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7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

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Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#291

Post by mkr-hn »

dbetteridge wrote: post #277
LightG wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. My current move is to delete Facebook completely (well, deleted that years ago). I just didn't find as much value there as elsewhere on the internet. And the psychological cost wasn't worth the little value there was there. So, complete deletion. Twitter, I've deleted the mobile app and I follow no one. I have a separate list of profiles I find interesting. I have to physically go to that list and click…

I use twitter.com##section div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"] In Ublock - origin rules to hide the trending sidebar

Better: https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter

This will benefit from updates from the author whenever Twitter tries to foil blocking. It comes with a variety of tweaks like a separate timeline for retweets and forcing the latest timeline.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#292

Post by tw04 »

lmm wrote: post #216
dhosek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you try just... not following the outrage parts? Not getting outraged? If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I have a facebook account I rarely if ever login to unless it's something school related. When I do, without fail I see someone I would otherwise get along with posting some ridiculous, easily disproven nonsense about insert scaremongering of the day. Every now and again I'll respond with a link to a factcheck which inevitably upsets the person who is angry someone isn't reinforcing the echo chamber.

Then I promptly close it and remember that's why I don't even bother. Facebook's entire engagement strategy has become outrage and fear. It's what keeps people the most engaged and that's literally the only metric they care about.

I truly believe if Zuck had the option of nuking a third world country to make another billion or solve world peace and Facebook goes away entirely, he'd nuke the country without a second thought. Everything about him strikes me as a sociopath with little to no regard for mankind outside of his personal bubble.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#293

Post by pc86 »

mkr-hn wrote: post #291
dbetteridge wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use twitter.com##section div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"] In Ublock - origin rules to hide the trending sidebar

Better: https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter This will benefit from updates from the author whenever Twitter tries to foil blocking. It comes with a variety of tweaks like a separate timeline for retweets and forcing the latest timeline.

This is fantastic.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#294

Post by robinj6 »

random5634 wrote: post #76

I 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…

Johannesburg, relatively speaking, is similar to this. People will use the Internet in business parks to do their jobs, but you don’t see people walking around staring at their phones. People use WhatsApp to curb high talk and text rates, but that is a lions share of what phones are used for. It feels very similar to 90s America technologically and it’s strangely relieving.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#295

Post by dkarl »

lmm wrote: post #216
dhosek wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you try just... not following the outrage parts? Not getting outraged? If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I found that didn't work at all with Facebook and only works with Twitter by being _very_ selective. But I think that is intrinsic to Twitter, and not only for outrage reasons. I unfollow lots of interesting and smart people because they add too much to my feed. If I follow someone for technical content and half their tweets end up being about music or chit-chat with their friends or drama in their part of the industry, I unfollow them to get that material out of my feed. Even if everything they tweet is interesting, if they tweet a lot, I unfollow them.

> If you want to spend more time connecting with people you care about, getting rid of facebook feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Sadly, lots of people I care about think it's a moral imperative to broadcast their political position on Facebook on every issue of the day. The people I connect with are skewed pretty heavily towards my own point of view, but that doesn't make it any less corrosive to read what they have to say. Facebook is just too emotionally taxing to follow. (Using Facebook's tools to curate my feed just reminds me how much power I'm giving up to them, which is also depressing.)

I feel so much better with Facebook out of my life. I have the app installed on my phone in case somebody from twenty years ago wants to look me up and message me. That's all it's good for.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#296

Post by varjag »

watwut wrote: post #156
varjag wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think all wars are rational, resource-driven pursuits? How about Falklands, what Argentina planned to extract there? Steal the rocks and tax the 300 sheep? Or Russia with Crimea, whose ownership value is enormously negative? All it takes is one moron with delusion of grandeur.

Wars are expensive, that is first thing. Second, soldiers need to eat right now and where do you think food used to come from? Army "living off the land" was a thing, because supplying them was difficult and who cares. The land armies passed through used to be pretty destroyed after. > Russia with Crimea, whose ownership value is enormously negative? Russia does not see expansion of own territory as negative value. A…

Unlike 'seeing', negative economic value is objective. Suffering sanctions for occupying a region that was traditionally heavily subsidised is negative value.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#297

Post by appletrotter »

random5634 wrote: post #98
ramraj07 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

> You drank after work with the folks you worked with (in west this is a no no for many good reasons)

It's like you've never been to a Western country`

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#298

Post by robinj6 »

amelius wrote: post #181
ornornor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Otoh 99% (exaggeration for emphasis but not that far off if you think about it) of what happens in the “news” is totally irrelevant to you and your life beyond the initial outrage it provokes. You have virtually no impact on preventing or influencing the event and it has no impact on you whatsoever. War in Africa again? It’s sad to think about and outrageous how some scummy warlords terrorize the local population, bu…

> 99% (...) of what happens in the “news” is totally irrelevant to you and your life beyond the initial outrage it provokes. Just like voting has almost zero effect. However, is not voting wise? In what direction would society move if nobody watched the news?

Now that it has become such a media item, how many shooters in the past few years do you believe had a partial motive in a near certainty they would achieve broad recognition in their otherwise meaningless and miserable lives? When you read the news and Wikipedia on the latest shooter, you’re contributing to future shooters in about the same magnitude as being a single voter.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#299

Post by appletrotter »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #235
varjag wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think all wars are rational, resource-driven pursuits? How about Falklands, what Argentina planned to extract there? Steal the rocks and tax the 300 sheep? Or Russia with Crimea, whose ownership value is enormously negative? All it takes is one moron with delusion of grandeur.

Indeed, countless wars were started for the most idiotic reasons imaginable, see 'war of the bycket' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Bucket

Did you read what you linked to? It says that the war wasn't actually started to due to the bucket, but the taking of a castle.

Pretty reasonable cause to start a war I could imagine, back then.

Re: 7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?

#300

Post by LightG »

mkr-hn wrote: post #291
dbetteridge wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use twitter.com##section div[aria-label="Timeline: Trending now"] In Ublock - origin rules to hide the trending sidebar

Better: https://github.com/insin/tweak-new-twitter This will benefit from updates from the author whenever Twitter tries to foil blocking. It comes with a variety of tweaks like a separate timeline for retweets and forcing the latest timeline.

Oh my gosh, that's beautiful. Thanks.
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