Is it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from _him_ of all people. Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
It's Business Insider, it's the TMZ or Uproxx of "business news". Every once in a while they'll have original content (i.e. sourced from their editorial team), but for the most part it's a content mill of copy-pasted content with a few rushed sentences from an overworked copy writer.
Is it just me, or does the article kind of suck? It starts with discussing who he is, and then his opinion, and the spends the next half of the article talking about what kind of person he is and how this is 'ironic' coming from _him_ of all people. Just seems weird that they give his opinion, and then we get someone else's opinion on HIM. That doesn't seem very unbiased. Maybe I am overthinking it.
I too had the same impression. It's a complete equivocation of the problem. Even if you're not fan of Torvalds, and think he's rude, his rudeness is different from the problems of social media.
Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lo…
I really miss forums. Google did a really good job of indexing forums, they where a great place to find honest reviews, share information etc. Now they are dying with users spread across various services which are not publicly indexed making it hard to find interesting information, that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites. A few of the communities I am interested in such as outd…
I often find myself adding "forum" to searches in the hope of finding some of what you describe in the results.
It's a nice thing of Linus to say. I was thinking just yesterday, that in my friend/relative circle, there are no one people listen to unsarcastically. If we still had someone like Orwell or A.D. Sakharov, and they'd say something like this, it would make a world of difference. I'm drastically losing the battle against fb around me.
We should get Joanne Rowling to speak up, if the kids loving Harry Potter know, who's the author (my nieces definitely don't though).
Those forums exist and are more widely-used than ever. They're just mostly hosted on reddit now.
Reddit is very far from a forum. It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive, it serves ads, has a terrible free speech record, and a slight amount of popularity means people will wander into your community and, generally, fill it with low content garbage. Reddit is a horrible place to host a community, and, in my eyes, is the actual cause of the death of forums more so than…
Do you have any recommendations for a better general-discussion site?
Personally, I have found myself resorting to discussion sites focused on a single topic, like Hacker News instead of /r/programming, or DharmaWheel.net instead of /r/Buddhism.
The problem is actually far deeper than just social media being mindless. The Internet as such has become a Big Bank, where anyone (and anywhere!) can put in time investment and withdraw money. Well, you could argue that people work on the Internet. It's not a bad argument, but the problem is much deeper than this. Every single major social network is now being used as a storefront where you can promote and advertise…
> and over the years, many have completely annihilated any emotional connection with their audience and instead run their pages as an established brand. This, so much this.
True, browsing the web for fun these days seems increasingly burdensome as I feel that a good chunk of what I read lacks personality and feels extremely scripted.
The solution to that is not "make it easier to publish online", as Big Tech will always claim. One way may be to start curating your own list of interesting voices, and consume their content deliberately, instead of having it be passively fed to you (including their likes and RTs, which I personally don't like seeing) via the Feed.
Social media ruined the internet forever, even less than a decade ago there were websites, forums of all sorts and for all kinds of interests, now the internet for most people is just these social websites/apps which intentionally lock users inside their services as long as possible to make more money from advertising and promoted posts. Unfortunately unless something big happens to fix this issue, the internet is lo…
The internet of the past was not useful for family/friend communications. I don't want the world to see pictures of my kids (even though nobody cares it still isn't a good idea), but I do want my parents to see them. Social media solves this problem. The interesting things you list were too public and so didn't. Don't get me wrong, I do miss the forums of the past, but there is also some good in what we have today.
No, Facebook and other social media websites do not provide value, they suck up value for the shareholders. Facebook and others like them are a disease, and they have effectively killed the internet. Your point about being able to show your grandparents pictures totally ignores email and other technologies that “solved” this problem more than a decade before Facebook. Hell, you could create a personal website with password protected pages if you were worried about the public finding certain photos. That’s how the world worked prefacebook, it was wonderful! But instead you are sending those private photos to Facebook, for free! They now own your private photos and will use them against you. Maybe you should have just used email. Of course you can’t monitize free/open, so the money people have convinced you that you need something better than a personal website, or email, or ftp or irc or Usenet or any of the superior technology that existed before the money people killed the internet.
I think he puts Twitter there because he doesn't use it. If you follow the right people it actually promotes intelligent discourse.
Same with Instagram. I don't use it but I concede that it is useful to some people as a platform for promoting businesses. FB on the other hand, deserves to die in a fire.
IG is the same IMO. You won't see the blatant bigotry and politics, but you will see a monoculture of self-promoters and brand builders which are similarly exhausting, just in a different way.
And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
Those forums exist and are more widely-used than ever. They're just mostly hosted on reddit now.
I also wanted to point this out, but I guess Reddit does pose a risk that they make some system-wide decision and in the process all those subreddits either vanish or die a slow death. As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...
The same problem applies to forums. Everyone here is gushing about how great they were and yes i had fun too but so many forums were just one person running phpbb and if they got bored or whatnot the whole forum was shot, just like that. Or a mod or admin would power trip. It's not like the early internet was some freewheeling utopia, it was mostly shit. Just like now. Don't believe me? Go look at those old forums and usenet posts you remember so well
Ah yes the weekly nostalgia thread. Have we all considered that our beautiful time on forums, IRC and RSS were also the time when 99% of the people who are now online simply weren't?
The internet of the old days isn't gone. (Look at this website!). It's just that we are a minority because FB, Instagram and YouTube brought 2 billion more people online.