201–210 of 246 posts
Is there a Twitter client / UI that presents threads (with all their replies) on one page with indentation / nesting, i.e. like HN / Reddit?
I think this is what you are talking about: https://threadreaderapp.com
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Here it goes, from a few days ago (I'm not the OP): https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6687123/Mother-arre... Sorry for the Daily Mail link but it looks like the mainstream press hasn't catch up on the subject. Afaik transphobia is not on the same level with "bomb threats or holocaust denial" but apparently people get arrested for it.
The Daily Mail is in the top three newspapers, by circulation, in the UK. And far far more read than the broadsheets. How is it not considered the "mainstream"?
It would be nice if he gave a publicly accountable timeline with actual consequences for failure.
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Funnily enough the internet was run by governments from when it started in 1969 through 1992 or 1993. Specifically, The US government paid for most of it with most of the rest being paid for Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries and maybe Finland. Unless they happened to be next door to an organization that already had a connection, US organizations had to lease a dedicated circuit from a phone company to connect…
Would you argue that the internet changed and improved more from 1969 to 1992 or 1992 to present day?
If you wanted to teach or learn about a particular chronic health condition on the other hand you would struggle to find others on the internet of 1992 who shared your interest.
In 1992 the web existed, but it played a minor role. What was then called Netnews, but would be renamed a few years later (by Time, Newsweek and other news organization who took offense at the name "Netnews") to Usenet was definitely the front page of the internet, and if a particular document was available on the internet, it was more likely to be available on an ftp server (that had been configured to allow anyone to sign in) than on a web server.
The web was the first significant internet service to offer a GUI. before the web you had to use terminal-based interfaces to access any internet service.
The web (and to a lesser extent the discovery of the internet by mainstream journalists) caused a massive democratization of the internet, which had good and bad effects.
The good effects are obvious, so let me give an example of a bad effect.
I recently had the need to learn more about a mental disorder called dissociative identity disorder, which is trickier for humans to think rationally about than most mental disorders are. i.e., it is quite tricky to think rationally about, so tricky that most humans and even many trained psychotherapists fail. I used Google Search and was successful in learning what I wanted to learn. Even though the vast majority of web pages (on this particular subject and in general) have been written since 2000, the 2 most useful documents for my learning were written in the 1990s. One appears to have started life as a web page in 1996 or 1997. The other was a FAQ regularly posted in the 1990s to the newgroups alt.support.dissociation, alt.abuse.recovery, etc.
The point is that most of the person-hours spent on the internet have been spent since 2000, and I would have expected and would have hoped to see more signs that all those person-hours haven't just gone to waste than I have actually seen during my searching and browsing of the web.
I've kind of switched the focus from 1992 to 2000 here. 2000 represents in my mind a kind of high water mark for the internet. I know we cannot go back again to the internet without commercial activity, so I cannot get too excited about the internet of 1992.
There are classes of Google Searches I performed often in 2000 that I have learned to refrain from now because they no longer constitute a productive use of my time. For example in 2000 I spent hours in Google Search trying to learn whether AI research might cause the end of the world -- and I was able to drastically improve my understanding of the issue. These days I still do a lot of Google Searches, but they are mostly about "settled science", e.g., what is a thiol?, e.g., whether any iphone model has an OLED display, e.g., what is a bounding box in computer graphics?
I also continue to search often for information that is easy for me to verify. e.g., if I search for recommendations for a browser extension to block ads, it is relatively easy for me to verify the recommendation by installing the extension, then watching to see how well it blocks ads.
A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…
> she suggested Twitter be a public utility
Always interested to know how that could possibly work. Not just for twitter but for any other dominant site. The internet now has more users outside of the US [0] so who is the public, and who manages things?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
A lot to unpack recently with Twitter and Jack. A few thoughts. 1. Jack doesn’t seem passionate about product, especially Twitter. 2. Kara seems to lack the vocabulary to talk about product which is both surprising and confusing, given her niche and time spent in it. She also doesn’t understand that Twitter has evolved way beyond Jack. “Why don’t you know, it’s your product!” she kept asking. The fact he doesn’t know…
Do you think the rate of improvements that have happened to the internet would be sustained if it were run by the government? I sure don't. Moving decision-making capabilities away from the public and into the hands of bureaucrats sounds like a good way to increase surveillance, decrease innovation, and lord knows what else. I really hope that idea does not take off.
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Can you cite some examples of people being prosecuted for saying things on twitter that aren't, you know, bomb threats or holocaust denial etc.
This isn't quite Twitter, but I think Instagram is close enough: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-merseyside-43816921 Teenager was found guilty of "sending a grossly offensive message" because she cited lyrics of a song in memory of a dead friend.
Implicit in all this nonsense is a "right not to be offended" which is absolutely impossible to enforce and protect without Orwellian levels of tyranny, which a lot of people seem to think is perfectly fine. Language changes, slang changes even faster, people like 4chan like to stir up trouble by showing how easy it is to manipulate the public perception. There's literally no way to define "hate speech" in an objective way without having to constantly modify the definition. And just as it is possible to be inadvertently guilty of "hate speech" because of ignorance (e.g., I didn't know the word "gyp" was a slur against Romani.) it's even more possible to engage in hate speech without using any of the explicitly proscribed language.
As an example, for this conversation, I'm going to define "grot" to be a racial slur against someone I am hypothetically prejudiced against. Does me calling someone a "grot" count as hate speech, when no one knows what it means? What if the word catches on among my friends (who are also hypothetical bigots) enough so that a common acquaintance knows what we mean when we use it. Does that count? How many people need to recognize this meaning of "grot" before it becomes something you can't say on TV? How many people need to recognize this meaning before you can be arrested in the U.K.? What if I can incite a crowd to violence by chanting "Grot!" over and over? Yeah, we'd all probably agree that's problematic speech, but where's the dividing line?
If you ask me, people who make "hate speech" laws are a bunch of grots because it's impossible to enforce them objectively and consistently.
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Would you argue that the internet changed and improved more from 1969 to 1992 or 1992 to present day?
The experience of using the internet to teach or learn about computers has not improved since 1992, but that is because there was a robust population of people using the internet of 1992 to teach and learn about computers. If you wanted to teach or learn about a particular chronic health condition on the other hand you would struggle to find others on the internet of 1992 who shared your interest. In 1992 the web exi…
I disagree.
> The web was the first significant internet service to offer a GUI.
No, it wasn't.
> before the web you had to use terminal-based interfaces to access any internet service.
No, you didn't. Most significant internet service had GUI clients before the web; this is certainly the case for all of news, mail, gopher and ftp.
In many cases, there was no compelling reason to use a GUI client, but they certainly existed.