231–240 of 283 posts
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Ok but then how is this relevant? Crazy uncles have existed long before the Internet.
Crazy uncles were unable to find other crazy uncles and coagulate into the fatbergs of information flow before the internet. Now the algorithms push them together.
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Yeah for sure. Revolutions are messy and its easy to lose sight of that when you're on the winning side. I'm personally very glad to not live under a imperial monarchy, but I do wish the founders could have kept their concerns over voters out of the way. There are historical examples of why trusting the mob goes poorly, but keeping that on the table fundamentally ruins the point of a democratic society. Its all well…
I don’t think the founding fathers much less the ancient greek democrats anticipated the level of idiocy in the public discourse we are dealing with today. A huge swath of the country has been manipulated by propaganda to the point of not believing in reality at all. It’s a dangerous position we find ourselves in today.
This article feels like a window into the mind of someone who drank too deeply of being perpetually online, and now feels the pendulum swing the other way. Like the verbal equivalent of that one time I drank far too much Gin and my stomach finally said "no" all over the bathroom floor (missed the toilet — oops). I'm glad to never have gone down that particular path. Stuck with my flip phone for ages, etc. But for peo…
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> This is probably an even worse “platitude”. Most people go with the flow so if you’re immersed in a lot of wokism, you will probably end up being woke eventually. Then it just spreads, especially if you couple the wokism with humor. Wokism is tribalism and seems naturally engrained so it’s something you have to actively resist. Funny how well a simple word replacement can work.
Assuming you’re serious and not just trolling - what even is wokism, aside from a name thrown at people you disagree with? Bigotry is a known, studied phenomenon. Are you saying there is not a natural tendency to prefer one’s own kind and mistrust foreigners? Are you saying that groupthink respects no particular ideology?
You can reduce anything to "a name thrown at people you disagree with", and anything can be "a known, studied phenomenon". Especially if researchers can safely study it when academia is captured by an ideology that's hostile to certain viewpoints. ;D
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Crazy uncles were unable to find other crazy uncles and coagulate into the fatbergs of information flow before the internet. Now the algorithms push them together.
But again, who cares if someone else or a group of people think something you find to be crazy? If they act on it that's totally different, but we have laws for that already.
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More hostile as in... you open some random webpage, you get 3 popup windows with porn ads playing at full volume? And when you close them, infinitely more open, like a hydra, until it locks up and you have to reboot. Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word. This was my interne…
> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word. I do have a strange nostalgia about those days. It was a culture that didn't exist in meatspace, and there was something fun about that. However, when covid hit and my wife and I started playing games, I quickly learned my wife severe…
This is an overly wordy article, that I think misses the mark. The internet _as the Western world knows it today_ will not be the same in a few decades. But then again, it's hardly the same today as it was 30 years ago either. A few things affect this: - Advertising. It's everywhere and corrupts every form of media. Content is made to appease advertisers, and web services are built to extract data from users. The int…
shrug Certainly a better place than a disconnected world.
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By far, the majority of my time "online" these days is spent in a Discord server for enthusiasts that are also interested in my hobby. Due to the server's small size and narrow niche, moderation is straightforward and we rarely have any issues with trolling. We don't allow political discussion, which mostly allows members of diverse backgrounds to interact safely, since triggering discussions don't come up very often…
Political decisions and sex are part of being a human being so I encourage communities to sometimes do that. Not all of them, but we need more spaces for adults to be adults. Too many hacker spaces are sterile in this way. Moderation is worth the challenge.
Thankfully there are lots of other servers that have more lax inclusion of adult topics, if that's your fancy. I think it's okay for different communities to have different standards.
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Oh people have known for a long time that the average person has crazy ideas. There's a reason the US election system isn't by popular vote, our founders believed that "the mob" couldn't be trusted and there needed to be a electoral escape hatch to make sure reasonable people were elected. With that said, what's the problem with people having ideas that seem crazy and baseless? Does it really harm you at all if someo…
> Does it really harm you at all if someone else believes 5G causes covid? And does it harm you enough to say that their speech should be limited rather than free? I would far rather restrict their right to vote than their right to speak. If they're sufficiently influential, that also means that everyone's vote who doesn't fall for their charm is worth just that much more.
I'm very opposed to limiting either, the US is already more restrictive with regards to both voting rights and speech than I'm comfortable with. I'd be very worried about gating voter rights to some kind of checklist of thought, removing Coting access from those deemed to be unworthy of casting a vote based on what they think or say.
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But again, who cares if someone else or a group of people think something you find to be crazy? If they act on it that's totally different, but we have laws for that already.
A single crazy in a sea of normalcy will be diluted. A congealed group of crazies, however, has political and social power.