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I think I hate the internet

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Re: I think I hate the internet

#111

Post by amanaplanacanal »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #44
Gareth321 wrote: post #22

I'm having a real existential crisis over the internet and technology. On the one hand, LLMs are allowing me to build and explore and learn more than I have ever been able to do before. I'm a kid in a candy store. On the other hand, I really hate what social media has become. I'm addicted to Reddit and I hate it. I hate the toxicity of the community. I hate the rage algorithms. I hate the brain rot content. The rest…

I'm with you. But Reddit has become so increasingly shit that it's easy to shove off from now. (You should try to do it too.)

I still use Reddit, but only see niche hobbyist subreddits for things I'm interested in. It's not bad if you use it that way.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#112

Post by vaylian »

mrweasel wrote: post #28
pjc50 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cars Good example: cars come with a tracking identifier (license plate), tied to a responsible individual, who is subject to a test, and whose permission to use it can be revoked if they abuse it badly enough.

While there are more trolls and bots on Facebook than real users, but many of those real users have no issue using their real name and picture while excepting awful behaviour. I'm not sure that adding an identifier is really going to help that much.

Also: Good users can be more easily harassed, because they use their real name.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#113

Post by card_zero »

ryandvm wrote: post #88
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…

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…

This was announced three days ago in Australia, the world's ban lab. Or at least the upcoming proposal of draft legislation was announced.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#114

Post by monomial »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #40
hypfer wrote: post #35

The global internet is - effectively - over. It will eventually also officially be declared as such, but it might be a while until we see that. Mark and his kind killed it, but, to be fair, it wasn't exactly hard to kill something that consisted exclusively of hopes, dreams, optimism and duct tape. It was a nice historical anomaly, and I am glad to have been gifted the privilege of growing up in that period; even tho…

And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up ). It's perhaps why I loathe it so much. For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through P…

> I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years

This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?

Re: I think I hate the internet

#115

Post by willtemperley »

krapp wrote: post #104
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.

I didn’t know about Gemini protocol, thanks. Seems to have traction.

Inadvertently, Cunningham’s law helps me out.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#116

Post by JKCalhoun »

monomial wrote: post #114
JKCalhoun wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm glad to have been gifted the privilege of having grown up before the internet (well, define growing up ). It's perhaps why I loathe it so much. For a decade now I have been scraping what I think I'll miss when either it's gone or I'm out in some remote place, living in my van, with no online connectivity. (I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through P…

> I have enough electronics hobbyist magazines from the past several decades to keep me thumbing through PDFs for years This sounds great. What magazines do you recommend?

You could do a lot worse than starting with Popular Electronics.

Unless you have a lot of antiquated components on hand, probably a good idea to work in reverse, chronologically.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#117

Post by vaylian »

fyredge wrote: post #58
raincole wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's why we should deanonymizing the internet. Everyone should need a government-issued license to access websites. That's exactly what the modern society needs. (in case it's not super obvious, /s)

But why not? I want to make the distinction on public and private speech. In the physical world, no one should ever have their private speech scrutinized, that's why there are laws banning covert recording. But in public, speech is very much moderated. We don't allow hate speech and we don't allow harassment of others. Social media is a public platform. We can't enforce moderation if we can't identify the abuser, the…

The internet would be a lot poorer, if all users had to be identified. I really appreciate it when people tell their personal stories and talk about how they have overcome crises. Anonymity empowers people to help others by sharing life lessons. Those same life lessons would be very harmful for the reputation of the internet user, if they had to be posted with the user's real name.

Not everyone has a life that is all sunshine. Not every use of anonymity is criminal or unethical.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#118

Post by rayiner »

sneak wrote: post #102
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.

Yes, the problem is the 99% of the other people and stuff that got added.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#119

Post by mancerayder »

mexicocitinluez wrote: post #80
arjie wrote: post #16

Every time people use costs I really wonder what’s going on. My wife still uses an iPhone 13 and life for her is not particularly different from my iPhone 16. You don’t have to do any of this stuff: > I have to service and finance a £600 phone, pay a monthly contract and subscription to Apple, I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable No one is going to connect you to a network fro…

> I then have to install an adblocker because otherwise sites are just unusable I've been raw-dogging the internet for years now and have had very little issues. Sure, some sites have ads. But if they don't generate revenue from those ads, then I'd expect those sites to no longer exist. It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I…

>It's a level of entitlement that's insane to me. If someone is hosting their own blog and use ads to help offset that, why should I be able to get their content for free AND cost them money for the traffic?

It's not necessarily entitlement for everyone - from a cognitive point of view, some people find it stressful or painful to maintain concentration on written paragraphs when there's flashing, bouncing, colorful stuff just an inch over on the side. What about a video that jumps over the text with a tiny X that I need to concentrate just to find (the X has no border, either). I'll tolerate ads in a newspaper. But not like this.

Re: I think I hate the internet

#120

Post by zanellato19 »

sneak wrote: post #102
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.

They are hidden behind the enormous mass of bullshit, so its much harder to find. I keep trying to find new blogs to follow and I find it very hard to do so. HN is basically the last place I can find it.
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