> We thought anonymous people saying what they thought in a public forum would lead to the best idea getting shared the most This is true in some parts of the internet, such as Hacker News and Reddit. The key seems to be good signal/noise moderation and users able to amplify content with cardinal voting (upvotes/downvotes). I'm constantly finding great, new ideas between the two websites (especially when combined wit…
I think there’s another option and that’s to get rid of votes AND comments. Using Twitter as an example, I think removing likes and comments and only providing a retweet and one level deep quote tweet would make it a much better platform. Of course, this assumes no bots as well.
Was everyone stupid back then?
91–100 of 135 posts
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure if this comment is a jab at the unwashed masses but you did leave out another group, corporations. BBS Sysops, and people that were putting up web sites in the mid 90s weren’t doing it for money. It wasn’t until the cult of money got involved and turned the internet into a giant direct marketing platform that things began to get really bad.
I remember when corporations started showing up. They were mostly ignored. It wasn't until mainstream adoption outweighed the early adopter culture that things really started going downhill and combined with corporations accelerated.
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#93Looking back, I guess the main point of why the early internet was so special wasn‘t because of cool new communications technology, but because of the self selection. In order to use BBSes or the early Internet, by definition you had to be above average curious, smart, rich, young (late night dialup tarrifs) and/or based in academia, as well as having a volunteering/cooperating mindset. We just managed to keep the ot…
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Social problems == culture divide It makes it funny when illiterates try to culture clump :)
Social problems are not only culture problems. They are also economic. They are mental health problems. They are education problems. They are industrial (logistical and infrastructural). And so on and so forth. All things that would be problems even where you have only one culture. For instance, ask the average Japanese about Japan's social problems, from mental health up to and including the nation dying. I think wh…
Even the lifestyle divide and language divide define perspective. Lifestyle clumping is just as funny.
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#95"You thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems?" I recognize that this is just a comic strip, but this is a pretty reductionist point. The idea that giving people access to more knowledge about the world and about other perspectives would be a big help in addressing social problems isn't crazy. A major problem, IMO, is that the feeds we use to navigate this sea of information became op…
Which is why I really don't like people who are disguising their opinions in a fictional story: You can do all sorts of shady rethodic maneuvers, such as presenting your opinion as some grand truth in-universe or - like here - putting it into the mouth of a character and absolving yourself from actually explaining it further.
Bonus points for adding another character who is impressed by the first character's statement to give the opinion an air of profoundness.
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
Imagine saying this about writing, or the printing press. It's not just reductionist but cynical. Optimizing for outrage is a mass communication problem, not an internet problem, and unfolds roughly the same in every new medium from town criers on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
You guys have all missed the point of the comic. We still have social problems despite having a printing press, or radio, or internet. In fact, at root, we have the exact same social problems as existed prior to Gutenberg's birth. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, etc. Why have they not been solved? Because they are human problems. The problem is within us and the problem is us. It's who we are on an…
The reason that we, naively perhaps, thought that an information transfer protocol would solve social problems, is because information; anything that can be encoded digitally, is now post-scarcity. But we never reformed society around the invention of the digital realm, and only adapted our old ways around it. This furthered inequality and unrest, rather than healed anything.
With digital distribution, there are now infinity digital sheep for three families and every person, every man woman and child can have infinity digital sheep for their own. It wasn't naive to think that would reform the world because up until that point, scarcity drove and still drives everything. Macroeconomics has us plot supply and demand on a graph, but doesn't tell us how to reform society when supply goes to infinity. Instead of reforming society like we must, we try and artificially limit supply, enacting intellectual property laws trying to deny the copyability of bits, which is like trying to make water not wet.
Why do we have capitalism? It's a long story, but it was invented to distribute the two sheep among three families with as little war as possible. No one wants to go hungry. And to state the obvious, you can't eat digital sheep. Nor are they created like organic sheep. Many someones have to come together, intentionally, working very hard, to lovingly create digital sheep like Disney's latest masterpiece from raw ones and zeroes.
Those someone's exist in a pre-scarcity world. They need pre-scarcity money to buy non-digital food to eat and pay rent on non-digital housing to live in. Digital sheep don't exist without the hard work of people who need non-digital money to exist in a pre-scarcity world. So we still need the old economy to pay those creators in pre-scarcity money. But once that digital sheep exists, there can be infinity copies of it. Every single person on the planet with a cellphone or computer can have their own copy of that digital sheep for a mere pittance in bandwidth costs.
Until we reform our whole society; the economy and the government; to realize that we live in a post-scarcity world for all digital goods - and are effectively post-scarcity for some physical goods, it's always going to be us in the same place. Poverty, war, man's inhumanity to man, tribalism, they all exist online, but they are different online. People are different because of the Internet.
The reformation we need is going to be radical, because it has to be. Supply and demand just got shot in the face because there's an infinite supply on digital goods. My proposal, in all its earnestness, has a few steps.
1) We abolish copyright. I said it was going to be radical, didn't I? We change systems around so that copying is allowed, but that it tracks what people are watching, and where it came from. But we abolish the system that's trying to make bits not copyable and water not wet.
2) We track what people are watching, and give out points based on that. Every day I'm granted 86400 attention cents, or ACs, and if I watch a two hour long Disney movie, Disney gets paid 7200 ACs by me. Disney gets to further distribute those 7200 ACs however they see fit to the individual creators who made that movie. If I spend 3 minutes chuckling at a tweet or a YouTube or TikTok video or Instagram video, the creator automatically gets 180 ACs from me, which they can pass on to whomever they see fit, literally crediting their sources.
3) We establish an VAT luxury tax, anything that's more than 3 orders of magnitude more expensive than the cheapest one, effectively creating a price ceiling on goods relative to the cheapest version of that same good. The $10 bottles of wine at my local store mean that bottles of wine now top out at $10,000. Anything over that is taxed and goes into an AC fund. Remember, capitalism is just some silly system we've come up with to decide who goes hungry and who gets to eat the sheep. Other such systems include feudalism, where a lord decided who went hungry and who was fed.
4) With that money, we establish an official way of trading ACs for pre-scarcity money, so people can use their ACs to afford non-digital food and housing and clothing and entertainment. Isn't that system going to be gamed and broken and create all sorts of arbitrage opportunities you ask? Yes but have you seen how broken the rest of capitalism is right now?
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#97Did people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world fro…
The talk on IRC in the 90’s was “imagine a war going on with the internet and civilians on both sides could talk to each other, why would anyone fight?”
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember when corporations started showing up. They were mostly ignored. It wasn't until mainstream adoption outweighed the early adopter culture that things really started going downhill and combined with corporations accelerated.
Yeah, I guess it’s a bit of a chicken and egg thing but corporations brought centralized servers. Of course we’re discussing a topic on a centralized server now but PG is not making any money from it.
If I had to pick one thing, I'd say it's about shallow consumption/interactions that kill the signal/noise. Like posting a picture/video with a caption, having it go viral with upvotes/reposts.
Re: Was everyone stupid back then?
#99Did people really think that Internet was going to solve all problems or is that revisionist history by back-in-our-day millenials? Even for a techno-optimist, it would've been hard to forsee the sheer penetration. Yes, the euphoria was there from the beginning. But, there's a difference between saying "it's going to be huge" and imagining an instantly accessible network available in the hands of 60% of the world fro…
I remember people in elation over the idea that information would be democratized and control taken away from "the establishment". No longer would any small group of people be able to restrict flow of information.
And with scarcity inverted from information supply to demand, each information source will spend more and more of their bandwidth declaring the other sources worthless and evil, and that only their source is worth attention.
This way people are driven to consume very few sources, whose content is inevitably impoverished.
How to break out of this dynamic?