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The internet is already over (2022)

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Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#241

Post by archagon »

_heimdall wrote: post #240
archagon wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A single crazy in a sea of normalcy will be diluted. A congealed group of crazies, however, has political and social power.

I get that crazy ideas can spread, but what is the actual concern? Are you worried about people believing the ideas, or people acting on them? If the latter, are you worried about them acting in ways that aren't already illegal?

One recent example is QAnon and its popularity throughout the Republican party, all the way up to the former president. Once a crazy idea reaches critical mass and gains political power, legality becomes irrelevant. Nazism was similarly insane and conspiratorial, and we all know what happened there.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#242

Post by nooormal »

JohnFen wrote: post #225
nooormal wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's true that the internet was already well down that road in 1999, but it has become much worse since then. I'm really comparing it to internet earlier than that. It was about 2000 when I started considering the internet as effectively dead in terms of being able to provide the value I used to get from it. But "more hostile" includes not only advertising and tone, but spying, overtly hostile actors such as crackers…

Interesting. My frame of reference for the internet started in 1998, after "eternal september" and the earlier culture. Which makes me curious about baseline expectations.

I agree many aspects are growing... overtly bad. I think LLMs are well on their way to rendering the mainstream internet, search, and social media effectively worthless. The signal to noise ratio is unfixable.

I still get value from my habits, which haven't changed for decades: niche forums, personal websites, blogs, podcasts, youtube. I would be satisfied as long as those remained more or less intact, the rest can go. Requires a lot of curation though.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#243

Post by suzzer99 »

InSteady wrote: post #197
suzzer99 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I just avoid those threads but stick to the science, history and programming threads.

Same. We have simply learned to filter the noise. It helps around here that the noise takes on a similar and easily recognizable form in most cases.

What I like is that there's always someone on here who's a legit expert on any subject imaginable. Like someone can post a pic of an obscure tape drive from the 60s and almost instantly someone can tell you all about it.

Or a rigorous back and forth on the horse-riding tribes who spawned the Indo-European languages.

Or people can put in context some outlandish quantum computing headline in a way that you'd never get from the actual article.

That stuff is valuable.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#244

Post by nickdothutton »

weitendorf wrote: post #129
nickdothutton wrote: post #77

We got the Internet that advertising built. This was not how we (well some of us early 90s and before) users assumed it would pan out. It has been my experience that private Internet communities (groups, forums, messaging chats) are where the quality discussion happens these days. Away from the advertising and the controversy seeking (and anti-tech) mainstream media reporters.

Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web): that it would be open and really big. It was supposed to be a place where some kid in rural Africa with only 8 years of schooling could learn how to be a software developer, or where people could naturally find and join communities too small to have a local presence (eg people really into collecting v…

> Small private communities are contrary to some of the most important, biggest promises of the Internet (and the web)

I fully agree with you there. This is why I remarked on the private (or perhaps better said, semi-private) nature of forums/chats I use with high SnR today. I’m disappointed it has gone this way, but then the 90s was a long time ago now and I was certainly more naive then.

To draw an analogy, I think distance/privacy brings its own benefits. There’s a reason the corporate giants of the 50s, 60s, and 70s put their research campus away from the main HQ centre of gravity.

In the late 80s/early-90s, it was quite a “hike” to get to the Internet. Either you were at University or as in my case, you had to get modem, cable, KA9Q, terminal emulator, Kermit, rz/sz, etc working together to reach it. Even when browsers became a thing, you may have needed to compile one, or get Winsock working if on a Pee Cee.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#245

Post by imiric »

woooooo wrote: post #229
imiric wrote: post #151

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…

> romanticized platitude of the 90s. I'm staying in romantic land, it beats the heck out of the government moderating which information I see for my own good.

Ignoring the problems of global interconnectedness doesn't make them go away. Information can be weaponized and used against you in ways that are difficult to detect and prevent. We know that propaganda, like advertising, is highly effective, and the internet is the best medium we've invented yet for broadcasting it. At what point do you prioritize issues of national security that threaten your society and way of life, over your perceived freedom to consume funny memes and dancing videos? It's increasingly clear that an unrestricted internet carries existential risks, but most people also wouldn't want to live under totalitarianism either. So there's a delicate line that "democratic" governments need to walk to ensure their subsistence, and it's on us to voice how far we're willing to sacrifice some of the "freedoms" we're used to.

Needless to say, it's going to be a bumpy ride until we figure this out.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#246

Post by Karrot_Kream »

JohnFen wrote: post #225
nooormal wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's true that the internet was already well down that road in 1999, but it has become much worse since then. I'm really comparing it to internet earlier than that. It was about 2000 when I started considering the internet as effectively dead in terms of being able to provide the value I used to get from it. But "more hostile" includes not only advertising and tone, but spying, overtly hostile actors such as crackers…

Wait do folks not remember the "I get to tell my wife 'sudo make me a sandwich'" jokes on Freenode into the early 2000s? "Pool is closed due to AIDS" from Habbo Hotel?

I think this "genteel internet" that came pre-Web was much shorter lived than the periods after it. It reminds me of crypto where the initial halcyon period of Bitcoin seemed full of hope but once the technology had to scale it just couldn't keep its initial values due to both technological and social issues.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#247

Post by stg24 »

The invention of the printing press enabled people of relatively modest means to mass distribute their message through pamphlets. Over the following centuries, that gave us all kinds of innovations and revolutions, like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Some said things that needed to be said, but in many cases, successful pamphleteers didn't feel a need to be fair or accurate.

As the centuries went on, many people decided that the time it took to read a pamphlet was almost always worth more than what they were getting out of it. So, we got book publishers and newspaper proprietors whose key value added was their guarantee that what they were publishing met a minimum standard of value, and people were willing to pay for that because it was better value than reading self-published books or pamphlets, even when free.

If the mainstream Internet follows the same path, it might come to have more in common with MSN of 1996 than with Facebook of twenty years later.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#248

Post by api »

chipsrafferty wrote: post #190
api wrote: post #15

This person is just, like many others, mistaking the death of public social media and the open web for the death of being online. All the interesting activity has retreated to Discord, Slack, Telegram, Mastodon, Signal, private and niche boards, game chats, etc. This stuff is all taking place in private rooms and small silos. If you aren't in them, you don't see it. Reddit still has a bit of a pulse but is probably o…

The public internet IS the internet

The Internet is TCP/IP, BGP, and other core protocols and the physical wires that carry them.

Public wide open free for all space are a major use case but they aren't a necessity and they may not survive the spam tsunami of LLMs and troll farms.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#249

Post by _heimdall »

archagon wrote: post #241
_heimdall wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get that crazy ideas can spread, but what is the actual concern? Are you worried about people believing the ideas, or people acting on them? If the latter, are you worried about them acting in ways that aren't already illegal?

One recent example is QAnon and its popularity throughout the Republican party, all the way up to the former president. Once a crazy idea reaches critical mass and gains political power, legality becomes irrelevant. Nazism was similarly insane and conspiratorial, and we all know what happened there.

The Nazi Party wasn't particularly popular in Germany until the great depression, but I've never seen it described as having been viewed as insane or conspiratorial by Germans of the time.

Regardless of the often overused WWII analogies, how would banning voter rights work in your example of QAnon and the Republican Party? Would you want to see anyone believing QAnon conspiracies banned from voting, even if you are correct that the ideology has taken over much of the Republican Party? I'm not sure that banning most voters in one of two parties we have would go over well, nor would it leave us with a democracy or much of an election process.

Re: The internet is already over (2022)

#250

Post by wruza »

account42 wrote: post #203
daelon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Removing it from your watch history might be more effective than disliking.

Even more effective is not using Youtube or similar algorithmic feeds for content discovery.

Simply not using it doesn’t help, ime. So what to use instead?
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