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Social networks are no longer social

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Re: Social networks are no longer social

#181

Post by Asooka »

masonic wrote: post #170
reaperducer wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions of days when you were anonymous It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers. Then the scammers discovered the internet, and everyone had to dummy up about who they are…

Generally, people used "real" email addresses that bound them to their company or school (before the Hotmail etc. era).

Oh man, email. Fun story - I started using the internet around 2000, maybe 2001 and to me email was always a website. Like hotmail etc. The first time I installed Linux I was very confused why it wanted my email address and most importantly why the basic default configuration installed an email server. I'm not setting up a hotmail competitor, why is there an email server installed? It took me almost a decade before I found out that email used to be on your machine and it would simply accept email from anywhere. You used to be able to just connect to any email server and go "here, have some mail" and it would accept it - no questions asked, no authentication needed. Even knowing it was meant for university-to-university mail exchange originally, it still sounds completely insane. Then again, unsecured ftp used to also be a thing. To this day I have no idea what to do when I log into a Linux machine and see "You have mail in /var/spool/mail/". It probably doesn't matter anymore.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#182

Post by Asooka »

Terr_ wrote: post #161
dleslie wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't seem to me that 4chan has failed. https://www.rank2traffic.com/4chan.org

Failed at discourse != Failed at traffic

Let's not kid ourselves. 4chan was good for approximately 5 minutes one time in 2004.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#183

Post by r3bl »

joe_the_user wrote: post #133
pcurve wrote: post #4

The article mentions of days when you were anonymous, getting to know strangers through common interests and exchanging ideas. I do miss those early days. For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window once companies started pressuring people use their real identity, and that became the norm.

The article mentions of days when you were anonymous, getting to know strangers through common interests and exchanging ideas. I do miss those early days. I use Facebook for this 75-80% of the time. A few IRL friends communicate with my account but it's mostly about common interests with people spread across the world. I did this in various web boards before Facebook but Facebook is better, more people with my common…

> Hot tip, Facebook doesn't make much of an effort to enforce real names. A little, certainly but not much.

It's certainly easy to say that until you get requested for an ID, being locked out all your activities and friends until you compromise your privacy.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#184

Post by boulos »

Asooka wrote: post #181
masonic wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally, people used "real" email addresses that bound them to their company or school (before the Hotmail etc. era).

Oh man, email. Fun story - I started using the internet around 2000, maybe 2001 and to me email was always a website. Like hotmail etc. The first time I installed Linux I was very confused why it wanted my email address and most importantly why the basic default configuration installed an email server . I'm not setting up a hotmail competitor, why is there an email server installed? It took me almost a decade before…

Just run pine/mail/mutt or whatever you’d like! You can also just go fumbling around with your text editor of choice. The primary reason would be to figure out what program is attempting to send mail to your username, and go log it properly instead.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#185

Post by tivert »

gaius wrote: post #171
propogandist wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Threaten equifax and you disrupt the business model of an entire industry, the same one that's responsible for the economic collapse. Credit ratings from the 3 major providers are used by banks to assess credit worthlessness of personal loans. Naturally, the more data these firms have on people the better they can rate (perceived) risk. These 'data controllers' serve banks and corporations who make their billions on…

the same one that's responsible for the economic collapse. Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.

> the same one that's responsible for the economic collapse.

> Credit ratings of individuals (Equifax) are unrelated to credit ratings provided by companies such as Moody's for corporate and government bonds.

It depends on how you look at it. They'll all part of the larger financial/banking industry.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#186

Post by tivert »

rrebelo wrote: post #21

> Watching distant cousins fight about politics I've long been cautious to step into the WhatsApp hysteria going on here in Brazil. But the last (disgraceful) election here was the last straw. The level of stupidity in the memes from both sides was far beyond repulsive. A solution that is working so far: automatic regulation. I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on…

> I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on Brazilian partisan politics, using regular expressions.

How did you handle simple substitutions and noise like rethuglicans -> rethug1icans or rethuglicans -> re.thug.licans?

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#187

Post by PavlovsCat »

icelancer wrote: post #106
evrydayhustling wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a really good point and something an over-30 like yours truly would have an easy time missing even as it happened around us (my most meaningful groups are now distributed over WhatsApp, Slack, and good 'ol email). Happen to know any sources quantifying this phenomenon?

> Happen to know any sources quantifying this phenomenon? Perhaps the best answer you can get here is "no." That's exactly what the privacy advocates would want to hear, yet the phenomenon is very real. I'm in my mid-30s but almost all of my social networking with younger colleagues/friends is done via ephemeral group chats (Snapchat) and Signal. I keep a business Twitter and personal Facebook like everyone else, but…

It has nothing on the free spirited forums "we" had 20 years ago. How would random people find out about and get into private, encrypted groups? Not at all. It's not the same thing in any shape or form.

If anything, a generation gave up even wanting to have a public space and a spirit of tolerance, and retreated into purely private rooms, moderated by private tyrants. Ancient Greeks had a word for people who restrict themselves to the private, and aren't interested in public offices and affairs, which today is an insult -- while what it used to describe is viewed as desirable, something people brag about.

Many people gave up, they aren't even part of the discussion anymore. They cannot fathom what is under discussion, because they never had it. It's not that I'm not aware, it's that I weighed it, and found it too light.

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#188

Post by rrebelo »

tivert wrote: post #186
rrebelo wrote: post #21

> Watching distant cousins fight about politics I've long been cautious to step into the WhatsApp hysteria going on here in Brazil. But the last (disgraceful) election here was the last straw. The level of stupidity in the memes from both sides was far beyond repulsive. A solution that is working so far: automatic regulation. I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on…

> I created a Telegram group with a bot that censors the most common names and expressions on Brazilian partisan politics, using regular expressions. How did you handle simple substitutions and noise like rethug l icans -> rethug 1 icans or rethuglicans -> re.thug.licans?

Regular expressions do cover most of the basic cases.

It will not handle some of them. But I discovered that partisan politics follow a Pareto rule, of sorts: 80% of the talk is around a small set of words. If you remove the adequate 80%, what remains is very ineffective, grotesque and pathetic communication. It is not enough to get people excited or willing to fight.

The tricky parts is to keep changing the set of words and regular expressions. Particularly on the months before an election the terms to filter go through intense change. After that they remain very stable.

Edit: I am trying now to use the Levenshtein distance[1] algorithm to preemptively detect the tricks you describe, of people deliberately changing some word in order to fool the regular expressions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levenshtein_distance

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#189

Post by starchild_3001 »

taurath wrote: post #130
starchild_3001 wrote: post #129

The biggest benefit of social media over forums or email lists is ML-based ranking. You save a ton of time reading the most crucial, while skipping the rest. The platforms are addictive not because they're designed to be, but because they pick out the best and most interesting content! FB, YouTube etc represent a revolution about how content is created and consumed. You no longer need to browse through 10s of posts o…

> The platforms are addictive not because they're designed to be, but because they pick out the best and most interesting content! The best by the users interests or the best for the advertisers? I think ignoring the personal and societal effects of social media is something you do at your own peril.

As a broad response, let's just say not everything is perfect. These systems can be and are abused (by publishers, malicious actors). Yes, let's fix those.

But let's not overlook why these things have become popular in the first place (from a utility point of view). Google made the whole web searchable and digestable. Facebook made social & forum content much higher utility than before. YT did the same with billions of mostly-uninteresting videos.

Going back to an old style forum & email-list experience is a step backwards. Well, be my guest, do it if you like :) I won't.

See Reddit, Hackernews etc regarding how social cues can be used for ranking/curation. Yet, those platforms do a bare minimum (imo not quite enough). E.g. Google Feed is more engaging, interesting, and informative (in my experience).

Re: Social networks are no longer social

#190

Post by znpy »

reaperducer wrote: post #51
pcurve wrote: post #4

The article mentions of days when you were anonymous, getting to know strangers through common interests and exchanging ideas. I do miss those early days. For me, social network stopped being social as soon as reasonable assurance of anonymity when out the window once companies started pressuring people use their real identity, and that became the norm.

The article mentions of days when you were anonymous It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers. Then the scammers discovered the internet, and everyone had to dummy up about who they are…

> It's funny how in the early days of the internet, everyone was so open and honest about who they are that it was very common for their e-mail messages, Usenet posts, finger plans, etc... to have their real names, home and/or work addresses, and home and/or work phone numbers.

Not really. I mean, yes, on one hand, yes. On the other hand, places for open-topic discussions explicitly allowed fake names and nicknames.

The best timeframe on the internet I can remember was when everything you needed was a nickname of your choice and an email account somewhere.

If anything went wrong, you could just drop everything, get a new pair of nickname/address and start anew.

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