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Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

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Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#31
I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are something I'd rather not have popping up in my strongly Jewish grandmother's news feed.

I'd imagine most people have things like this, from innocuous things that might just get them teased at the office, like an obsessive interest in historical reenactment, to embarrassing things like health problems, to even mildly illegal things like enjoying weed.

Paradoxically, at the same time, the internet is getting more private. Because everything is tied to a real world id, and people don't want to expose everything about themselves online, things are moving to private forums. Things like closed facebook groups for friends, instant messaging, etc. Personal websites that someone put up and made open to the world out of their own interest are getting harder and harder to find. Blogs seem to have killed them, and now even the blogs are dying.

And it really is getting harder to be anonymous, as far as I can tell. Most major email providers really want some sort of information that ties your identity down, like a phone number. Same with a bunch of larger social networks. Forums seem to be dying slowly, and even there, often an email tied to a real phone number is needed.

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#32

It helps that the web is now terrible. It used to be that when I typed in some band, movie, show, book, or piece of ephemera into Altavista, 50 sites would come up with 50 different voices commenting on it from 15 different directions. Now, 50 sites still come up, but they're all using the exact same anonymously-written copy. Sometimes you get lucky and you can use Wikipedia to index into the Wayback Machine, and see…

I think it's less that the web is terrible and more that the centralization of content to a few singular systems has made it very easy for junk content to be gamed to the top. There still is a grand amount of content out there but it does take significantly more digging to get to it.

Blogs for example are still striving very strongly, it's just that a lot of the content that you seem to desire (as I do as well) is buried past the first four pages of SEO items and various aggregation websites. It's like digging through strata of earth; for example finding good cooking blogs means you have dig through layers of Yummly, Cooks.com, Foodnetwork.com, and About.com search results. Then you have to drill through the various food labels such as Pillsbury or Kemps. Then you have to go through the chinese cloned sites that just scrape content and repost it along with thousands of ads. Finally, when you're down around the 20th results page, actual blogs start to pop up.

And exclusions in searches just aren't good enough. Every time you think you've excluded out the unwanted aggregate sites and food producer sites, you have thousands of auto-generated Chinese sites to prune through, or brands you've never heard of.

There is still great content out there after looking for it - the main methods of discovering this content has just been gamed and polluted. While Google, DDG, et. al. have taken steps to ensure that when you search for some content you get the most desirable result in a special pocket on the page, that's not the same as discovery.

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#34
post #31

I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are something I'd rather not have popping up in my strong…

It's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without surveillance cameras. Hell, I do that sometimes and I'm not even doing anything criminal.

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#35
post #32

It helps that the web is now terrible. It used to be that when I typed in some band, movie, show, book, or piece of ephemera into Altavista, 50 sites would come up with 50 different voices commenting on it from 15 different directions. Now, 50 sites still come up, but they're all using the exact same anonymously-written copy. Sometimes you get lucky and you can use Wikipedia to index into the Wayback Machine, and see…

I think it's less that the web is terrible and more that the centralization of content to a few singular systems has made it very easy for junk content to be gamed to the top. There still is a grand amount of content out there but it does take significantly more digging to get to it. Blogs for example are still striving very strongly, it's just that a lot of the content that you seem to desire (as I do as well) is bu…

One surprisingly simple way to break through all the SEO is through https://millionshort.com/ which simply trashes the first million (or 100k, 10k, 1k, or 100) results.

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#36
post #34
post #31

I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are something I'd rather not have popping up in my strong…

It's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without surveillance cameras. Hell, I do that sometimes and I'm not even doing anything criminal.

That's kind of missing the point. For casual communities, it's easier to just not post.

I don't care enough about posting that awesome recipe for brussel sprouts with bacon lardons to go through the effort of setting up a custom domain so I can sign up for an anonymized facebook account so that I don't have to worry if it will show up in my family member's news feeds. I barely care enough to tweak facebook settings to keep it hidden. I also don't necessarily want to share who I am, where I work, what my other hobbies are, and so on to the world, which means that in the absence of a good anonymous forum implies that I'd prefer to keep my posts restricted to a more private audience, so I don't necessarily feel like posting with my facebook account.

As the weakly anonymous communities are dying or shrinking, the separation of "who I am" and "what I do" makes it more difficult to share the interesting things I know publicly without exposing my real world identity.

Since I don't care much, the post doesn't happen, and I move on with my day. And the internet is a little bit poorer for it. I suspect that lots of little dyanmics and frictions like this are what's killing the 'old way Americans used the internet'.

It's theoretically possible to fight this. But for almost all casual content, the friction is just not worth overcoming.

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#37
post #33

I will sometimes stop myself from googling something I'm curious about. I imagine a situation where I become falsely accused of a crime and the search I'm about to make coincidentally incriminates me and is discovered with a subpoena.

I'm pretty sure they have me set to ignore. (Threat Class: Nerd. Threat Level: 1/5. Threat Target: Probable Self)

On the other hand I have a machine for messing around on the internet. And a machine for work. And a machine I do things like banking and taxes on.

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#38
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's less that the web is terrible and more that the centralization of content to a few singular systems has made it very easy for junk content to be gamed to the top. There still is a grand amount of content out there but it does take significantly more digging to get to it. Blogs for example are still striving very strongly, it's just that a lot of the content that you seem to desire (as I do as well) is bu…

One surprisingly simple way to break through all the SEO is through https://millionshort.com/ which simply trashes the first million (or 100k, 10k, 1k, or 100) results.

This is a very nice website. Thank you!

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#39
post #37
post #33

I will sometimes stop myself from googling something I'm curious about. I imagine a situation where I become falsely accused of a crime and the search I'm about to make coincidentally incriminates me and is discovered with a subpoena.

I'm pretty sure they have me set to ignore. (Threat Class: Nerd. Threat Level: 1/5. Threat Target: Probable Self) On the other hand I have a machine for messing around on the internet. And a machine for work. And a machine I do things like banking and taxes on.

I'm pretty sure being a nerd puts you on a threat level of 5/5.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extrem...

Re: Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

#40
> 26 percent of internet-using American households [self-reported in US Census survey] avoided buying goods or services

The retail giant [Amazon] tallied $23 billion more in U.S. e-commerce sales in 2015 than 2014, the report found. [1]

The difference between reported behavior and actual behavior can be very large.

[1] http://s831.us/229QeKz

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