Bringing people back to the open web • Hacker News Board

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#21

Post by prophesi » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #15

groby_b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason we're in the mess that we are is the shit show the open web was. People were delighted to have a walled garden where they only communicated with friends, instead of random drive-by trolls in the open. And frankly, it's understandable. A place that justifies bullying and hate speech as a good thing, with mumblings of "b.. b.. but free speech", is not a place where anybody wants to spend their time. (Except…

Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who don’t have experience with why that may be a bad idea. The ACLU has long defended all speech: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...

The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#22

Post by butterfi » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

bitwize wrote: post #7

kuschku wrote: post #2

This is a good idea – but impossible. Google and Facebook have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Google and Facebook have tons of userdata for training ML models. How do you compete with that? The only way your projects would ever be able to outcompete Google and Facebook on technology is if you’d somehow get a ton of engineers willing to work for a good cause. But t…

A free OS for PCs is a good idea -- but impossible. Microsoft and Apple have tenthousands of developers. And not just any devs, some of the best in the industry. Microsoft and Apple have research labs where they can subject their OS to hundreds of thousands of user-hours of testing for usability, scalability, and robustness. How do you compete with that?

Linux?

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#23

Post by groby_b » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:40 PM UTC

malvosenior wrote: post #15

groby_b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason we're in the mess that we are is the shit show the open web was. People were delighted to have a walled garden where they only communicated with friends, instead of random drive-by trolls in the open. And frankly, it's understandable. A place that justifies bullying and hate speech as a good thing, with mumblings of "b.. b.. but free speech", is not a place where anybody wants to spend their time. (Except…

Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who don’t have experience with why that may be a bad idea. The ACLU has long defended all speech: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...

Sensible adults have long been aware that censorship is something the government does, and that private individuals (and by extension, corporations) are perfectly fine restricting what speech they're willing to accept in their environment. The rule commonly known as "my house, my rules". The problem many people have with the open web is that many people don't step up and spell out house rules, which others interpret as "sure, we can pee on the carpet"

And you'll note that even the ACLU is perfectly fine with the government restricting speech in some well-defined circumstances[1].

[1] Visible if you see the full text of the blog post you linked: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still...

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#24

Post by cptskippy » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:41 PM UTC

throw7 wrote: post #11

We did have a way. It was called a kill file. Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected from hearing anything they don't like to hear and must be giving the right to shutdown people's speech they disagree with ("heckler's veto").

> Unfortunately, we don't have adults anymore. We have children that need to be protected

I absolutely agree and this is a problem of our own design. This issue goes beyond the web. We hear about how a neighbor called the police when a child was left unattended in their front yard. Or the countless posts on community forums starting out with "who do I contact to report XYZ?" and the most controversial response is always "did you talk to the person?"

Everyone today is so afraid that they're being exploited and taken advantage of by everyone who isn't. They don't want to speak out or stand up to anything, they'd rather just have someone come and take care of it for them.

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#25

Post by lainga » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

carapace wrote: post #14

What if the Internet itself is the problem? We might be witnessing the Eternal September of the entire network. Humans + networked Turing machines = shit-show Are we doomed? Can we have a fundamentally different relationship with these machines? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

> networked Turing machines

Brainfuck over UDP...?

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#26

Post by attalus » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:42 PM UTC

prophesi wrote: post #21

malvosenior wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who don’t have experience with why that may be a bad idea. The ACLU has long defended all speech: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...

The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

Muh safe spaces

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#27

Post by groby_b » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:43 PM UTC

crdoconnor wrote: post #19

groby_b wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason we're in the mess that we are is the shit show the open web was. People were delighted to have a walled garden where they only communicated with friends, instead of random drive-by trolls in the open. And frankly, it's understandable. A place that justifies bullying and hate speech as a good thing, with mumblings of "b.. b.. but free speech", is not a place where anybody wants to spend their time. (Except…

Goebbels was in favor of free speech for views he liked. So was Stalin. If you’re really in favor of free speech, then you’re in favor of freedom of speech for precisely the views you despise. Otherwise, you’re not in favor of free speech. Besides, censoring Nazis and other undesirable types (e.g. ISIS propaganda) is ineffective at shutting them up and endears potential recruits to them. It would likely be more effec…

You got me. In my personal environment, my house? Speech that I don't accept doesn't happen. And it turns out that that's actually perfectly fine, because free speech should only not be restricted by the government.

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#28

Post by untog » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

prophesi wrote: post #21

malvosenior wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who don’t have experience with why that may be a bad idea. The ACLU has long defended all speech: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...

The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

That's a very common and entirely overblown hypothesis. Sure, there are student protests about a tiny number of speakers each year. But there have been student protests about anything ever since there have been students.

> More importantly, though, we can see here why reaching broad conclusions from sets of anecdotes is inadvisable. There are around 2,600 four-year universities in the United States. Friedersdorf tried to compile all of the most outrageous instances from a single year, and found about 10 of them. Those 10 were probably roughly evenly distributed according to the political affiliation of the students; i.e. there are more shutdown attempts by liberal students than conservative students, but students are also more liberal. And among those high-profile incidents, a bunch of the speakers ended up coming and speaking and the petitions went nowhere.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-...

"college campuses" are quite safe from the "younger generation".

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#29

Post by pmlnr » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:44 PM UTC

groby_b wrote: post #12

pmlnr wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs are not the problem, especially not the amount of them. Google has so many devs, sure, maybe that's why we now have 7 messaging app from them... The tools for the open web are present, just check https//indieweb.org Comformist, lazy people, our own friends, are the problem. I'd love to see how to make them care.

I'd start by not calling your own friends "conformist" and "lazy". And instead, try to understand where they come from. We won't solve problems by shouting at each other.

I lost contact with many people because none of them respected me constantly asking to keep in touch outside of facebook - email, for example.

I don't have lighter words, even if I consider them friends.

Moving on from grammar and culture (in my read, I wasn't offensive, merely stated a fact), what actual solutions, proposals, ideas, can you contribute?

Re: Bringing people back to the open web

#30

Post by galactus » Mon, Apr 23, 2018, 4:49 PM UTC

I don't believe there will be any silver bullet that will make people back to the open web any soon by sheer technical merit. In the meantime, we should not abandon efforts to make people understand why huge centralized walled gardens such as facebook are a problem. It would be like if society had stopped anti-smoking campaigns in the past, waiting for a miraculous safe cigarette to solve the problem.