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The internet wants to be fragmented

noahpinion.substack.com

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Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#181

Post by seydor »

causality0 wrote: post #44

Being the same person online as offline destroyed everything great about the internet. When you were an asshole you got banned from the website, and then you had to trim some of your sharp edges off so you didn't get banned from the next one. These days being an asshole results in either you aurrou ding yourself entirely with other assholes or getting your real life ruined by losing your job or even being arrested in…

Internet discussions don't scale.

I think we are at the end of the road, it has already become impossible to have honest debate about something online. Some of us maintain the illusion that things will return to a somewhat more bearable state but it is futile. I think newer generations know it's not going to happen.

I fear that AI will lead to people basically talking to themselves and to their imaginary perfect friends. This will make people even nastier, and somewhat alien to each other. But maybe that's the natural course of things

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#182

Post by culi »

TEP_Kim_Il_Sung wrote: post #165
pixl97 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered why someone hasn't created what I call the 'orange slice' expression button. Much like cutting an orange in half it gives a preset amount of positive and negative values. Sort of a play off the meta moderation that Slashdot did. For positive values it you could have something like [I believe this is truthful], [I like this content],[Funny],[Positive message] and for negative values [I believe thi…

That's what trive.news was about. Turns out crowd sourcing truth gives a weighted average towards accuracy. Something tells me businesses relying on getting "experts" to sell you on things, would want to keep general public opinion out of the equation. http://www.trive.news/Whitepaper.0.2.6x.pdf

the whitepaper offers no evidence for such claims except some vague about the "wisdom of the crowd"

Experience from political betting spaces tells me that the wisdom of the crowd rarely actually holds up to scrutiny. Political bettors[0] hardly ever do as good as simple poll aggregators like 538 or RCP.

[0]: https://electionbettingodds.com/

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#183

Post by tux »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #106
dayvid wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem is that you can make money from the internet. The internet was more about self-expression and fun. Then people realized they can sell things or themselves (being a "content-creator", "thought-leader", etc.). As a result the most active people are tailoring their actions towards increasing engagement, getting you to buy something, getting you to think a certain way, etc. and we have a divide betwee…

Money does this to everything. Radio used to be cool, now it's mostly ads. Circulating pamphlets was once a potent political tool, now they come sandwiched between ads in a newspaper that nobody reads. Evaluate a randomly chosen NFT-referent for artistic merit and see how it stack up to a randomly chosen pre-nft art. I'm still optimistic about the web though. It's more configurable than the other media. We may yet fi…

There are many online radio stations without ads, and you can already wall off advertising with something like PiHole or extensions like uBlockO. I never hear or see ads anymore :)

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#184

Post by borski »

josephcsible wrote: post #177
borski wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I’d also argue discord or Slack does this, in the same way that IRC did; you essentially spin up separate servers and thus separate communities. Sure, it’s still hosted by a central entity, but the moderation and discourse is all yours to manage.

> the moderation and discourse is all yours to manage. No it isn't. Look at all the things https://discord.com/guidelines and https://slack.com/acceptable-use-policy say you can't do. For example, Discord bans sharing cheats for even single-player games, and Slack bans discussing ideas for a chat app of your own.

OK fine, I stand corrected. But my larger point was that the movement toward these types of communities / services is indicative of the article’s thesis being correct, in general.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#185

Post by nonethewiser »

fleddr wrote: post #141

I tend to agree with the conclusions of the article but at the same time I think it leaves out a few important factors in comparing the old internet versus today's internet. First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember central…

> First, the political macro backdrop. The extreme political polarization in the US leading to the so-called culture wars. This is a massive driver of toxicity on social media. This conflict machine is relatively new, people fondly remember centralized social media as being far less "political" just a few years ago.

But social media is widely credited with causing this polarization. I would tend to agree. But I'm curious, do you have some other explanation?

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#186

Post by nonethewiser »

lapcat wrote: post #9

I found myself agreeing with every word of this article. The penultimate paragraph summarizes it well: > People call Twitter an indispensable public space because it’s the “town square”, but in the real world there isn’t just one town square, because there isn’t just one town. There are many. And the internet works when you can exit — when you can move to a different town if you don’t like the mayor or the local cult…

People don't want actually want that though. They want everyone on twitter. Not a small circle of 200 people.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#187

Post by innocentoldguy »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #4

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

I agree. I also think the downvote button is a bad metric since it can be interpreted as, “this comment is wrong,” when often times it just means, “I don’t like this point of view,” “I disagree,” or even “I didn’t like something you said a month ago, so I’m going to be vindictive and downvote everything you say in the future.”

Even on Hacker News, I think it would improve the experience if you had to explain why you were downvoting (or upvoting) a comment before being allowed to do so. It would let everyone else know whether your reasoning justified the action.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#188

Post by themitigating »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #4

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

I upvoted you since I want others to see your opinion which I agree with.

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#189

Post by genghisjahn »

HD103720b wrote: post #176
Nextgrid wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the biggest problem is advertising. It would be much less harmful if commercial content was upfront about asking for your wallet, and the transaction ended there (the publisher's incentives are directly aligned with the end-customer's). Instead, we have stuff that's technically "free" but actually comes with plenty of strings attached such as mismatched incentives - the content is only there as bait and t…

Not just advertising, its the ad networks that have been silently putting their finger on the scale to coax/trick the major corporate customers to support certain issues.

Wait, so the ad networks are the puppet masters pulling the strings of the major corporations to support...what certain issues?

Re: The internet wants to be fragmented

#190

Post by weakfortress »

machina_ex_deus wrote: post #4

The biggest problem is the like button. The like button is not only a bad metric - it's the worst possible metric. Speaking up used to be something you do to change someone's mind or yours. What's the point in speaking up if nobody does anything with what you said? The like button reprogrammed people. They started getting positive feedback for speaking in an echo chamber, for saying and doing things their audience al…

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