The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)
fourmilab.ch
fourmilab.ch
It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
That makes my old hacker heart smile.
https://seedboxes.cc/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex .. etc.
But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.
YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing.
One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.
That you knew of.
Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).
TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.
The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.
> A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.
Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.
Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?
I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.
Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone.
As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.
Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes to administrators.
[1] https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/
I got my first gmail address via an invite and it was light-years ahead of everything else.
Nowadays it's possibly worse than most other providers, and it doesn't filter spam as well as it used to. Nowadays I just dislike it.
Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
...man, I miss it.
IMO, the apps are quite nice actually and I enjoy not having to ever run out to a meter anyway, but requiring a phone should not be considered meeting accessibility requirements.
Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.
https://www.designnews.com/automotive-engineering/scammers-t...
Yes. High tech != smart.
I can put quarters in the meter.
Using coins or credit card is a far better experience downloading an app.
It is annoying though to have to install half a dozen different parking apps for the lots that have partnered with different app providers. It would be nice if public parking lot apps would interoperate.
It takes fewer “clicks” so to speak and is more accessible to the elderly.
But anything government which doesn’t require to keep track of a purchaser’s identity should accept cash. Otherwise what’s the point of cash if your own state doesn’t accept it.
This is so obviously true for non-tech elderly folk that don't already have smartphones. I can hardly believe it's in question.
Card:
1. Receive free card from bank in mail.
2. Keep card in your wallet/purse which you already take every time you go out.
3. Memorise PIN (the tricky bit, to be fair).
4. Wave or insert card for payment.
Phone app:
1. Either find a phone shop and ask for help, or figure out how to securely buy a smartphone online.
2. Figure out how to set your phone up. This involves a lot of confusing decisions such as whether to create an apple/google account, which services to enable, etc... .
3. Learn how to search for, install, and use phone apps. The parking app will vary depending on where you choose to park.
4. Set up google/apple pay or your card payment details on required apps.
5. Learn how to connect your phone to wifi if you end up parking in an area with internet but no phone signal.
6. Remember to take your smartphone with you every time you plan to drive and park somewhere.
7. Muddle your way through what is often a bloated, ad-ridden app every time you want to park.
Not even that, for a credit card.
An app often requires some account setup with spam emails to follow.
How a particular change impacts you will, of course, strongly color your perception of it.
If you're someone who always has coinage readily available, forcing you to install an app and create an account on a device you may not have, or be familiar with, plus feeding said app an up-to-date payment method (accompanied by concerns of financial loss) and eating the cost of transaction fees is not going to be seen as progress.
If you never use currency and having coinage on hand is an extra effort, and don't mind installing and using yet-another-app on your current smartphone, then doing away with coins seems much less hostile.
And, of course, if you own/operate parking meters, reducing your own overhead is a win for you, as long as the meters keep getting used enough that your profits go up.
Which ends up actually benefiting the public more, I don't know.
Seems beyond stupid to require me to have an Apple program or a Google program and specific hardware to pay for parking when I can just have the coins in my pocket.
Especially since ParkMobile could just decide not to support the version of android I’m running, so that I’m forced to purchase a new device.
Coins aren’t subject to code rot.
A bonus is that meter toll collectors would have a job.
My county forcing Microsoft 2FA as the only option for the government entity I work for, in which I'm the youngest by far and we don't accept having to buy a phone just to use an account, reeks of capitalism.
He's completely useless these days, particularly around social media, but increasingly around everything else. I worry about him.
It's difficult to imagine what it would look like, but I'm increasingly of the opinion the best way forward is a hard break with tech. Minimal engagement outside of what's needed for the daily basics.
It's transparently wrecking our brains and societies. We can't build a better Internet, we need to escape it.
redraw
redraw
This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.
However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.
And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
It turns out it was an AI generating responses to every single thread linking to this test.
Here’s one example:
> In my experience, I found skipping grades to be challenging initially due to the abrupt environmental and academic changes. It took me a few weeks to adjust to the pace and social dynamics, but it eventually became rewarding. It's important to approach it with openness and patience. By the way, if anyone is curious about their potential for advanced learning, the Gifted Test at [redacted] can provide insight - it's been validated by licensed psychometricians.
Every comment was like this. You can see the mod’s profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/themightymom/
I brought this up in modmail with them, to see if any of the uncorrupted mods would respond, under their names. The responses denied my claims and mocked me, before banning me, but notably, all of the responses were under the group-mod username: so either none of the old mods were willing to respond under their usernames, or it wasn't the new mods responding. (Hint: it was almost certainly the latter.)
I reported it to the Reddit admins, but have heard nothing back. I don't expect too much because if the worst the new mods are doing is spamming affiliate links, that's relatively tame and far down the priority list.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.
> Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).
This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)
People go to these platforms for a reason, my point is that the reason isn't because they are walled off. It seems like you are arguing that the chief (if inadvertent) benefit to users of a walled garden is that users don't have to deal with undesirable behavior because access to the platform is restricted by a login wall. This isn't how I would understand a service being "walled off" - Hacker News is not a walled garden even though I need an account to access some of its features. The important distinction is that most (all?) of the content on Hacker News can be accessed without an account. Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora are examples of services going the other way - they lock down content, not for the benefit of the users, but for the benefit of themselves. They save on not having to serve the content to unregistered users, keep the content on their platform, and encourage unregistered users to sign up.
The chief benefit of the open web was always permissive read access, not permissive write access.
Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.
Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days.
There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)
This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.
Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)
I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my company.
I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running track.
The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social media.
Just sad really.
Don’t try to understand the work flow. That’s impossible. Just try to realize the truth.
I actually had an example of something similar before my eyes. My advisor's advisor's advisor (...), emeritus, occupied the office next to mine and printed his Fortran code to work on at home. He debugged on paper, then typed it down the next day in the office. His whole career had been at the crossroads of math and computer science, his main contribution algorithms and software, and he did not have a computer at home (says he). This software debugged by hand (and typed with the index fingers) is still used in commercial software!
This is why worldcoin may have a bright future: https://world.org/world-id
I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.
Systems that run on the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there's definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening.
I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.
Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.
An excerpt from Carmen Hermosillo (humdog):
"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."
It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords it's all about the money and they've already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother?
Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.
I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.
Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.
Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.
Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse.
> You are an elitist
Correct.
Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.
Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return control to the user.
What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre.
Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend.
But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best.
My rubric for what constitutes "the web":
• Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!)
• If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)
• Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)
• Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.")
Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics.
But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.)
If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)
But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies."
(This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")
in real life and online
What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.
If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.
So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
Real name systems (for routine discourse) are bad. Walled gardens are bad. I should not need to forsake my privacy unless I wish to or alternatively a material need exists.
Don't need to connect the account? What sort of joke is that? They require you to use your government recognized name.
Your last sentence also just doesn’t make any sense. Why would you worry about platform x if „they“ „know“ everything anyways. I was talking about your anonymous online personas.
Complaining about potential guidelines on one platform when numerous unrestricted spaces exist online seems rather narrow minded, especially given the abundance of alternatives available. Just use it as a modern telephone book. You have total agency over yourself and if or how you use it.
Nir Eyal would like a word
>If following the platform's basic guidelines feels like too much effort,
That's the straw elephant in the room
>perhaps the communication wasn't that important to begin with.
And this is the particularly dehumanizing part
>entitlement
Is that what entitlement is? Preferring to avoid using the services of an unethical vendor if possible? Or is the entitlement in the "being able to afford to avoid..."?
If multiple services require you to use the same identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to find and link.
The existence of alternative services with different terms does not address the issues raised in this thread. Neither does it change the fact that I think the existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of course I'm going to complain about that.
> Just use it as a modern telephone book.
Other people upload information about me into said book. There are various things that I can't do unless I use said book and those have nothing to do with looking up contact information.
It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the provider of the telephone book could every contact lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
You: "You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to"
Them: "Sometimes it's required for some important task"
You: "Why not simply sign up for Facebook and use it?"
We were talking about the impact that platforms with real name policies have on society simply by existing and being widely used. Particularly relevant considering that the first comment in the thread was about just such a platform being officially provided by the government and tying accounts to a government issued ID. The second comment in the chain, which you responded to, explicitly referenced Facebook.
> you all seem to love condescending rage comments.
Your arguments don't hold any water and you're having difficulty accepting that fact.
There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does not make one smart man.
Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you could argue that its not really needed any more - but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Yea, it is like a catapult. You need to let go of it at some point to keep moving forward, or it is going to pull you back or at least stop you from making further progress.
>but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Good intentions or In this case, moderation. You know that I cannot go into detail here without pissing the moderators here, right? Yea, exactly my point.
If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at your door.
Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I think you are sadly mistaken.
Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-anonymity right now ).
If you have a democracy then the laws of the land should be those that are agreed by general consent - give or take - and as such applying those laws to people in a way that means they are accountable for their actions isn't a problem - in fact it's the long standing bedrock of civilisation.
The problem in China isn't that they can catch people breaking their laws, it's a problem with how those laws are set in the first place.
So the real issue is stopping a move towards authoritarianism which is a whole larger conversation.
So in the issue above - about the journalist - the question should be about whether the particular hate speech law is correct, rather than worrying about if they appear to breach it whether they can be caught.
In the past 100 years the following countries have slipped from democracies to authoritarian states: Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua.
Some of them recovered, others never did. Look at Turkey for example. If you think you are safe, you aren't.
Have you considered that massively enables organised criminal elements in democracies and increases the chances of a slide into authoritarianism?
It's a bit like in the good-old days of the internet when everyone trusted everyone else - life was simple and good. Then the bad actors came, and so did SSL, firewalls, n factor auth etc etc. Search engine results became less good as people gamed the rankings.
You have to adapt.
In Europe we take a different view from America - in America mass school shootings are a price worth paying for the right to own a gun. In the UK there is a presumption that they really isn't any good reason for owning a handgun, nevermind an assault rifle, so it's pretty hard to get one.
Freedom is multi-dimensional - and not absolute. I'm free of worrying my child will be shot at school, but less free to own a gun.
Same goes for freedoms on the internet - in the end it's about a pragmatic choice about what's best and I'm saying that pragmatic choice is already encapsulated in centuries of legal tradition - the internet doesn't change that - people, in the end, need to be accountable for their actions.
I doubt she wants this state of affairs to change.
On the other hand, if your house gets burgled, you get a crime reference number and told to take it up with your insurance company.
So? Justice secretary has nothing to do with the police - justice is the courts.
Home secretary is ultimately in charge of the policing policy and in the UK they have no day to day influence over polices actions - the police are quite decentralised. Are you from the UK?
And in terms of the wider government they are supporting Israel's assault in Gaza directly with intelligence and weapon systems and are silent on the daily atrocities - that's hardly pro-palestinian.
I can see on the one side that police should only ever investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false allegations.
on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some form of scrutiny.
I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use the postal service. Why should government provided social media or email or whatever be any different?
This makes sense because the only realistic way to enforce a non-falsified return address would be to verify government issued ID when accepting the parcel.
It's an interesting point thought that receiving messages does require a physical address. I guess the analogy would be needing to log in to browse the message board but not to post? That would be quite strange.
What you’re advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier. You’re advocating for an authoritarian’s wet dream (and a treasure trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that’s the last thing we need.
I vote a hard no on your proposal. I’m opposed to it like I am to Chat Control.
Signed,
A European
This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and suppress moderate voices.
And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative, which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-encryption political schemes, but the social media question pertains to public, not private, communications.
Signed,
Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)
A European
It wouldn't only update the floodgates, it's rather the idea behind these proposals. :-)
Which is an orthogonal issue. Private social media doing it does not mean government-owned social media wouldn’t. In fact, it is precisely because authoritarians already can see it working that they would salivate at the though.
> And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here
You’re agreeing with and rebutting things I haven’t said. I don’t think the proposal was to outlaw other forms of social media. I still think the proposal is bad on its own.
> which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world.
It guarantees no such thing. There’s nothing stopping that real person from asking an LLM and posting the reply directly. That already happens today. Heck, people confidently post screenshots of LLM conversations as if they were fact even when they’re provably wrong.
> If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
I personally don’t use any of those, and neither would I defend them. Again, my argument is those are already bad and OP’s proposal is just as bad and then adds worse things on top.
The point is that it prevents multi-accounting and deliberate astroturfing campaigns. If people personally decide to just trust ChatGPT screenshots as gospel and assume LLM outout as their opinion, that's their own prerogative.
- do you think it is so hard to track people by their other behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
- isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the (out-of-band) legal system?
2. Maybe I don’t understand the question, but I don’t see how that’s relevant or true. Social media is routinely used as evidence in court.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/12/30/heres-h...
If pseudonyms didn't work, no one would be proposing the policy that he proposes. And nearly everyone seems to propose it or some variation of it.
It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.
I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it. Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret Dontknow is pretty obvious..
In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.
When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.
The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.
Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.
Are you assuming that the author's own identity will always be masked or throwaway like a sockpuppet? That seems very much like a design choice of the forum.
This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.
but it also means responsibility, which acts in the opposite direction.
a realnames policy doesn't preclude also offering pseudonyms for sensitive cases.
to me, it seems like the real issue is sockpuppetry - basically a Sybil attack on authenticity/reputation/responsibility.
I want social media to disappear.
The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.
Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know quite some people who do this!).
> I want social media to disappear
I often read people trashing on social media who are doing so on this site which is very much social media. I don't use other social media sites and appreciate that this one is different than the normal ones. It's still social media as I understand it.
Assuming I'm not wrong about this being social media... If they want social media to disappear, why are they creating more of it by participating here?
I mostly keep my mouth shut, but the embedded contradictions sometimes make me comment to scratch my itch.
Well it is true that newest gives chronological listing. Most of us visit the front page which does not. Instead, it uses the algorithm of user vote aggregation.
On the other hand, while Facebook and the like had me interacting with those in my relational proximity, here it seems I am relating with people more in my cultural and professional proximity (largely due to the rules and cultural norms here). Sometimes it's just small talk and at others more technical or serious life matters but it's communicating with other humans (and likely a few bots) about life, sharing information and ideas, challenging one another to learn and grow. These seem like deeply social behaviors and that's a big part of why I regard this as social media.
With regard to the mall, that seems far more like Twitter or Reddit than here. While Reddit is less clear, Twitter is widely regarded as social media. On the other end is email that is "a human talking to another human" and regarded as not social media. Not to say you're wrong, just trying to explain my view and offer that as a bit of evidence that the boundaries are not so clear.
"That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times."
(This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also prescient commentary on modern trends)
Speak for yourself, please, would you?
I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.
No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours, you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to individuals and democracy alike.
I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.
Problem is that regional forums in Europe died because of the regulations.
the EU regulations made it harder/less attractive to host a small local forum and I think that was his point
It may just be because people in Europe interact in real life more and don't need an online forum.
forocoches(dot)com
And I have more:
mediavida(dot)com ( it means half-life :) )
And then I have random ones:
redcafe(dot)net foro.acb(dot)com
I read them, and post on them daily, forums are alive and kicking it on europe :)
But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a real person, and where everyone stands for what they say online.
In many countries internet forums are technically banned by regulations. HN posted that many user forums in UK were simply deleted because of the excessively heavy burden of the law.
I await the new AOL or whatever.
When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?
We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.
Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before."
There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.
That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.
If it is the case, I will leave to greener pastures.