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I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I
by ori_b 10y ago
I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are something I'd rather not have popping up in my strongly Jewish grandmother's news feed.
I'd imagine most people have things like this, from innocuous things that might just get them teased at the office, like an obsessive interest in historical reenactment, to embarrassing things like health problems, to even mildly illegal things like enjoying weed.
Paradoxically, at the same time, the internet is getting more private. Because everything is tied to a real world id, and people don't want to expose everything about themselves online, things are moving to private forums. Things like closed facebook groups for friends, instant messaging, etc. Personal websites that someone put up and made open to the world out of their own interest are getting harder and harder to find. Blogs seem to have killed them, and now even the blogs are dying.
And it really is getting harder to be anonymous, as far as I can tell. Most major email providers really want some sort of information that ties your identity down, like a phone number. Same with a bunch of larger social networks. Forums seem to be dying slowly, and even there, often an email tied to a real phone number is needed.
- sverige 10y agoIt's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without surveillance cameras. Hell, I do that sometimes and I'm not even doing anything criminal.
- ori_b 10y agoThat's kind of missing the point. For casual communities, it's easier to just not post. I don't care enough about posting that awesome recipe for brussel sprouts with bacon lardons to go through the effort of setting up a custom domain so I can sign up for an anonymized facebook account so that I don't have to worry if it will show up in my family member's news feeds. I barely care enough to tweak facebook settings to keep it hidden. I also don't necessarily want to share who I am, where I work, what my other hobbies are, and so on to the world, which means that in the absence of a good anonymous forum implies that I'd prefer to keep my posts restricted to a more private audience, so I don't necessarily feel like posting with my facebook account. As the weakly anonymous communities are dying or shrinking, the separation of "who I am" and "what I do" makes it more difficult to share the interesting things I know publicly without exposing my real world identity. Since I don't care much, the post doesn't happen, and I move on with my day. And the internet is a little bit poorer for it. I suspect that lots of little dyanmics and frictions like this are what's killing the 'old way Americans used the internet'. It's theoretically possible to fight this. But for almost all casual content, the friction is just not worth overcoming.
- Supi-lee 10y agoBasically the internet is selecting for the people who are the opposite of you. Their voices, ideas and influence is being amplified. Unfortunate.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoIt doesn't need to be impossible for Big Brother to win. It just needs to be hard enough that it's not worthwhile for the vast majority of citizens. (And both of the things you mentioned are things that would take hours or days to hunt down and figure out for the average internet user. A privacy mechanism that isn't really, really easy to use is--in terms of the global internet and its citizens--worthless.)