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I think I hate the internet

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Re: I think I hate the internet

#101

Post by mrhottakes »

beanjuiceII wrote: post #89
ryandvm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need legislation that requires all platforms to support a mandatory "algorithm opt out". News, social media, shopping, chatbots, everything - they all become far less predatory and addictive if there's no user stats driving the presentation. Sure your online experience would become boring and, horror of horrors, less profitable, but at least you wouldn't have to be googling anti-depressants in between your customi…

please no more legislation, especially for 'thing i dont like'

Yeah, looking around at society today it's obvious the main problem is the government trying too hard and passing too much legislation.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#102

Post by sneak »

rayiner wrote: post #92

Many folks don’t remember how glorious the Internet was in the late 1990s. That version of the Internet had 90% of the cool stuff, but didn’t follow you around everywhere.

That internet and almost all the people from it still exists.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#103

Post by stonogo »

BirAdam wrote: post #67

I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was. There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is…

> There has been a massive disintermediation of information,

How do you figure? Information is gatekept differently, but editorialized harder than ever before.

I also question whether "better optimized supply chains" is in fact a benefit. Optimizing a supply chain has meant just-in-time inventory etc; I'd argue an optimized supply chain is a fragile supply chain.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#104

Post by krapp »

willtemperley wrote: post #72

You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web. The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this. An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible. I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.

>The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this.

People are working on this: https://geminiprotocol.net/

And the fediverse and other decentralized protocols have yet to entirely succumb to the rot.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#105

Post by medstrom »

donatj wrote: post #83

I've been trying to come to terms with the modern internet just not being for me. It's honestly taken a bit of emotional processing, growing up a very lonely teen in the late 90s the internet was a haven and a lifeline. It's where I met a number of my current friends. It was my community. The modern internet and especially social media is just... bizarre. I open Facebook and it's all videos of body horror bullshit be…

I keep thinking of phpBB.

I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.

Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?

No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.

Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.

I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.

Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#106

Post by mrhottakes »

roenxi wrote: post #6

> The internet was about connection, but the way I see it, it’s become a great way for bad actors to... There seems to be a profound confusion somewhere in here that people come with an evil bit and we're going to toggle technology so that those people can't use it and everyone else can. Y'know, racists use cars to drive to their racist conventions or whatever. On publicly funded roads. Possibly with time freed up by…

Do you honestly think roads and the internet are similar? I don't think you've really thought that through.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#107

Post by mplanchard »

BirAdam wrote: post #67

I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was. There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is…

Is the implication here that it’s cheaper to build a house with lead, asbestos, and radium? I cannot see how those have any causal link to home prices, which seem to be much more heavily influenced by broader socioeconomic factors (area desirability, gentrification, housing supply, etc.)

Re: I think I hate the internet

#108

Post by ramesh31 »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #43

> He was a good coder ... Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php.

>"Counterpoint: Facebook was written in php."

...Which was a perfectly valid choice in 2005. It was that or Ruby, more or less. Java, ASP, and ColdFusion were a thing for enterprise, otherwise it was Perl CGI, Python, or some crazy custom C++ stuff.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#109

Post by krapp »

Steve16384 wrote: post #100
willtemperley wrote: post #72

You don't hate The Internet, you hate The Web. The Web can be forked and I don't know why people aren't working on this. An ad free, zuck-less ungoogle Web is possible. I don't like the current web either. I like The Internet though. I can get free satellite imagery of the world and tons of other cool stuff. This doesn't need to use The Web, except for some relatively simple and replaceable metadata channels.

What's to stop this nu-web going the same way?

Arguably having numerous decentralized, small and insular sub-networks hostile to change and growth makes them not worth the effort of corporations to co-opt and control.

The biggest problem with the web is that there is only one.

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