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Christ, we went from Information Wants To Be Free to Sharing Is Spamming in less than two decades. How naive we were back then, thinking that tech alone would s

Christ, we went from Information Wants To Be Free to Sharing Is Spamming in less than two decades. How naive we were back then, thinking that tech alone would suffice to bring us freedom.

fzzzy 9y ago
Information still wants to be free. It's just that most of it is garbage. It's always been that way, too, we just didn't notice it as much.
- DesiLurker 9y ago
  this, Just this morning I was thinking perhaps a startup can auto generate fake but interesting news using a 'Watson class' machine learning system. If we could saturate the internet with such 'real fake news' then perhaps there will be return to actually paying for news. the value we used to get from old media was the due diligence behind reporting. unfortunately with the rise of internet the anybody can aggregate thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users. the thing that I find rather insidious is news aggregators like FB or google dont use even a fraction of the revenue they siphoned off the old media to support anything remotely like journalism. hence the rise of fake news. That was my key take away from this election.
  - foodie_ 9y ago
    I'm not sure the primary value was due diligence. I think the value was more socially driven. You could ask anyone "did you see the front page story yesterday?" Much like you can talk about the weather and movies, newspapers were a way to connect and have a common experience.
    - ianamartin 9y ago
      Interesting point. I think I disagree, but if the primary value is that it was something to talk about, then it makes sense that it no longer has any value. Also, no one talks about the weather or movies anymore either. Because people don't talk anymore. So nothing has any value now. :(
  - FooHentai 9y ago
    >unfortunately with the rise of internet the anybody can aggregate thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users. Worse still, this reduced revenue for high-integrity high-overhead traditional news outlets, and led to reducing the quality of their journalism because they couldn't afford to maintain the same standards. So even the better news reporting institutions had to get worse to stay in the game.
    - gozur88 9y ago
      I have to assume the money men in the business know what they're doing, at least in the short term, but it seems like many of the moves they made to cut costs reduced or eliminated their core competency as a business. When I pick up a copy of the NYT I want to see hard news, not "lifestyle" crap about the hot new cocktails in New York bars or a piece weighing the advantages of a sous-vide machine. That kind of stuff I can get in more detail for free from blogs.
  - Trundle 9y ago
    I had a similar idea in that an easy to install pre made news site + content source could help kill off the undue respect people give an article simply for it being an article. Have it so in 5 minutes someone can have set up their own news site pre seeded with actual news, logo from a list, then all they have to do is buy a domain and write out their fake article. Instead of putting the ideas you pulled straight from your ass in to a Facebook/reddit/hn comment box, you could make them seem like a source and just link them instead. It'd be glorious. Fake news getting flung everywhere by everyone.
    - Larrikin 9y ago
      It'd be glorious until enough people start believing it's real, demanding retractions from legitimate outlets, then people killing other people based on a lie.
      - DesiLurker 9y ago
        thats the thing, let them believe it. there will be a transition period before it becomes common knowledge that the trust in a picture with caption & link is misplaced. you'll need real due diligence before I give you a slice of my attention.
      - ianamartin 9y ago
        People have been killing people over lies for a very long time. Fake news won't start any more of that.
    - DesiLurker 9y ago
      I like it. sort of like a a meme generator & fake email ID generator mixed together to produce credible news article. something thats not easily shrug-off-able as seeing an onion link.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users Wait what? I still find blogs pretty distinct from regular news, in that regular news are mostly bullshit and blogs tend to deliver actual information in a reasonable format.
    - sdwisely 9y ago
      They're both very flawed in different ways. Blogs have have plenty of incentive to be quick, but not correct. From time to time they have incentive to be incorrect too. An apology, retraction, etc is just more ad revenue at the end of the day.
      - wutbrodo 9y ago
        "Blogs" is a useless category to generalize about: it just describes a medium, and is on an axis entirely separate from content (even the NYT has blogs, for example). There are blogs I read that put far more effort into attempting to ensure that their analysis is correct than papers like the NYT. They don't have the resources and connections that the NYT does for hard-fact, "did this incident occur" checks, but they're far, far less likely IME to (e.g.) misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent a recently-published academic paper, pretty much regardless of the subject. On top of that, they're a lot more likely to "show their work" and their comment sections are a lot more likely to have credible rebuttals to their main claims (hell, a link to a counterargument I made in a comment was recently edited in to an article on one of the blogs I frequent). You'd think this would be a problem mainly for factoid-type, pop-science articles about space or wildlife, but the most egregious examples I can think of come from coverage of analyses in the social sciences. This is way more damaging, since people form their opinions on policy through the accumulation of their understanding of articles like these. I understand that journalists aren't necessarily any smarter than the rest of us when it comes to things out of their field, so there's some baseline level of inaccuracy you'd expect, but some of what you see out of papers like the NYT is just flat dishonesty. And I say that as someone who's a fan!
- Mathnerd314 9y ago
  It's not necessarily garbage, just redundant. The first ad for "enhancement" might actually be somewhat interesting. But the hundredth or the thousandth is a waste of bytes.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  I've long suspected that Web 3.0 will mark a return to valuing more curated content, genuine expertise, and slower-paced and probably more fully moderated discussion. The community-driven content of Web 2.0 has had a long run, and it surely isn't going anywhere. It's achieved some truly amazing things: who would have thought, even one generation ago, that today we'd have information sources like Wikipedia, or that they'd be as good as the best of them really are? However, Web 2.0 has also shown us the weaknesses of a system where all voices are equal regardless of knowledge or experience. It has proved surprisingly difficult to create and sustain self-moderating communities that function as meritocracies, both in terms of the accuracy of information or validity of advice, and in terms of the challenging legal and ethical questions when one possibly anonymous person's free speech butts up against the real and possibly serious consequences of what is said for someone else. That same Wikipedia has had entire long and well-established pages on subjects where the content was utter drivel for months or years at a time, because it was utter drivel that enough inexperienced people believed, and there was no effective mechanism or incentive for a real expert to set the record straight. It seems likely that many of these issues could be overcome if we combined the undoubted enthusiasm of the masses for having their say with a greater amount of input and influence for real experts and diligent moderators. However, that probably requires giving up a degree of the anonymity/pseudonymity we enjoy today, which does usefully allow for more honest and open discussions at times, so that credibility can be established with sufficient transparency to generate trust. It probably also requires people to actually pay real money to support the content or offset the running costs of discussion forums, so that a greater degree of expert contribution and/or moderation is actually viable without relying on ads, affiliate marketing schemes, or other secondary revenue sources that cloud the issue. That in turn may well require some form of either micropayments or syndication, and whoever cracks that one is probably the next Stripe.
  - anigbrowl 9y ago
    The Web has reached the end of its cycle, and is fundamentally limited by its own structural foundations. The post-web information environment is a client-driven hyperspherical sparsely connected directed acyclic graph whose gradual population will be the cryptographic proof of work yielding a meaningful currency whose exchange creates rather than apes value.
- LMYahooTFY 9y ago
  Well the ability for anyone to publish didn't come with a new universal baseline for education and knowledge. The notion of Eternal September always seemed a bit pompous, even if understandably so where some gaps really stretch the tolerances. Hate the Freshmen just to pay it forward.
z1mm32m4n 9y ago
Information still wants to be free. It's not free when Facebook controls it.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> Information Wants To Be Free As a legit inquiry, can someone explain this phrase to me? I've heard it mentioned tons over the years and have seen a bunch of different inconsistent interpretations people have applied. Which meaning of 'free' is being used? How is it's meaning reached from the phrase? I legit don't understand it.
- slededit 9y ago
  The idea was that the truth would come out and disseminate if the distribution channels weren't censored. It assumes everyone had a natural good faith search for truthful and accurate information.
  - Animats 9y ago
    The truth usually does come out, but finding it among all the junk news is hard.
  - dungle6 9y ago
    Lol I hadn't heard that interpretation. Personally it's too interpretive for me. Ive always accepted the tautological version -- similar to TANSTAAFL: Information wants to be free -- simply because the cost of duplicating and distributing information in digital form is basically 0.. all information is free. Not really speaking to the quality of said information and this is not as strong as what you have said -- it's useful because clearly policy makers and lay people often can't internalize this economic truth. Ie this is the same definition of information as in the phrase information theory.
    - slededit 9y ago
      I think this really ignores the difficult problem of disseminating information which was much more challenging before the internet. We weren't limited by how fast we were printing books but how hard it was to find information already printed. A book on its own is useless if nobody knows about it. The real idea here was that the internet would be a game changer. Not only would information be available immediately - but you could actually find it. When it became cheap to find "correct" information the idea was that would dominate. The implicit assumption was that people actually wanted correct, accurate and truthful information. In practice it turns out people prefer information that validates their opinions, regardless of accuracy.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
What do you mean? The first spam email was in 1978. Advertising and Spam keeps on evolving as all tech does.
wutbrodo 9y ago
> How naive we were back then, thinking that tech alone would suffice to bring us freedom. You've completely misunderstood what the phrase actually means. The notion of access to information doesn't imply access to a selected, curated subset of it: in fact it means quite the opposite. Access to a deluge of information unbarred by gatekeepers is precisely at the heart of the concept, in contrast to the highly-curated and high-barrier world of (e.g.) three broadcast networks, and thousand-dollar encyclopedias. Don't get me wrong: I certainly don't think that it's only the "dumb" that find handling the information deluge to be challenging. From the perspective of the individual's access to information, "Information Wants To Be Free" is still very much alive and well; it just requires a little more maturity than "tell me what to believe". Every single time I've heard someone complain about the fact that they see reliable sources say seemingly contradictory things about an issue, it's because the issue in reality is more complex than their oversimplified model would like it to be. Amazing access to information doesn't even remotely mean the same thing as "every issue is now magically simple enough that you don't have to put any effort into understanding it". FWIW, "Sharing is Spamming" is utter nonsense. If you put the time in to curate whose sharing you read, you won't end up with garbage in your proverbial in-box.

Christ, we went from Information Wants To Be Free to Sharing Is Spamming in less than two decades. How naive we were back then, thinking that tech alone would suffice to bring us freedom.

fzzzy 9y ago

Information still wants to be free. It's just that most of it is garbage. It's always been that way, too, we just didn't notice it as much.

DesiLurker 9y ago
this, Just this morning I was thinking perhaps a startup can auto generate fake but interesting news using a 'Watson class' machine learning system. If we could saturate the internet with such 'real fake news' then perhaps there will be return to actually paying for news. the value we used to get from old media was the due diligence behind reporting. unfortunately with the rise of internet the anybody can aggregate thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users. the thing that I find rather insidious is news aggregators like FB or google dont use even a fraction of the revenue they siphoned off the old media to support anything remotely like journalism. hence the rise of fake news. That was my key take away from this election.
- foodie_ 9y ago
  I'm not sure the primary value was due diligence. I think the value was more socially driven. You could ask anyone "did you see the front page story yesterday?" Much like you can talk about the weather and movies, newspapers were a way to connect and have a common experience.
  - ianamartin 9y ago
    Interesting point. I think I disagree, but if the primary value is that it was something to talk about, then it makes sense that it no longer has any value. Also, no one talks about the weather or movies anymore either. Because people don't talk anymore. So nothing has any value now. :(
- FooHentai 9y ago
  >unfortunately with the rise of internet the anybody can aggregate thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users. Worse still, this reduced revenue for high-integrity high-overhead traditional news outlets, and led to reducing the quality of their journalism because they couldn't afford to maintain the same standards. So even the better news reporting institutions had to get worse to stay in the game.
  - gozur88 9y ago
    I have to assume the money men in the business know what they're doing, at least in the short term, but it seems like many of the moves they made to cut costs reduced or eliminated their core competency as a business. When I pick up a copy of the NYT I want to see hard news, not "lifestyle" crap about the hot new cocktails in New York bars or a piece weighing the advantages of a sous-vide machine. That kind of stuff I can get in more detail for free from blogs.
- Trundle 9y ago
  I had a similar idea in that an easy to install pre made news site + content source could help kill off the undue respect people give an article simply for it being an article. Have it so in 5 minutes someone can have set up their own news site pre seeded with actual news, logo from a list, then all they have to do is buy a domain and write out their fake article. Instead of putting the ideas you pulled straight from your ass in to a Facebook/reddit/hn comment box, you could make them seem like a source and just link them instead. It'd be glorious. Fake news getting flung everywhere by everyone.
  - Larrikin 9y ago
    It'd be glorious until enough people start believing it's real, demanding retractions from legitimate outlets, then people killing other people based on a lie.
    - DesiLurker 9y ago
      thats the thing, let them believe it. there will be a transition period before it becomes common knowledge that the trust in a picture with caption & link is misplaced. you'll need real due diligence before I give you a slice of my attention.
    - ianamartin 9y ago
      People have been killing people over lies for a very long time. Fake news won't start any more of that.
  - DesiLurker 9y ago
    I like it. sort of like a a meme generator & fake email ID generator mixed together to produce credible news article. something thats not easily shrug-off-able as seeing an onion link.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > thereby the difference between blogs and nytimes is blurred to end users Wait what? I still find blogs pretty distinct from regular news, in that regular news are mostly bullshit and blogs tend to deliver actual information in a reasonable format.
  - sdwisely 9y ago
    They're both very flawed in different ways. Blogs have have plenty of incentive to be quick, but not correct. From time to time they have incentive to be incorrect too. An apology, retraction, etc is just more ad revenue at the end of the day.
    - wutbrodo 9y ago
      "Blogs" is a useless category to generalize about: it just describes a medium, and is on an axis entirely separate from content (even the NYT has blogs, for example). There are blogs I read that put far more effort into attempting to ensure that their analysis is correct than papers like the NYT. They don't have the resources and connections that the NYT does for hard-fact, "did this incident occur" checks, but they're far, far less likely IME to (e.g.) misunderstand or intentionally misrepresent a recently-published academic paper, pretty much regardless of the subject. On top of that, they're a lot more likely to "show their work" and their comment sections are a lot more likely to have credible rebuttals to their main claims (hell, a link to a counterargument I made in a comment was recently edited in to an article on one of the blogs I frequent). You'd think this would be a problem mainly for factoid-type, pop-science articles about space or wildlife, but the most egregious examples I can think of come from coverage of analyses in the social sciences. This is way more damaging, since people form their opinions on policy through the accumulation of their understanding of articles like these. I understand that journalists aren't necessarily any smarter than the rest of us when it comes to things out of their field, so there's some baseline level of inaccuracy you'd expect, but some of what you see out of papers like the NYT is just flat dishonesty. And I say that as someone who's a fan!
Mathnerd314 9y ago
It's not necessarily garbage, just redundant. The first ad for "enhancement" might actually be somewhat interesting. But the hundredth or the thousandth is a waste of bytes.
Silhouette 9y ago
I've long suspected that Web 3.0 will mark a return to valuing more curated content, genuine expertise, and slower-paced and probably more fully moderated discussion. The community-driven content of Web 2.0 has had a long run, and it surely isn't going anywhere. It's achieved some truly amazing things: who would have thought, even one generation ago, that today we'd have information sources like Wikipedia, or that they'd be as good as the best of them really are? However, Web 2.0 has also shown us the weaknesses of a system where all voices are equal regardless of knowledge or experience. It has proved surprisingly difficult to create and sustain self-moderating communities that function as meritocracies, both in terms of the accuracy of information or validity of advice, and in terms of the challenging legal and ethical questions when one possibly anonymous person's free speech butts up against the real and possibly serious consequences of what is said for someone else. That same Wikipedia has had entire long and well-established pages on subjects where the content was utter drivel for months or years at a time, because it was utter drivel that enough inexperienced people believed, and there was no effective mechanism or incentive for a real expert to set the record straight. It seems likely that many of these issues could be overcome if we combined the undoubted enthusiasm of the masses for having their say with a greater amount of input and influence for real experts and diligent moderators. However, that probably requires giving up a degree of the anonymity/pseudonymity we enjoy today, which does usefully allow for more honest and open discussions at times, so that credibility can be established with sufficient transparency to generate trust. It probably also requires people to actually pay real money to support the content or offset the running costs of discussion forums, so that a greater degree of expert contribution and/or moderation is actually viable without relying on ads, affiliate marketing schemes, or other secondary revenue sources that cloud the issue. That in turn may well require some form of either micropayments or syndication, and whoever cracks that one is probably the next Stripe.
- anigbrowl 9y ago
  The Web has reached the end of its cycle, and is fundamentally limited by its own structural foundations. The post-web information environment is a client-driven hyperspherical sparsely connected directed acyclic graph whose gradual population will be the cryptographic proof of work yielding a meaningful currency whose exchange creates rather than apes value.
LMYahooTFY 9y ago
Well the ability for anyone to publish didn't come with a new universal baseline for education and knowledge. The notion of Eternal September always seemed a bit pompous, even if understandably so where some gaps really stretch the tolerances. Hate the Freshmen just to pay it forward.

z1mm32m4n 9y ago

Information still wants to be free. It's not free when Facebook controls it.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

BoiledCabbage 9y ago

> Information Wants To Be Free As a legit inquiry, can someone explain this phrase to me? I've heard it mentioned tons over the years and have seen a bunch of different inconsistent interpretations people have applied. Which meaning of 'free' is being used? How is it's meaning reached from the phrase? I legit don't understand it.

slededit 9y ago
The idea was that the truth would come out and disseminate if the distribution channels weren't censored. It assumes everyone had a natural good faith search for truthful and accurate information.
- Animats 9y ago
  The truth usually does come out, but finding it among all the junk news is hard.
- dungle6 9y ago
  Lol I hadn't heard that interpretation. Personally it's too interpretive for me. Ive always accepted the tautological version -- similar to TANSTAAFL: Information wants to be free -- simply because the cost of duplicating and distributing information in digital form is basically 0.. all information is free. Not really speaking to the quality of said information and this is not as strong as what you have said -- it's useful because clearly policy makers and lay people often can't internalize this economic truth. Ie this is the same definition of information as in the phrase information theory.
  - slededit 9y ago
    I think this really ignores the difficult problem of disseminating information which was much more challenging before the internet. We weren't limited by how fast we were printing books but how hard it was to find information already printed. A book on its own is useless if nobody knows about it. The real idea here was that the internet would be a game changer. Not only would information be available immediately - but you could actually find it. When it became cheap to find "correct" information the idea was that would dominate. The implicit assumption was that people actually wanted correct, accurate and truthful information. In practice it turns out people prefer information that validates their opinions, regardless of accuracy.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

What do you mean? The first spam email was in 1978. Advertising and Spam keeps on evolving as all tech does.

wutbrodo 9y ago

> How naive we were back then, thinking that tech alone would suffice to bring us freedom. You've completely misunderstood what the phrase actually means. The notion of access to information doesn't imply access to a selected, curated subset of it: in fact it means quite the opposite. Access to a deluge of information unbarred by gatekeepers is precisely at the heart of the concept, in contrast to the highly-curated and high-barrier world of (e.g.) three broadcast networks, and thousand-dollar encyclopedias. Don't get me wrong: I certainly don't think that it's only the "dumb" that find handling the information deluge to be challenging. From the perspective of the individual's access to information, "Information Wants To Be Free" is still very much alive and well; it just requires a little more maturity than "tell me what to believe". Every single time I've heard someone complain about the fact that they see reliable sources say seemingly contradictory things about an issue, it's because the issue in reality is more complex than their oversimplified model would like it to be. Amazing access to information doesn't even remotely mean the same thing as "every issue is now magically simple enough that you don't have to put any effort into understanding it". FWIW, "Sharing is Spamming" is utter nonsense. If you put the time in to curate whose sharing you read, you won't end up with garbage in your proverbial in-box.