The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#181

Post by soulofmischief » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:31 PM UTC

gerbilly wrote: post #41

rkho wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi I'm a short-term mentality shareholder and I'm also addicted to money

Hi, I'm an end user who refuses to pay for software. Why should I when all the tools I need are online for free?

Hi, I'm a broke American who would only eat organic, not buy cheap electronics from China, volunteer 6 hours a week, help out the homeless every Saturday, never use Uber, and take part in every major political protest.... just as soon as my government decides an economy functions better when the people who make it up aren't living on scraps. Ethical consumption under late-stage capitalism is a myth. It can't happen.

And before you tell me something about lifestyle changes, I pay well over $100 a month for various software and distribute around $50 to the local homeless a month. But that isn't the norm and most people can't justify it. Our tech salaries blind us from how the rest of the world lives.

I mean... I contribute to and release my own free software, so at least I'm putting my money where my mouth is? Making things free is a form of economic resistance.

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#182

Post by soulofmischief » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:34 PM UTC

shadowgovt wrote: post #145

denkmoon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is (was?) a place of free exchange of ideas, without ego. You have no updoots to collect, nobody can be downdooted for not conforming to groupthink. Anyone who tries to establish an identity on the site is lambasted for not respecting the anonymous nature of the discussion. There will always be a place for truly anonymous discourse. For a time, that was 4chan.

And what has been the result of that anonymous discourse?

A lot of wonderful, wonderful things. Anonymous has roots in 4chan. A lot of amazing political activism has sprung from 4chan. And it was the seed for the entire meme culture which permeates the internet.

At its peak, 4chan along with half a dozen other forums entirely contained the fountain of creativity from which the modern internet drew its inspiration.

I have been visiting 4chan since elementary school, now well in my twenties, so I have seen the changes over the years. What exists today is a shell of what once was. moot, the resident admin, left some years ago and placed the forum in the hands of a third party with conflicted interests and no interest in proper moderation.

It's also worth mentioning that /b/, the board everyone is most familiar with outside of 4chan, is the one where you hear about all the illegal racist stuff getting posted.

Before /pol/ was hijacked into a nazi version of /b/, it was actually a wonderful place for political discussion. And there are dozens of other topic-specific boards which harbor some very thought-provoking discussion.

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#183

Post by shadowgovt » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:51 PM UTC

soulofmischief wrote: post #182

shadowgovt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what has been the result of that anonymous discourse?

A lot of wonderful, wonderful things. Anonymous has roots in 4chan. A lot of amazing political activism has sprung from 4chan. And it was the seed for the entire meme culture which permeates the internet. At its peak, 4chan along with half a dozen other forums entirely contained the fountain of creativity from which the modern internet drew its inspiration. I have been visiting 4chan since elementary school, now well…

That is positive, but it's hard to say if that positivity has outweighed the negativity that came after. It's also hard to say If one can preserve such positivity in the absence of stronger moderation. In fact, as you indicated, one of 4chan's failings was a lack of proper moderation after moot left.

History has indicated time and again that you cannot trust a "benevolent dictator" model for sustained positive outcomes, and the consequences when it breaks down can be terrible and tragic.

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#184

Post by MiroF » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:52 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #67

mc32 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s s sad state of affairs for product search. I do the same (site:reddit) and I’m almost certain most people do too. Google search I guess is good for entertainment search or “buzzy” things like whatever is trending on the trendsetting social networks of the day, but regular search is too spammy and farmed stuff. Often it’s junk.

I don’t think most people do, because if they did, Reddit would also be gamed.

Reddit is certainly gamed. Not on everything, not as widespread as SEO, but I've definitely seen it before.

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#185

Post by MiroF » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:53 PM UTC

dceddia wrote: post #74

lotsofpulp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think most people do, because if they did, Reddit would also be gamed.

Not saying it is, but, how would you know it isn't? I imagine that either "they" (the advertisers/companies) have either already figured this out and are learning how to leave grassroots-looking comments, or they will pretty soon.

I think it's more the bot upvoting comments that happen to be favorable to your product than actually leaving fake comments.

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#186

Post by theNJR » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 12:57 PM UTC

soulofmischief wrote: post #180

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #93

Normal people finally got on the internet and the average person can’t create shit. All they can do is bitch and moan, be horrible to others, and be surveilled and controlled. And that’s what we got. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

A slightly different take on Eternal September: In the old days, when you joined a community it could be very insular. That's okay, there were communities for everything and everyone. So you had to read the rules, learn the lingo, and shut up and lurk for a while so you didn't invoke the wrath of the mods. Or you were gone. Anti-social, attention-seeking, spammy, obnoxious or controlling behavior was simply not toler…

The reason most the web has been neutered is why Hacker News is so great.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20032259

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#187

Post by mxuribe » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:04 PM UTC

silveroriole wrote: post #178

pmlnr wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's already a system for it: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that - sounds quite similar to Mastodon? I wish they weren’t social networks based around identities, friends and sequences of posts, though. I would much prefer sites and pages to be the primary thing. I don’t like the kind of content that social media encourages, even decentralised social media.

Have you considered/looked into Indieweb[0] concepts? While one could argue that it is a sorta type of decentralized "social media"...i would argue that it simply is "sites and pages"...But that can be somewhat be connected to other sites in a loose, decentralized manner - but only if you desire to be connected. Not sure that indieweb is exactly what you seek. But, have a look and see. Good luck!

[0] https://indieweb.org

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#188

Post by neilalexander » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:08 PM UTC

idoubtit wrote: post #129

The way most people act on internet has changed dramatically. Web users are usually consumers, and web "creators" are often standard sellers. People got used to the fact the sites are there to attract them in a race for attention. An anecdotal evidence: circa 2000, I published an old French dictionary. I received thousands of emails about it during the first years. Some people just asked about a word, or send their t…

In the past it was much easier to attribute a website to a single person or a small group of people, and maybe they were able to publish contact details like email addresses without fear of them being harvested and spammed. Websites didn't really have comments sections so often so the reliable method for feedback was email.

Maybe email was also a lot less tedious back then - it strikes me that these days the main purposes of email accounts are to allow registration with other online services and to hold the huge amount of spam that usually happens as a result of registering for online services.

I don't know many people my age (Gen-Y) who would even dream of using their personal email accounts to actually communicate with actual people outside of places where it is strictly required (like applying for jobs), even less so their friends. They're too used to services run by corporate giants (like FAANG) and are being trained to interact in very specific ways, e.g. in direct messages in apps, in the comments sections or through "Like" and "reactions" buttons.

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#189

Post by nicolapcweek94 » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:09 PM UTC

emersion wrote: post #138

eitland wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Getting out there and developing the sites/apps you want to see will bring change. Be proactive. Be the change you want to see. I now have my own stupid blog again[0] trying to add some good old fun and weirdness to the web along with some hopefully useful or thought-provoking posts in between. I wish we could have a thread (possibly even a monthly thread here, like who is hiring) where people could mention their b…

This reminds me of openring [1], which is a little box you add to your blog with links to latest articles on blogs you follow. [1]: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring

Also from sircmpwn, there is a mailing list called free-writers-club [0] with quite a few introductory posts and blog links... post yours, everyone!

  Hello and welcome! This mailing list is for authors of technical blogs
  and other publications to support each other's work. Feel free to post
  questions, drafts for review, and so on.

[0]: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/free-writers-club

Re: The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control

#190

Post by neilalexander » Tue, Oct 22, 2019, 1:15 PM UTC

esotericn wrote: post #71

Developers who work on adtech nonsense, GDPR popups, etc, should take a hard look in the mirror. Yeah, you might make a bit of money, and yeah, maybe your colleagues, in your sick system, give you a bit of respect. One day, I think you're going to wake up and realise that you wasted your talents. Like a war veteran who thought what they were doing was right, that the ends justified the means, until suddenly one day i…

I understand the cookie choice popups are maybe a legal necessity in some places with GDPR and so on, but the implementation of the entire thing is just awful. Each website having their own badly-coded popovers which are either slow, unusable or just outright deceptive, blocking page scrolling and causing unnecessary page reloads.

As for advertising taking over the place, it's just getting insane with them being inserted inline in article content and increasing the page load time significantly, appearing at the beginning of videos or, worse, half-way through them, making pages more resource-intensive and less responsive.

The web has never been so widely accessible and yet it has never been more inaccessible.