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I don’t think the internet is the problem, it’s the centralisation and focus on dopamine addiction. I mean, the internet used to be a place where people shared

I don’t think the internet is the problem, it’s the centralisation and focus on dopamine addiction. I mean, the internet used to be a place where people shared deep meaningful content that interested them. Sure, your rock collection or biology blog on the different frog species of some random island probably aren’t interesting to most people, but the effort spent on those digital journals and the insights they provided is the internet at its best. Social media on the other hand is the internet at its worst. What value can you ever have within the limited confines of a twitter chat? And what value does the ability for billions of anonymous people commenting and/or liking really add to anything? I’ve been around since before eternal September, so I know it can be valuable, but that was probably the last time it was. I think reddit speaks volumes of the status of social media these days. Almost everywhere you go, it feels like strangers waste their time trying to push whatever political agenda they have, and it works on the internet, because in the internet you don’t notice the people who ignore you and simply walk away. You’re only ever confronted by the people who respond. I’ve noticed that over time, this simple fact destroys anonymous social media. I say anonymous but I probably should say strangers instead, because Facebook is just as bad. I’ve removed friends on Facebook that where alt-right, just like I’ve cut them out of my life because I didn’t want to debate whether holocaust was real every time I saw them, so these people certainly noticed the impact of their opinions, but all the thousands of hateful bastards and trolls who post nonsense on the few history groups I follow might as well be anonymous and will never know that I disprove of them. Because I’m not going to waste my time on them, I’ll just walk away. It’s been a while since I’ve even been to reddit. I’ve had wonderful conversations on there, but these days you can barely make it three posts into something before it’s about some crackpot political issue. Just look at /r/technology, it used to be a slow version of HN that also featured arstechica articles, now it’s a political hellhole, and it’s getting worse, probably because I’m not the only person leaving. I’m not sure what can be done though. Censorship isn’t a great option, but I have to agree with the NYT that it’s not working out great right now. More than a 100 people died of the measles in Europe this year because a bunch of fools got together on the internet and decided vaccines were bad, and that’s just the start of it. I doubt we’ll really succeed though, I fully expect a lot of the less regulated countries to go full cyberpunk dystopia in the next 25 years, and I think it’ll give a huge advantage to the pro-censorship countries who don’t have to deal with the nonsense, but they’ll fit right into the cyberpunk dystopia, won’t they?

cm2187 8y ago
It’s a bit of an idealistic view of early internet. Trolling came pretty much as soon as IRC was online. And early internet was probably reflecting a subset of the population of early adopters, academics and engineers who did not reflect the general population. The population has a distribution of characters, most are good people, some are angry and heinous. The internet is no better or worse than the population who uses it. These calls to censor and control aren’t about the technology, they are calls to censor and control what people tell each others. I think every time we are considering a new rule for the internet we should consider what is the physical world equivalent of that rule, where we have wealth of experience and history to assess whether it is a good idea. Tracking your browsing? It’s like having to show your ID everytime you buy a newspaper for the state to monitor what you read. Scan emails and chats to monitor extreme groups? It’s like bugging everyone’s phone line and having a mic behind every radiator to check what everyone is telling each others in private. Kicking people off facebook because of non compliant speech? It’s like a venue cancelling an event because they disagree with the content. Some will agree with those measures, others won’t. But there is nothing there that is inherently specific to the internet.
- eksemplar 8y ago
  I don’t think the general population is as bad as the internet makes them out to be. Ever go to a townhall, join an interest group for hobbies or exercise or done some vulanteer work? You’ll meet all sorts of people at those, and most of them treat each other well. I’ve seen my share of assholeness on the internet, I’m old enough to have been on it before usenet has its eternal September after all, and I think it’s different today. Much more political than its ever been.
  - cm2187 8y ago
    I agree that there is a social control tempering the aggressivity and nastiness in individual physical interactions. But in a sense this is merely social norms inhibating people into not being themselves. I think the anonymity of internet is more similar to the anonymity of a crowd or mob. And mobs behaviour often isn't pretty.
8y ago

cm2187 8y ago

It’s a bit of an idealistic view of early internet. Trolling came pretty much as soon as IRC was online. And early internet was probably reflecting a subset of the population of early adopters, academics and engineers who did not reflect the general population. The population has a distribution of characters, most are good people, some are angry and heinous. The internet is no better or worse than the population who uses it. These calls to censor and control aren’t about the technology, they are calls to censor and control what people tell each others. I think every time we are considering a new rule for the internet we should consider what is the physical world equivalent of that rule, where we have wealth of experience and history to assess whether it is a good idea. Tracking your browsing? It’s like having to show your ID everytime you buy a newspaper for the state to monitor what you read. Scan emails and chats to monitor extreme groups? It’s like bugging everyone’s phone line and having a mic behind every radiator to check what everyone is telling each others in private. Kicking people off facebook because of non compliant speech? It’s like a venue cancelling an event because they disagree with the content. Some will agree with those measures, others won’t. But there is nothing there that is inherently specific to the internet.

eksemplar 8y ago
I don’t think the general population is as bad as the internet makes them out to be. Ever go to a townhall, join an interest group for hobbies or exercise or done some vulanteer work? You’ll meet all sorts of people at those, and most of them treat each other well. I’ve seen my share of assholeness on the internet, I’m old enough to have been on it before usenet has its eternal September after all, and I think it’s different today. Much more political than its ever been.
- cm2187 8y ago
  I agree that there is a social control tempering the aggressivity and nastiness in individual physical interactions. But in a sense this is merely social norms inhibating people into not being themselves. I think the anonymity of internet is more similar to the anonymity of a crowd or mob. And mobs behaviour often isn't pretty.

8y ago