301–310 of 405 posts
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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.
Thanks!
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For most people here, getting rid of the internet would also mean changing careers to one of the few remaining things you can do professionally without using the internet. "You criticize thing yet you also use it, how curious" is such a banal take it's literally a meme.
My apologies for the banality. The completely obvious truth that internet is a necessity in 2021 somehow escaped me... Or maybe it didn't and that was the whole point. Given that these people are here, they are obviously engaging in internet usage that IS NOT part of their job (I've yet to see a job posting where reading HN is a requirement). Nobody is pushing anybody to use certain parts of the internet. Don't like…
Why the aversion to complaining? Sometimes things are bad and need changing, and sometimes all you can do is complain. There's a certain alure to saying "don't like it don't use it" and that being the end of it, but at the same time it doesn't acknowledge the fact that these concerns might be legitimate, and sure, something else can always be worse, but that doesn't really address the issues at hand.
The alternative to what the internet is now isn't no internet, change for the better is possible.
There are real structural issues with how the internet is de facto to most people, these are issues of power, governance and capital, turning your back on them doesn't make them go away. I understand why people can feel immense frustration at the current state of the internet (and perhaps the world in general) without making the drastic step to restructure their life around avoiding a utility most of the world runs on.
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…
This sounds like paradise. Maybe Starlink isn't such a good idea after all.
My dad doesn't use the Internet. Not on principle or anything, but he grew up without it, has friends but meets them in person or talks on the phone, same as he has for the past 40 years. He's retired now, but never needed it working as a skilled tradesman with a county job. In retirement, he still builds stuff, but physical stuff. No need for Internet. My ex-wife's mom also didn't use the Internet, but she was a sch…
My grandfather doesn't ”use the internet", my grandmother uses email (not sure what else). They do watch Netflix now via roku (they used to have a blockbuster subscription so they could go and pickup DVDs). Is that the internet?
I bet an online poll asking “do you use the Internet?” would probably also get on the order of 7% negative responses.
Roughly speaking: it's the old, the poor, the uneducated, and the rural. That's not terribly surprising.
Almost all of the stats in the study reflect the composition of the 65+ US population.
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Growing up, my friend’s parents literally had 100s of VHS tapes, of many TV series and movies they had dubbed. There was always something to watch. Of course, you had to physically be at their house.
Or you could go down to the local video store and rent something (or, for that matter, go to a movie theater). I'd probably argue that pre-VCR was more different from post-VCR than time-shifting/rental era was different from today's streaming. As with many things, the friction and need to plan is less today but the VCR freed you from the network schedule to a significant degree.
The cost of VCR rental scaled linearly with the amount of content, and the friction of renting was a significantly larger barrier than auto-play next episode.
A 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
I think a lot of people are surprised by statistics like “x% of people don’t [thing every modestly privileged person does]” because it’s easy to forget that society has a lot of fringes if you’re not regularly exposed to them. My first reaction was “7% sounds low”, but again, that’s probably biased by my own experiences.
That was my reaction as well, particularly based on how the question was asked - it was very specifically about the Internet, not mentioning specific services that someone with low technological literacy might not associate with Internet usage (e.g. Google Maps, or Facebook Messenger) [1].
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Non-i...
People rationalize with “I don’t look at the bad parts” and “I can quit anytime I choose, I just choose not to right now.” People don’t see that they’re addicted to something that is destroying all that is good. Using Facebook or Twitter on a regular basis is bad, in some cases it turns lethal. Even worse is functional addiction, where it warps you slowly over the years, too gradually to notice. We regulate big pharm…
Disclaimer: never did get into Twitter and Facebook though I periodically give Twitter another try every half year or so