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Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

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Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#91

Post by __s »

AlexandrB wrote: post #57
HNthrow22 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tied to real identity - given the current state of the net one could make a case that the S Korean system of requiring gov ID # for all online signups would be an improvement, of course that opens the door to serious abuse but at this point would it be the lesser of two evils?

This is the exact opposite of correct. Old school forums were pseudonymous, but managed to do OK on the moderation front because they were often controlled by the community. Tying real world identity to sign-ins just paints a big fat target on those that have the most to lose already, such as minorities. As an example, check out the myriad articles about Google users being outed as trans when Google started integrati…

Pseudonymous identity was identiy enough

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#92

Post by ihm »

smt88 wrote: post #17
jinushaun wrote: post #12

I can’t help but feel like history will look back at this time period and ask themselves: what the fuck were they thinking? A whole generation of smart engineers optimizing addiction.

Smart engineers are optimizing addiction, burning fossil fuels, and many other social ills. But those pursuits make a lot of money, and absent regulation, the labor market will be attracted toward them. The future you're talking about will have to be regulated much more (at, at least, differently) than the present. I doubt it could even be capitalist -- which, to be clear, I see as a good thing.

This is about what capital funds, not the labor market. Given how unorganized it is, workers mostly just have to work on whatever projects get funded.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#93

Post by craftyguy »

apexalpha wrote: post #80

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.

> 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?

Looking at the vast majority of content on facebook, twitter, instawhatever, reddit, HN, etc I don't consider that to be a bad thing.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#94

Post by matz1 »

loriverkutya wrote: post #54
matz1 wrote: post #22

These social media are not for everyone, for some one who are introvert or not a people person or just simply don't like other people then yeah twitter, fb etc are abomination. Social media is also a tools, good or bad, its what you make of it.

The problem is, it's not a tool for communication, but a tool for selling ads. And it is bad for the average user. It makes people depressed.

Its tool for all kind of purpose. Certainly can be used for communication too as well as selling ads. Even for selling ads it still have some good for some user.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#95

Post by themoat »

DataWorker wrote: post #77
bluGill wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pa…

I completely comprehend the bad things the platforms introduce, but pre-social media it was just really inconvenient to stay in touch with people way out of your area. Blogs were alright for it, but not great for 2 way communication in my memories.

I stayed in Peru for a couple years pre-facebook. I told friends and my host family I'd stay in touch and we all shared email addresses. I wrote less than 3 emails.

Next couple years go by and they start shooting friend requests and suddenly I am interacting with long lost friends, talking about their kids, jobs, and reminiscing about the dumb things we did together.

There are definitely other ways to communicate, but there's something about social media that reduces the effort required to connect with someone. It's irrelevant that you might change your address, phone number, or even email address. You have a fixed place that I can contact you and reach out. Oh, and it's the same website where I can find my favorite college roommate too...

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#96

Post by cirgue »

mikorym wrote: post #35
smt88 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

> As of March 2019 Reddit seems still quirky and interesting though...

This can be read as a searing indictment of reddit: it's quirky and interesting, but its value ends there. There's no real discussion to be had and most topic-specific subs are wildly uninformed for most of the things I have any personal experience with. This is certainly not limited to the tiny slice of the world I know well.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#97

Post by gargs »

The one thing that the Internet changed in a very negative manner that ultimately brought us here is -- the expectation that everything is/has to be free. No one wants to pay for anything anymore; people don't want to pay for information; paying for correspondence is just a terrible idea; and so on.

You could control who you interact with, only so far. When no one you know reads the newspaper, while depending on 'social media' for all their opinions, you're going to run into a lot of noise. There's just no escaping it, unless you use this same social media landscape to join some nice new group of intellectuals that actually meets offline.

We just need to start paying for things.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#98

Post by anbop »

Linus doesn’t have any uniquely informed point of view here. Internet giants are much more like media companies than technology companies in the way they interact with society. Linus’ opinion is like a famous actor’s opinion on climate change: not necessarily wrong, but not really newsworthy.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#99

Post by asark »

nikofeyn wrote: post #27
BFLpL0QNek wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> that and forum posts look to be now down ranked in Google in favor retail sites i find myself having to explicitly add "forum" or "forums" to my google search to find things that might be in a forum, despite them being the most relevant to certain searches.

Googling has gotten really hard. I used to be able to really nail exactly what I wanted, craft queries that'd "drag" obscure pages up to the first couple results by picking words likely to be used in links to those pages but rarely elsewhere, that kind of thing. No longer works at all. Attempts to narrow with quotes and phrases end in "no pages found" (bull. shit.) It's like they downranked everything not on the top 500 most trafficked sites so hard that they dropped right off their index entirely. Except blogspam. God they love blogspam.

Re: Linus Torvalds Says Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram Are 'A Disease'

#100

Post by quake »

seneca wrote: post #86
de_watcher wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's centrally administered by people outside your community who have a profit motive The only thing that the administrators outside your community do is the shitty redesigns of the UI (big thanks to them for the "old.reddit.com" option though). Everything else is done by the community of a subreddit.

Reddit admins shut down communities without warning due to their own political whims, have edited the content of a users post with no indication of doing so, and, as said already, inject ads. Reddit's model is paternalistic at best.

I would say that political whims have nothing to do with shutting down subs like fatpeoplehate, jailbait and incels. Places that routinely advocate, or have been directly tied to violence tend to get shut down. See the pizzagate debacle. Same with all the qanon stuff.
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