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Did the early internet activists blow it?

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Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#101

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ethbro wrote: post #85
ip26 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your parent is basically referencing the fact that you can find large groups of people who share your views, no matter what they are. Nervous about vaccines? Great, you can find literally thousands of people who affirm your fears, and you needn't even speak to anyone who doesn't. That's what's new, that's how scale changed things.

I was thinking in terms of virality velocity as well. Using the postal reference, something may have taken a week to transmit to 100 people. Now, it takes 5 seconds. That's a fundamentally different situation, and it requires different tradeoffs in society.

The telegraph has been transmitting information all over the world at the speed of light for more than a hundred years, so that's not it either.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#102

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ip26 wrote: post #81
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The sheer scale of social networks makes the effect fundamentally unlike prior scenarios. Is this even true? There are a billion people on Facebook, but it's not like a given post ever gets seen by more than a small fraction of them. Nearly the entire human race has been reachable by postal mail for over a hundred years; the size of the network really has nothing to do with anything. What has changed isn't the size…

I think your parent is basically referencing the fact that you can find large groups of people who share your views, no matter what they are. Nervous about vaccines? Great, you can find literally thousands of people who affirm your fears, and you needn't even speak to anyone who doesn't. That's what's new, that's how scale changed things.

That's not scale, it's the opposite of scale, and it's very much more the way things worked a long time ago.

When communication was expensive you could only talk to people in your physical vicinity. If they had stupid ideas, you had stupid ideas. A town even a few dozen miles away would have an entirely different set of stupid ideas.

What's different now is that the clusters aren't based on geography, so there is more overlap and you encounter people whose set of stupid ideas are different than yours. That's actually a good thing -- it's how a lot of them get stamped out because they're so obviously bad that they can only survive when no one is even attempting to challenge them.

The problem now is, instead of there being a third world village full of people who think crazy things and whose children die of preventable causes but nobody else has reason to care that they exist, now there's a few of those people in every town getting infected with measles and then showing up to school with your kid. So now we have to care more about idiots being wrong because said idiots live closer to home than they did before.

But the way to fix wrongness isn't censorship. That's how you make wrongness increase, because as soon as you erroneously censor something true, nobody can say it in order to argue that it shouldn't be censored.

The way to fix wrongness is education and debate. Which is real and continuous work instead of a switch you can flip and make the problem go away. Sorry.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#103

Post by anigbrowl »

heartbeats wrote: post #94
anigbrowl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's take a concrete example: how about people swapping recipes for chemical weapons and discussing their efficient deployment against unknowing civilians? Or people discussing and developing (largely anonymously) the logistics of mass shootings, with a view to maximizing the body count?

They're just having a chat. It's unethical to censor them. Perhaps they should be brought in on some other charges, but there's nothing illegal about talking. They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they? In practice, you see this as well. There's a lot of people posting on the Internet about how they're going to do this and that, but in practice most of them are just blowing off steam. I get why a site like Face…

They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they?

Yes, that's kind of the point.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#104

Post by heartbeats »

anigbrowl wrote: post #103
heartbeats wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're just having a chat. It's unethical to censor them. Perhaps they should be brought in on some other charges, but there's nothing illegal about talking. They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they? In practice, you see this as well. There's a lot of people posting on the Internet about how they're going to do this and that, but in practice most of them are just blowing off steam. I get why a site like Face…

They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they? Yes, that's kind of the point.

[flagged]

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#105

Post by dang »

heartbeats wrote: post #104
anigbrowl wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not threatening to kill anyone, are they? Yes, that's kind of the point.

[flagged]

Would you please stop? This combination of flamebait and pedantry is definitely not helping.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#106

Post by heartbeats »

dang wrote: post #105
heartbeats wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Would you please stop? This combination of flamebait and pedantry is definitely not helping. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't get it - I have not introduced any new topics, nor went on any unrelated or generic tangents or controversies. I've made the claim that the clientele of a specific forum do not generally make posts which by the legal definition constitute threats, which does not seem all too flamebait-y nor unrelated to the topic at hand.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#107

Post by chillacy »

mikedilger wrote: post #41
chillacy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let it be an outlet for those who choose to partake in such content I normally don't argue for censorship but I will throw out that if you believe the following things: 1. There exist thoughts and beliefs which are dangerous to (my) society 2. These thoughts and beliefs are normally tempered through social pressure in the dominant culture 3. Through the internet you can create your own subculture which reinforces y…

You certainly may _want_ to eliminate such places and/or such beliefs. But stamping out places or beliefs doesn't really work. People find or create new places, and what is left is just ill-will and further political division. Beliefs become martyred and the Streissand effect draws more people in to investigate. The way to reduce bad beliefs is to, IMHO: 1. Ingratiate and investigate. Respect the people, become their…

This is exactly the way that the broader society changes beliefs on individuals, I think the danger is that individuals can now create their own subcultures which are more significant (to them) than the dominant culture. At some point you don't need to talk to anyone outside of your subculture.

One example is subreddits: over time they start to develop a subculture and the mechanics of downvoting and upvoting means that people with more moderate beliefs can end up leaving after awhile, leaving the subreddit to become more and more polarized over time.

This makes it hard to have these types of empathetic conversations.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#108

Post by Mirioron »

fl0wenol wrote: post #87
Mirioron wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the aforementioned "oh, hmm, that lady has opinions about video games, let's try real hard to destroy her life" dreck that the various chans indulge in when they're bored What are you referring to when you say this? Because if you're referring to Gamergate then that's quite a mischaracterization. I'm not saying that bad things weren't done during it, but it wasn't about hating on women in video games. And aren't mo…

>but it wasn't about hating on women in video games. Are you saying it was about integrity in video games journalism? I wish I could express a figurative glance over the top of my reading glasses without an image macro.

To some degree? Sure. But if it truly was about hating women talking about video games for being women, then how come some of the idols of the movement were women themselves? If it's all about misogyny then shouldn't they hate people like mombot just the same? This is why I said that it's a mischaracterization.

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#109

Post by 1000units »

heartbeats wrote: post #106
dang wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please stop? This combination of flamebait and pedantry is definitely not helping. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't get it - I have not introduced any new topics, nor went on any unrelated or generic tangents or controversies. I've made the claim that the clientele of a specific forum do not generally make posts which by the legal definition constitute threats, which does not seem all too flamebait-y nor unrelated to the topic at hand.

They understand what you're saying. You are of a common mind already in this sense, but they differ in how they feel about it. "Yes, yes, you waste your breath in misreading my feigned confusion. I just wish it weren't so. Please do not remind me, so we can pretend we live in another world until it finally comes." It's a gross dialectic, and extremely common.

The problem with "polite" discourse is you can't just buckle down and say "F--- you; we are enemies. Our minds our here but our spirits there and there."

Re: Did the early internet activists blow it?

#110

Post by bsder »

heartbeats wrote: post #95
bsder wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. No, there should not. People should have the freedom to congregate and to discuss. If people are hurt by this, too bad. There is no solution. Hogwash. We have harassment, stalking, libel, defamation, and slander laws in meatspace for a reason. The fact that doing it on the Internet exempts you from these laws because enforcement isn't "cost effective" is a problem . The Libertarian Internet(tm) was tried and fai…

> Hogwash. We have harassment, stalking, libel, defamation, and slander laws in meatspace for a reason. The fact that doing it on the Internet exempts you from these laws because enforcement isn't "cost effective" is a problem. All those are illegal online too. But if I go to the pub and discuss some harassment with my friends that I'm going to do later, the pub clearly isn't held liable for this. Why? Because even i…

> My opinion is this: people should grow thicker skin.

A motivated harasser or mob can basically force you completely offline. You cannot answer that with "grow thicker skin".

The problem is especially acute if your harasser or mob is in a different state, for example.

> It used to be the case that people were recommended to not use their real name on the Internet for basic safety reasons.

And what about if your business is online? Most states require that your public business filing include your real name.

Your glib solutions betray your lack of experience with the problem.

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