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Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

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Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#191

Post by dredmorbius »

SerLava wrote: post #92
plaguuuuuu wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit really 'dug' (see what I did there) its own grave by aggressively catering to casual users, in order to drive signups and grow the user base. I can't remember exactly what happened at which point, but it all follows the general pattern of appealing to the mass market. E.g. the curation of the frontpage via default subs such as /r/AdviceAnimals that don't really contain meaningful discussion. There's no real ne…

Curation of shitty content is also built right into the algorithm. They'll hide behind "But people are voting for this mindless content" but that's not the full picture. A vote after 5 seconds is actually weighted higher than a vote after 5 minutes. It's specifically because Reddit the company is against too much engaging content. They want people to smirk, chuckle, acknowledge, and move on. Engaging content means fe…

A vote after 5 seconds is weighted, or acts as if weighted?

If that's built into the algorithm, that's one thing. If the social effect of early moderation is amplified, well, that's still a problem (and a major one), but ... of a different sort.

Citations requested.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#192

Post by dredmorbius »

jacquesm wrote: post #133
alanfranzoni wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most probably it would be illegal, against each website's TOS. If such tool catches up, it will be removed - and you still need to account for upstream changes that periodically kill the functionality.

Against the TOS does not make something illegal.

Unfortunately, that's precisely what the CFAA does, in the United States. EFF's interpretation:

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”), 18 U.S.C. § 1030, is an amendment made in 1986 to the Counterfeit Access Device and Abuse Act that was passed in 1984 and essentially states that, whoever intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains information from any protected computer if the conduct involved an interstate or foreign communication shall be punished under the Act. In 1996 the CFAA was, again, broadened by an amendment that replaced the term “federal interest computer” with the term “protected computer.”18 U.S.C. § 1030. While the CFAA is primarily a criminal law intended to reduce the instances of malicious interferences with computer systems and to address federal computer offenses, an amendment in 1994 allows civil actions to brought under the statute, as well.

https://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act_%...

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#193

Post by cylinder »

pmlnr wrote: post #105
cylinder wrote: post #90

Indeed. I miss the days of IRC and such. The internet started feeling really noisy after the iPhone was popularized.

This. It's because of smartphones. People don't write things on smartphones, it's tedious.

It also brought a lot of people online who previously were not. Desktops were stashed in some room, one per household, and laptops were still seen as somewhat nerdy or work related.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#194

Post by dredmorbius »

jalfresi wrote: post #112
zeta0134 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Hacker News is one of the only online communities I've participated in where the score is handled appropriately. It's a good personal measure of how well my posts and comments were received by the community, but it's not bragging rights. No one else can see my vote tallies here, so I have no real incentive to increase it. I've seen this affect sites like Stack Overflow as well. At the bottom of any popula…

Out of curiosity, does any one know of any research or articles into reputation systems in general?

Randy Farmer's "Building Web Reputation Systems" is a good start:

http://buildingreputation.com

There's a blog, book, and wiki.

Some keyword searches: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=kw%3A+online+reputation+sys...

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=online%20reputation%20s...

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#195

Post by ekianjo »

mercurysmessage wrote: post #183
d--b wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other problem with IRC is that it's not very user friendly: there are many different networks, which implement different rules. Your IP may be banned for some reason. People can steal your nickname, etc. While this is totally fine for internet-savvy people, I can see why regular people who just want to chat turn to alternatives.

I feel that most 'regular' people don't even know about IRC.

Indeed. I remember even back in the mid 90s I was talking about IRC and most people around me who were already connected had no idea what that was.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#196

Post by hobofan »

Mooty wrote: post #158

Maybe what people want is a centralised web, not a "good practice" web ? This is not what I want but as a matter of fact, that may be what majority wants. I wonder how devs/techies people think they know the truth for other people. What changed a lot of things are modern apps and their new features : push notifications, infinite scrolls (attention killer) or adding a f... emoji (I miss smileys personnaly). The rest i…

The people want a working web. They don't care if it's centralized or decentralized, and most probably never even lost a thought about it.

"Techies" think that they know better because they are the first to be impacted and have noticed the shortcomings of a centralized web.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#197

Post by dredmorbius »

ConfucianNardin wrote: post #166
CM30 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, could you explain what you mean by more Reddit style comments? Because I don't think I've seen too many low effort comments here recently, or at least not much more than there were in the past. And while political threads get a bit out of control, my experience there is that the most volatile, disruptive posts tend to get downvoted to hell before they can cause too much of an issue. So even if a cer…

Example of "Reddit style comments" would be low effort jokes. Some subreddits are addressing this by using a convention where you can mark submissions with a "[serious]" tag, forbidding such replies (if there are any, they will usually be removed by the subreddit's moderators). On HN, quite a few of them seem to get heavily downvoted (sometimes enough to mark them as dead, meaning you won't see them unless you explic…

Different subs vary. But the effect, overall, is discouraging.

Groupthink is another significant problem, particularly on topics which tend to gravitate toward ideology. Many economics subs operate this way.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#198

Post by dredmorbius »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #135
yosito wrote: post #57

My own theory about why our ability to focus on what we want to on the internet is Attention Capitalism. Our attention is the latest resource to be exploited by capitalism, and each company is attempting to control what we focus on for their profit. I've noticed this trend; very little software let's me control what information I see anymore. It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim…

> It's almost all controlled by some algorithm making me see what they claim I want to see. The algorithm is known as "doing what users want". Very popular with companies and even open source projects nowadays. It works like this: you do some "analytics" of your product, or look what sells for others, assume it reflects what users want (and the things that are missing are obviously not wanted by users), and do those.…

Or, worse: the discerning users or customers blot out the company (or its website) and go elsewhere.

A/B testing can't test for the users who aren't present.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#199

Post by dredmorbius »

alanfranzoni wrote: post #123
edgartaor wrote: post #9

What do you think about Reddit? Topics are enforced and have an API.

Depending on the subreddit, it's sometimes interesting. but I haven't found a NNTP-level client for it, yet.

It does support RSS quite pervasively. Tag ".RSS" to the end of any URL (before the arguments), and you'll get a feed.

Subreddits, users, posts, searches, and a number of other elements.

Re: Stopping the Internet of Noise – A useful internet back again

#200

Post by Pigo »

netsharc wrote: post #11

Great point about Twitter and FB not having the "I've seen this" flag (although they probably have this info for their "engagement metrics"), it keeps people addicted and returning. I remember being glued to Twitter during the Mumbai terror attack, but the way it was designed, it was an endless stream of the same info, repeated. And spam, since bots add trending hashtags to their junk messages. I guess it's like cabl…

I just don't get Facebook anymore, and I've never enjoyed Twitter. I understand they can still be useful tools for finding out some news quick, or sharing pictures of your kids with grandma. But is there anything online that is even close to what Myspace and early facebook were like? People seem to have forgotten what it was like when these were tools to augment your actual social life.
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