi Party wasn't particularly popular in Germany until the great depression, but I've never seen it described as having been viewed as insane or conspiratorial by Germans of the time.

Some of the core beliefs underpinning Nazism were based on bizarre occultism and antisemitic conspiracy theories. I suppose people simply ignored or brushed off what they didn't like, much as they do with QAnon politicians today.

> Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party?

I never said anything about banning voters. I was just lamenting how easily the crazies can coalesce and gather power these days. Don't know what the solution is. Maybe we're just doomed.

Yep, just realized I got comments threads crossed here. Ignore the banning voters question, sorry about that!

My understanding of the history of how the Nazi Party took power is a bit different than what you're describing, curious what you may have seen that I haven't. My understanding is that the party was always based on racist ideology but that it only went antisemitic in the 30s around the time Hitler gained power.

Sorry again about the voting question, that's very confusing when I got the context wrong here!

With regards to potential solutions, I think it really comes down to fighting for a system we believe is sustainable long term and resilient to bad ideas floating around the population. To me that means doubling down on many of the core ideals of the American system, throwing out where we've gone wrong, and doubling down on free speech.

Ultimately all we can do is trust that the system is designed to withstand. If we don't think the system can work without breaking our own rules to "do the right thing" then what are we really doing? As long as people can speak their minds and hash out disagreements in public we're all better off. When ideas that may end up being dangerous are forced to stay behind closed doors we really have a problem.

Some of them with wild ideas do things like try to storm the capitol on thought processes riddled with ridiculous ideas. I'm not an American, but watching that is scary. The same problem exists in other places and people believe absolutely wild things unquestioningly and act on them on a daily basis, sometimes harmlessly, sometimes very harmfully.

I am an American though was actually living in Europe when the capital was stormed. I was scared watching that in the middle of the night, and also confused as to how anyone pushing through barriers and doors were going through without being shot.

At least in the US though, speech is protected specifically from government censorship. Facebook can censor whatever they want, but the government can't take part in it at all. Historically, American culture has stood strongly behind free speech and we're very uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a person for what they say. Once you act on an idea that's a different story, but we have laws that already cover that.

> I was scared watching that in the middle of the night,

It sounds to me like you should lower your caffeine intake. Nobody sober-minded watching that on TV should have felt scared; it was obviously a mob of clowns goofing around, not an insurrectionist army.

> and also confused as to how anyone pushing through barriers and doors were going through without being shot.

Because it was obvious to everyone that it was just a mob of clowns goofing around, not an insurrectionist army. The tiny minority that got violent and probed too far got violently dealt with though.

> Historically, American culture has stood strongly behind free speech and we're very uncomfortable with the idea of punishing a person for what they say.

One funny thing to tie this with is that Congress is literally "the People's House". It would be a very American interpretation of things to say that anyone should have the right to protest at/in the Capitol. Those Congress critters shouldn't have run away and hid as if they're dictators holing up in the bunker when the peasant have surrounded the royal palace; they should have met the non-violent rioters and talked with them. Their job is to represent those people that are angry out there!

And, optically, that would have been a win-win for all of us: either they bravely diffuse the situation and get respect OR they get assaulted, in which case the "OMG INSURRECTIONIST" rhetoric would prove to be actually warranted.

Oh, also, another deeply American valence is revolution. Take for that what you will. ;D

We have a very different understanding of the potential fallout from a takeover of the US Congress. Its easy to write them off as clowns now, but in the moment how is they known? Those people didn't go through security checks and it wasn't known what they may have been carrying with them.

What would have happened if they got into Congressional chambers? Or got their hands on congressmen? PR the VP? We simply don't know.

It wasn't caffeine that scared me. It was the potential for a civil war. That seems outlandish now that we know was Jan 7th looked like. But honestly, can you say it wouldn't have happened should they have reached Pence or Pelosi?

I don't like either of those politicians, or government in general. But its a for agile house of cards, and a mob of people forcing their way into the capital building while all of Congress is in session is a terrible sign. I don't know how you write that off as a clown show, and I don't know what tipped you off to that being a clown show rather than something potentially more serious. Maybe I just missed it.

Anti-vaxxers putting the greater population at risk.

Storming pizza parlors.

Protesting election results in violent and extreme ways.

Coalesced crazy is dangerous, full stop. Stupid ideas being dragged out into the sunlight used to work but these folk are being fed nothing but crazy by the algorithms of social media, so it stopped working.

The solution is regulation of social media.

Those dangers already have legal solutions without regulating speech though. Talking about some conspiracy theories isn't, and shouldn't be, a crime. Acting on them, say by trespassing or commuting acts of violence are already illegal. Depending on what authorities can prove, conspiracy to commit certain acts is already a crime.

Regulating social media isn't a solution, and definitely not the solution. For one thing, if the state officially took a role in regulating speech on social media they would be bound by constitutional powers.

You could actually see censorship on social media sites decrease when they are required to respect individuals' rights to free speech and protection from government censorship. Why do you think they currently do it quietly and behind closed doors? As long as the government isn't openly censoring us on social media the censorship isn't unconstitutional. As soon as its government regulated we will see supreme court rulings likely deciding that the government censoring speech online is unconstitutional and a violation of the first amendment.

Oh people have known for a long time that the average person has crazy ideas. There's a reason the US election system isn't by popular vote, our founders believed that "the mob" couldn't be trusted and there needed to be a electoral escape hatch to make sure reasonable people were elected.

With that said, what's the problem with people having ideas that seem crazy and baseless? Does it really harm you at all if someone else believes 5G causes covid? And does it harm you enough to say that their speech should be limited rather than free?

“The mob” being the voting citizens of a free and open democratic society, of course.

Interesting point of view/source of internal tension there.

Yeah for sure. Revolutions are messy and its easy to lose sight of that when you're on the winning side. I'm personally very glad to not live under a imperial monarchy, but I do wish the founders could have kept their concerns over voters out of the way.

There are historical examples of why trusting the mob goes poorly, but keeping that on the table fundamentally ruins the point of a democratic society. Its all well and good to say we need an educated populace, but the system should offer the public a chance to live up to the ideal rather than guard against their failure.

I don’t think the founding fathers much less the ancient greek democrats anticipated the level of idiocy in the public discourse we are dealing with today. A huge swath of the country has been manipulated by propaganda to the point of not believing in reality at all. It’s a dangerous position we find ourselves in today.

I think the founding fathers actually had a more educates populace than we do today. For all the modern education and fields of study we have today, is the level of idiocy an anomaly or is it a symptom of of modern education?

I would also say the propaganda environment the founding fathers found themselves in was very nascent. It certainly wasn’t so married with findings from neuroscience or psychology supported by data like it is today. The media market was also generally more competitive. When you are down to one regional paper and thats that, there is little incentive for quality journalism and informing people factually.

> Does it really harm you at all if someone else believes 5G causes covid? And does it harm you enough to say that their speech should be limited rather than free?

I would far rather restrict their right to vote than their right to speak. If they're sufficiently influential, that also means that everyone's vote who doesn't fall for their charm is worth just that much more.

Oh that's an interesting take, I wasn't expecting that one. I don't think I've seen anyone argue for restricting voter rights over speech before.

I'm very opposed to limiting either, the US is already more restrictive with regards to both voting rights and speech than I'm comfortable with. I'd be very worried about gating voter rights to some kind of checklist of thought, removing Coting access from those deemed to be unworthy of casting a vote based on what they think or say.

> Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web)

I fully agree with you there. This is why I remarked on the private (or perhaps better said, semi-private) nature of forums/chats I use with high SnR today. I’m disappointed it has gone this way, but then the 90s was a long time ago now and I was certainly more naive then.

To draw an analogy, I think distance/privacy brings its own benefits. There’s a reason the corporate giants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s put their research campus away from the main HQ centre of gravity.

In the late 80s/early-90s, it was quite a “hike” to get to the Internet. Either you were at University or as in my case, you had to get modem, cable, KA9Q, terminal emulator, Kermit, rz/sz, etc working together to reach it. Even when browsers became a thing, you may have needed to compile one, or get Winsock working if on a Pee Cee.

I honestly don’t agree with most of the doomsayers of the Internet.

Sure, there is way more advertising and bots these days but there is WAY more content available today than 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Definitely way more diversity of content too.