Could not have said it better.
I feel like the author is a mind-reader and somehow read my mind.
I think I hate the internet
121–130 of 168 posts
Re: I think I hate the internet
#122Earlier 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.
It could be explained by the herd mentality. An angry man alone would probably not throw stones in the street with his face uncovered; But he would probably do so in a riot. Now, in social networks, is quite easy to simulate persons and have them starting a riot. Having a way to identify real persons could make this more difficult.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#123> 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…
Roads are neutral, social networks are not. Twitter is run by white supremacist openly trying to stroke racial violence. Facebook moderation favored pro-genocide side before the genocide. And it continues to favor outrage stroking groups.
I agree with "roads are neutral", but to be really precise, no they aren't; they are built by a polity at the expense of some other not-built roads, in a way that supports some types of traffic more than others. Compare Los Angeles to Utrecht.
The industrial age brought tech with enough downside to spark a reaction. Then there was a run of less-contentious tech. Recently, we've had a run of tech that looks to me like all downside for society. The conditions (neoliberalism) are still in place. People are not empowered by hf trading, web 2.0, social media. They could be, but the tech was co-opted. IMO, neither are they empowered, in the round, by crypto or AI.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#124Every 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…
Are you kind of implying that you can have a bank account without internet access in 2026? Extremely disingenuous
You certainly can. My parents don't use online banking or even ATMs.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#125Like how Maduro kidnapped from Venezuela affected RuneScapes[1], maybe our dislikes of internet today is just a reflection of the reality itself.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#126This Internet experience has convinced me that intelligent people need a safe place separate from everyone else. I grew up on BBSes as a kid, a sort of hateful misfit, and learned to write, code and made friends I still know today. Local message forums and meetups, and FIDOnet and other distributed message forums for the wider reach. It took effort to even learn what these were, much less use them. As a kid computer nerds weren't running billion-dollar companies yet (Gates being the first obvious one in the late 90s), were made fun of at school, and were even the butt of jokes (if you remember from those 80s American movies).
The early commercialisation of the Internet killed BBSes but there were web forums. But more people could access it, so more problems. More stupidity, noise.
The dumbing down has fully transpired. Violence, anger and salaciousness are not only the noise in the noise to signal ratio, they're the investor's friend - the engagement hook that we pattern everything after.
Instead of nerds we have plastic faces with big fake lips posing for pictures or recording selfie videos in public.
I have painful nostalgia when I see an old VGA screen with an old operating system or Sierra game on it, and I wish I could find through the slop where the nerds went.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I generally agree with this, but a problem I can't solve is: at what point does a "large group chat" become a "public channel"? If, hypothetically, someone is organizing a thousand people in balaclavas to turn up outside a business they want to intimidate, over Telegram or Signal, is that "private" or "public"? (also everyone in this thread saying deanonymisation does not on its own solve the problem is correct)
I draw the line on discoverability. Reddit? Public. Hacker news? Public. 4chan? Public. Facebook and Instagram are also public with a slight caveat, private accounts will be considered private, otherwise public. Even ye old public forums are considered public.
Discord and group chats will be considered private. Basically anything that requires an invitation / permission to view their content is considered private. To your example, I'm not sure if J6 members were organising publicly themselves. If the FBI wanted to, they could easily infiltrate these groups as an anonymous member themselves, so I don't see a contradiction there.
Legislatively, it means that platforms will be held responsible for their public content, which I think is fair. If there are too much content to moderate, it's up to them to find solutions. I hear rumours of a promising automating tool called LLMs.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#128I'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…
> Bluesky was a decent little community for a minute. I found it interesting before the mass-exodus from Twitter/X. Now it's mostly politics and negativity. Not much different in that regard from X, just at the other end of the political spectrum. X still has, for me at least, most of the relevant accounts.
The problem with X is it forces you to hand over personal information to sign up, and even then many have said it leaves them in a "we're having difficulties" loop.
It might be a fair trade if this exchange of info helped them eliminate bots, but it sounds like bots on X are more rampant than ever, so no thanks to that.
Re: I think I hate the internet
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I mean I do think regulatory capture is at least in part what's allowed corporations to conquer the web
Re: I think I hate the internet
#130I'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…
Your experience resonates.
This gives me a ray of hope, if a bold enough group of people are willing to give it a shot: