This sounds like a dream to be honest.
7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
91–100 of 405 posts
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward…
> If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it Of course. Being able to entertain ideas without necessarily believing it is what online interaction is all about. I suspect this is why your friend seems like a completely different person online. He should be. Being able to take a completely different perspective to see if you can understand it well enough to talk about it is an excellent learning tool a…
> I suspect this is why your friend seems like a completely different person online.
I disagree, and strongly.
Considering a different perspective does not in any way require that you become a different person. You may end up doing so, but at that time, the entirety of who you are shifts, and not just some persona that you present on Twitter.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#93I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…
Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider). Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale,…
My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a shocking amount of "non-human" activity. I think there are definitely bots, but also people that are paid to promote one narrative or another (paid with money or social validation). I've trolled through many a twitter/reddit account when I sniff something off about a post. They are often hyper focused on a single topic, pushing a specific point of view. Rarely is this mentioned. Its "hail corporate" vibes…
But people are, too! You only need to talk to my grandmother for 5 minutes and I swear you'll get to hear how bad the CDU is as a party. If I ran a bot, sprinkling in a few off-topic comments is a very easy way to both get reputation/karma and look less suspicious. Humans with an agenda are far less concerned about that.
On reddit just have a repost bot, then a mini upvote swarm, then use it as a guise to make realistic human interaction.
Have your bots come through and copy a similar on-topic, joke or pun thread from a previous repost of that same content.
It is for SEO/narrative purposes, online account farming. More posts from social media corps about defeating this ecosystem would move no deescalate the situation. The "paid ad" requirement for influencers was one step forward in the same fight
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Part of what you’re describing can be attributed to lack of internet. But other part is just being an outsider that doesn’t really care that much (and I mean that in totally non offensive way - it’s just a benefit of being an outsider). Outrage existed long before internet. Daily tv news, newspapers, gossips at work, coworker with totally opposite world view, etc, were all great sources of outrage. At smaller scale,…
My outrage quotient has dropped significantly in the two and a half months since I deleted facebook and twitter. Just removing those two things from my life has made a measurable improvement in my quality of life.
I found I had to get rid of a decent portion of the news too, and news-adjacent comedy shows like Colbert. It's not enough to personally not read FB/Twitter, since they have gotten so integrated into mainstream media. Maybe 10 years ago you could just ignore social media, but by 2018 (when I started making an effort to avoid it), you could end up seeing thousands of tweets without ever using twitter yourself, if you just regularly watched TV news and/or current events comedy. Whole portions of these shows turned into literally putting a tweet on the screen and then talking about the tweet and responses to it. Especially Trump tweets and their replies, but not solely those.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#96A significant portion of the US is illiterate [1]. One might assume that being illiterate affects internet usage. Not quite as romantic as neo-Luddism, or even making a conscious choice not to expose oneself to potentially problematic patterns of communication. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
Trump voters
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#97Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet. I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompa…
I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward…
> I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another
I think this is unlikely because it would be far simpler, cheaper, and more effective to employ a small number of people and use tooling (automation, templates, etc.) to amplify their reach drastically. Why invent an unreliable AI to push narratives on the Internet when you can have one real person carry on thousands of arguments a day with a little help?
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#98I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…
People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course…
I think instead of saying it's relaxed, I would describe it as very local?
Folks work pretty hard in Caribbean, but when I was there (a fair while ago), I also worked dang hard. But you absolutely felt like you were in a bubble. You really could imagine that Israel and the Palestinians would have an intifada / war and no one would notice.
You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons), you ate larger group meals, you spent a lot more time outside. I'm just spitballing some impressions. Some of this was efficiency, (group meals are more cost effective?) etc.
There is also an attitude difference. There is a story (probably made up - please fill in correct details) that a group "conquered" one of the islands (maybe Saba?). They took over whatever building, raised whatever flag. And everyone just ignored them. They eventually left.
One thing that's an adjustment is ignoring the rules if they are silly - no one thinks anything of it. And yes, in part because of corruption and rent seeking there are some silly rules so maybe you have to.
Absolute downsides as well no question. But I wonder if the folks not on internet just don't care as much about what someone said to someone as the rest of us.
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#99I used to work in the Caribbean when internet there was ridiculously expensive. Local social life was fantastic - I missed nothing about the internet. Also - I missed nothing about not keeping up to date on latest news - locals just didn't care what was going on for the most part - the latest "outrages" were 100% irrelevant. If you went to bar at night, and IF they had a TV on, it was sports. So you'd come back to th…
People always bring up how people in Fiji or the Carribean are so happy and not stressed, and I’m not sure what the message is. Of course if you just want to relax and not worry too much about what you want to accomplish in life then yeah go to some corner of the world and live happily? However for a lot of people that’s not what they want out of their lives; they want it to mean something in their own way. Of course…
You could try programming in the Caribbean. Nice beach shack, a couple of manuals and offline copy of stackoverflow perhaps....
I heard that Travis Kalanick coded the initial code base of Uber in Varkala beach in Kerala[1],[2].
[1] https://www.gadgetsnow.com/tech-news/guess-what-uber-ceo-tra...
Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?
#100A significant portion of the US is illiterate [1]. One might assume that being illiterate affects internet usage. Not quite as romantic as neo-Luddism, or even making a conscious choice not to expose oneself to potentially problematic patterns of communication. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp
Trump voters
ha! you think illiterate people are voting?