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Being Raised by the Internet

jimmyhmiller.github.io

231–240 of 331 posts

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#231
post #176
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are" But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.

People were running adsense and Amazon affilates in 2004. I visited many websites who would let you spin a wheel and send you a check if you won. Browsers would pay you to surf. Money was a big factor and you would have to go pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it. Geocities had ads. Punch the monkey was everywhere.

Google was, ironically, a reaction to how heavily ad-laden Altavista was.

Russ Alberry's famous rant about spam ruining USENET was 1998: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html and should be required reading for anyone trying to build a decentralized communication system.

> pre dot.com or the bbs world to find it

That was indeed where the good stuff was (and some of the bad stuff; BBS culture could be flamey and cliquey as well as welcoming). It was so good that an entire generation of people keep trying to build it over and over again, such as bluesky, mastodon, and the deceased cohost.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#232

https://xkcd.com/1311/ "The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricty, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will left to do unaidad will be to make love." Mrs. John Lane, The fortnightly 1905

I guess 'make love' was not a eupheism for sex in that time?

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#233
post #127
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many have definitely been motivated by the wish to share information. But there also wasn't much of an alternative. If you wanted to actively learn something, get someone else to use it, or get them to share what they knew, you almost had to interact with others. Which doesn't mean there wasn't a genuine want to help others. But it was also wanting what you shared to become better. Something that was a direct consequ…

i mean, you could totally solve a problem yourself and not write it up. i did that lots of times too! it'll be interesting to see what happens with llms and things like stack exchange

LLMs kill stackexchange and all of the wonderful gift economy, because they replace humans in the loop with uncanny humanoids with whom it is impossible by their nature to have a real connection.

I think the next generation of popular counterculture service is going to be one which goes to extreme lengths to verify that the participants are authentic humans.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Servers are overly friendly and will interrupt conversations to ask if the food is up to standard, etc. The median American in any restaurant with chairs not bolted to the floor can be assumed to operate on roughly the level of a marginally clever, but ill-parented and intemperate, four- or five-year-old child. Even nice places have to deal with this, because neither the child nor the American recognizes any such d…

I'll take even the worst, unkempt dining experience at a deep south waffle house over the treatment that europoor Parisians give to those who don't speak perfect french at even high end restaurants in the heart of Paris. Also, foie gras, traditional veal, and many other European delicacies are disgusting (ethically). Coincidental, even the ghettos of Baltimore/Detroit likely have a higher GDP per capita than most of…

Awful lot of eurohate for someone posting with a German username.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#235

The author seems about a decade younger than me and "raised" isn't the word I would use for myself, but I doubt I would have made it if not for the friends I made and the things I learned that way. The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their…

> People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity.

Having fell hook, line, and sinker to the conceited and holier-than-thou notion that (progressive) people have been enlightened beyond assuming things such as gender or shared lived experience or even race, I can corroborate the claim that silence is the winning move here. Unfortunately as others have noted downthread there are many who like to, and will insist upon, prying in this post-privacy era of the Internet.

People like to pat themselves on the back for having been educated beyond making such assumptions; in reality they still have the blinders on and are still constrained by the tunnel vision that their own upbringing has imposed, not even capable of comprehending that other ways of growing up and living can even exist, and presuppose that everyone visited the same waypoints in life at the same time and in the same order. The framing of one who has grown up in privilege is fundamentally different from one who struggled through adversity; si duo idem faciunt, non est idem.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't even unreasonable as a cultural norm, although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work." The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over- asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one di…

I once heard, in a different century, that the "modal restaurant script" differed between the US and the UK in that in the former, the waitstaff asks the diners a bunch of (to a cultural outsider) overly prying questions, while in the latter, the diners ask them of the waitstaff. Still true? Never was?

UK: the diners aren't asking questions of the waitstaff unless things are very quiet, nor are the waitstaff asking you either. You might have a bit of "where have you come from today" in the more rural pub destinations. Tipping culture is basically "high end only" or a service charge sneaking onto the bill for larger groups.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#237

As someone of the younger generation, I think "raised by the internet" these days is extremely toxic and non-productive not at all what the author here is talking about in this lovely post. When someone says "I was raised by the internet", I immediately think: social media addiction, 4chan and other online obscenities. But this is completely based on my own personal experience. My point here is not related to this lo…

I hate that this comment is at the top of the page - that may be what you think but even if those exact sites, the chans, are the places a young person is spending their time that doesn't mean it's a problem necessarily. I'm an adult and I spend about 80% of my time in front of screen and so do all of you. I'm reminded of a Bible verse something about a log in your eye. That's what this is.

What's on the screen matters.

Or maybe it doesn't so much. Matthew 15:17 says that it's what comes out of your mouth that matters, and by extension your posting. Jesus is watching your 4chan posts.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#238
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, not certain about wait staff. I’m certain that barbers do it everywhere I’ve ever been though.

Historically, in the United States, the barbershop was a meeting place. It was a place you went to talk and relax. It's weird in the modern society of fast cuts and what not. But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their exper…

After a tip from hispanophone colleagues in California, I started going to their hairdresser: it was Monday only, $5 or $10 instead of $30, and that was because the girls only took 5 or 10 minutes instead of 45. That was when I learned that the traditional barbershop package consisted of, say $10 worth of haircutting and $20 worth of rag chewing.

> barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people.

There's someone on staff at my local grocery who once told me she likes working the register because of the human contact, so whenever she's there and there isn't already a line I head for the register instead of the self-checks.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red flags galore. You should divorce immediately. Not the asshole. I do fear, in the long term, what happens to those chat logs? Surely they will be used for training later on, and being anonymous doesn't always work out. Will the viewer be more AI bots? Human employees? Law enforcement? A dump on 4chan?

One of the things that bit me is one of those anti-system videos where they tell you not to speak to police or whatever. Turns out it's better just to say "hi officer, yes officer, no officer" than spending the night in jail for absolutely no reason other than "the internet taught me how to react to police answering questions." A more harmless example is when I read that the best way to clean cooking oil spills was t…

I got rid of a fine but just being nice, acknowledging my mistake to the officer and apologizing without the intention of getting away without my well deserved fine.

Re: Being Raised by the Internet

#240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historically, in the United States, the barbershop was a meeting place. It was a place you went to talk and relax. It's weird in the modern society of fast cuts and what not. But barbers tend to go into that business because they like talking to people. And you're right, every barber I've ever had has pried into my life. But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their exper…

> But I've also been more willing to share life experiences with barbers, and listen to their experiences than any other profession. Not sure why. It is like going out for a smoke on a party to talk with some prospect partner. Having an excuse to talk other than talking makes it easier. You are not flirting. You are smoking.

I hadn't understood the social power of smoke breaks until my welding instructor admitted he had been convinced for the first week or two of class that I was a tweaker because, given a bunch of rods to weld, I'd disappear into a booth and not come out again until I'd welded them all[0], no matter how many smoke breaks the other students had taken in the meantime.

It's a pity that when we realised the cancer sticks[1] aren't so healthy, we just got rid of them instead of trying to replace them with an activity that also allows colleagues to down tools and socialise for a well-determined short time.

(in the Old Country, anyway: over here, many businesses have a coffee break/round of snacks at ~9 and ~16)

[0] apparently one of the prereqs of becoming a welding instructor is knowing all the places in a booth lazier students will attempt to hide their unwelded rods

[1] see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41318314

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