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The Internet of creation disappeared. Now we have surveillance and control
- api 7y agoI am glad this is being generally realized and people are no longer pretending the status quo is fine. It's the first step toward changing things.
- shadowgovt 7y agoI don't know. Given that the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan, things are changing in the other direction for a reason. It's kind of unclear to me whether the pendulum is ready to swing back towards lack of oversight again.
- shantly 7y agoAnonymous people saying shitty things on 4chan is nothing compared to surveillance capitalism. If anyone regulates 4chan out of existence and declares victory, they’ve missed the point.
- shadowgovt 7y agoWhat is the point they will have missed?
- antepodius 7y agoOne argument might be that /pol/ might arguably be able to radicalise one or two people a year into a mass shooting, but that's not as bad as a worldwide technological panopticon. (It's not really a dichotomy, of course.)
- anigbrowl 7y agoradicalise one or two people a year into a mass shooting You undermine your point with such obvious counterfactuals. This is not in any way an endorsement of the panopticon - which is exactly what /pol/ wants, just with itself in middle.
- antepodius 7y agoI don't know what you mean by that, sorry. Could you elaborate? I could read that as you either being charitable, or the opposite, towards /pol/.
- Ygg2 7y agoThat trading liberty for safety usually yields neither.
- shadowgovt 7y agoModern interpretations of that quote are way off the bead from the historical origin and intent of the original speaker. https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou... It's not unlike people misattributing the quote about the net, censorship, and damage to mean the internet, When it actually referred to USENET (a system that was, essentially, censored by collective action of internet service providers ceasing to store and forward its messages, some because they perceived it as obsolete, some because they believe they would have personal responsibility, morally if not legally, for the way people use the channel). The simplistic interpretation of the Franklin quote breaks down very quickly when one observes that most of the Founding Fathers agreed significantly with Locke's social contract theory, which is very much relinquishing individual, personal liberties for collective safety.
- mc3 7y agoThanks! Here is the meat: WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it. SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation. WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means. However this misunderstanding alone is not a reason on it's own to dismiss Ygg2's statement.
- api 7y agoChan culture is one of three things that I personally list as having killed the creative Internet, with the other two being gamified / addictive social media and spam. Chan culture is itself a form of addictive gamified social media too, albeit of a much more niche variety. It popularized memes and snark as a cheap zero effort way to get attention and as a "thought stopper." I started hating chan culture way back in the 'oughts before any of this Nazi alt-right edgelord BS, but none of it surprises me. I saw the way cheap shitty memes and repetitive jokes were overtaking substance everywhere and that the chans were the origin of the cancer. I still struggle to describe the essence of the chans but I know it when I see it. There is this odd cognitive style and of course jargon and buzzwords. It's almost like a very weird cult... like how people who have had contact with them say you can smell a scientologist.
- asteli 7y agoI think there's an argument that the consolidated internet caused 4chan to morph from a benign imageboard to the relative monster it is today. 4chan didn't start as a cancer, it became that way when all the 'normies' left for reddit|facebook|twitter.
- api 7y agoI see the chans today as inseparable from the social silos. There's a two way dynamic in play. The chans are to social media what the gaming discords are to the games they shadow. It's where people go to cook up strategies to play the social attention game, and it's also an echo chamber where new memes and such are cooked up. The whole thing needs to be nuked from orbit.
- tomatotomato37 7y agoIt's actually kinda the opposite, 4chan traffic more than doubled[0] (with a matching decrease in quality) after gamergate and the election, and there is a general consensus that it's going to get worse when the next election ramps up [0]https://s2.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/1543019932974.png https://s2.desu-usergeneratedcontent.xyz/a/image/1543/01/154...
- denkmoon 7y agoThat the free internet gave us the likes of 4chan is exactly why we should defend it.
- shadowgovt 7y agoCan you explain why?
- denkmoon 7y agoIt is (was?) a place of free exchange of ideas, without ego. You have no updoots to collect, nobody can be downdooted for not conforming to groupthink. Anyone who tries to establish an identity on the site is lambasted for not respecting the anonymous nature of the discussion. There will always be a place for truly anonymous discourse. For a time, that was 4chan.
- shadowgovt 7y agoAnd what has been the result of that anonymous discourse?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- soulofmischief 7y agoA lot of wonderful, wonderful things. Anonymous has roots in 4chan. A lot of amazing political activism has sprung from 4chan. And it was the seed for the entire meme culture which permeates the internet. At its peak, 4chan along with half a dozen other forums entirely contained the fountain of creativity from which the modern internet drew its inspiration. I have been visiting 4chan since elementary school, now well in my twenties, so I have seen the changes over the years. What exists today is a shell of what once was. moot, the resident admin, left some years ago and placed the forum in the hands of a third party with conflicted interests and no interest in proper moderation. It's also worth mentioning that /b/, the board everyone is most familiar with outside of 4chan, is the one where you hear about all the illegal racist stuff getting posted. Before /pol/ was hijacked into a nazi version of /b/, it was actually a wonderful place for political discussion. And there are dozens of other topic-specific boards which harbor some very thought-provoking discussion.
- n-exploit 7y agoThis is the first time I have heard of a "tech crisis" - and I think it's appropriate. I think we, as industry leaders, need to accept and address our faults and shadows. The first step to progress is to admit that you need help.
- majjam 7y agoHi, my name is FAANG and I’m addicted to money
- rkho 7y agoHi I'm a short-term mentality shareholder and I'm also addicted to money
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- user2827282 7y agoHi, I'm a user, I don't pay for services. And I'm a paying customer. We were told that everything is fine, privacy matters less, safety is what matters most and we blinding believe in big tech co because tech is the new frontier, tech is the future, tech is the new God
- gerbilly 7y agoHi, I'm an end user who refuses to pay for software. Why should I when all the tools I need are online for free?
- user5284 7y agoHi, I'm a Alexa paying end user and I'm surveilled anyway. I've paid for my smatrtv and I'm being aurveilled. I've paid for cable and they told me there where be less ass and more quality shows. Well I'm maybe wrong but people not paying are looking smarter than me
- badrabbit 7y agoI can accept some of what is said on this article but from a technical perspective the internet (imho) offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time in the past. I believe most of the shortcomings and abuse of the internet is a result of mass adoptation of the technology without correspnding legislature. Societies just haven't caught up with technology,even well seasoned technologists struggle to grasp the privacy implications and economic complexities at hand. There is also the psychological aspect where the mechanics of the internet are intangible and we have a hard time conceptualizing and grasping these complexities the same way we do tangible constructs. Imagine how complex a physical machine would be if it was as complex as a web browser,but we can see it and we can easily grasp the scale of the complexity and adjust our approach on how to use and secure it accordingly.
- buboard 7y ago> offers much more opportunities to create and collaborate than any other time in the past. We had skype, games, ICQ, MSN, blogs, blog aggregators, rss readers, galleries, audiogalaxy, guestbooks, forums, hotline communications, IRC, video chats, joomla, wikis etc etc in the year 2003. Not much has been added. Video is perhaps the only thing that we didnt have. A big deal but it s not everything. The main change was the format - mobile. The internet today feels less vibrant, less mysterious, with less corners to explore, and it's not because we 've exhausted it all. Even the news have become extremely repetitive, with every site posting the same stories slightly rephrsed. People keep parroting the same obsessive ideas over and over and over in their comments. Everything is memes, and that everything is actually a small number of ideas being produced every day, possibly countable in one hand. You have to dig hard into social forums to find a unique perspective, as the self-congratulating, selfimportant crowds seem to have crowded out everyone else. Anecdotally, how many sites do you find yourselves browsing daily?
- taurath 7y agoIt’s because we’ve given over to aggregators. When we need to actually get something done, they’re useful. If you want to explore though, they’re less useful. You need wiki links and webrings and recommendations that aren’t driven by algorithm.
- Kenji 7y agoYou just aren't looking hard enough. The internet of creation is vastly bigger than it used to be, it's just covered by a bigger pile of steaming shit.
- cloudyo 7y ago"our battle is not lost, but that we can control the use of our data, [...] that the privacy laws that protect us are obeyed." Privacy, privacy. We've actually developed a self-hosted private cloud solution as a substitute to Dropbox for exactly these reasons. Basically a private Dropbox at home (no complicated installation and no server needed) We're currently in beta, could interest a few in this thread! https://www.duple.io/en/ https://www.duple.io/en/ The point is to have a product that works just like a Dropbox, as simple and straightforward, but that is actually private with no one interfering, playing, accessing or reading your data.
- phkahler 7y agoThere's more to do than that. We need decentralized replacement for social media And our own email servers for starters. This should all come in one box like a wifi access point or modem.
- buboard 7y agoWe have always had email servers. You can set up one today. What we need is to to convince more technical people to use the internet the way it was designed for. And to find ways for these people to make money, because the monopolized internet of today makes that unattainable.
- rhizome 7y agoMaybe something to make would be an addition to mail servers that chat-ifies group emails.
- buboard 7y agoall you need is an X-header. I also liked the expires header but it didnt catch on
- jimktrains2 7y agoChatifies in what way?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- maxwell 7y ago> three decades following the creation of the Internet The internet turns 50 in a week.
- thrower123 7y agoThe normal people came to the internet, and crowded out the nerds. You can still find all the weird, wacky stuff that used to be out there; I daresay there is far more of it, by volume, than there ever was. It just requires more effort to sift out the dross.
- Porthos9K 7y agoIt didn't merely disappear. It was murdered. Chances are you are complicit.
- stuart78 7y agoI think of this issue in a much more mundane way all the time. When looking for product reviews, for example, the top results are, in my experience, unusable. A search for espresso machine reviews returns SEO driven results, and even the more genuine-looking results (sorry BusinessInsider, but I don't need your input) seem to exclusively list products which the site manager can get a referral link for. I don't mind the idea of referral links in theory, but what happens to the entry that would be #1 except for not being available on Amazon? I don't know that there was ever a golden age of espresso machine reviews online, but I do think that my trust in the quality of information I find through general searches has dramatically fallen in the last ten years. I imagine there is a Facebook group that might have better perspectives, or 'Coffee Twitter', but neither of those are easy to discover through Google, and multiplying my search area across them all (reddit too, I suppose) gets burdensome quickly. So I'm not sure that the internet of creation has disappeared as much as it may have become hidden. Either within walled gardens or by the professionalization of page rank by SEO pros (against whom Joe's coffee corner cannot hope to compete). Either way, search suggests a much less creative internet than might actually be there.
- microcolonel 7y agoAmerica's Test Kitchen does the best appliance reviews IMO, not sure if they cover espresso, but their pick for drip coffee machines was spot on for me.
- hollerith 7y agoAgreed. If I could search the web of the year 2000 using the Google Search of 2000, I would prefer it to searching the web of today about half the time (specifically, when the knowledge I seek hasn't changed much since 2000.)
- NeedMoreTea 7y agohttps://www.millionshort.com/ https://www.millionshort.com/ Can be a big help here - search without the top million (or 100k etc) results - the SEO driven and commercial giants. Results vary, but I find it really useful when the main results are all engagement ad driven crap. Some of the old-school web is still around, it's just down on page 20+ of Google and Bing.
- cookie_monsta 7y agoThe internet is awesome. It's those goddamn users that is the problem.
- davidjnelson 7y agoThank goodness for GitHub, it’s pure creative bliss and it’s growing obscenely fast.
- dougmwne 7y agoToday I tried to read a few links off HN and hit endless paywalls and ad infestations, all for a paragraph of fluff. I logged onto Facebook and my feed was crowded out with promoted posts and memes. I went on Reddit and the tiny bit of great content was crowded out with memes. I realized this is it. The web has fully lost it's early magic and it will never recover it in this iteration. There are ways you could fix it, but it's too late and all the players are too entrenched for anything to change. The monetization model is broken. This pony is all out of tricks. We'll need to pioneer the next platform for tech to be exciting and fresh again. Probably VR, possibly AR. I'll see you guys there.
- thrower123 7y agoIf everybody here would flag the paywall'd junk and not upvote it, it could be a nicer place. Liberally using the 'hide' button also helps, but only yourself. You kind of need to cull out a third of it. One of these days I'm going to make a custom skin that filters out the worst of the hosts that clog up the front page.
- davidjnelson 7y agoGrateful for that hide feature, so useful. Thanks for adding that Hn team.
- davidjnelson 7y agoA few hacks that don’t fully solve it but do help to some extent: adblock plus, just read, incognito mode, searching the article title and clicking through from google ( or the “web” link here in Hn ).
- ericflo 7y agoFacebook has outlasted everyone else working on VR, so now they get to own that platform. They were sad they didn't get an app store monopoly like Google and Apple, and now they have one. Better luck with AR I guess, where our best hope is that at least the current tech oligarchs compete for it rather than just allowing one of them to take it like they let Facebook take VR.
- codesushi42 7y agoThe title says it all. The Internet used to be about building and sharing things. Then it turned into a giant and mindless message feed where everyone exposes everything about their private lives, intentionally or not. Now all of the hot new opportunities that exist are to spy on and exploit that data. The latest AI hype is a consequence of the pervasiveness of "big data". I miss building and sharing cool things instead with the online community.
- Frost1x 7y agoPart of that was a higher barrier to entry to push content online. It wasn't hard per se but it wasn't easy. Now, my 5 year old nephew can do it. Before, it took dedication and creativity to put something together. It's now more difficult to find needles in the haystack.
- codesushi42 7y agoIndeed. Now all of the infrastructure is built. Oversaturated and consolidated. At least the game dev scene is vibrant, even if overcrowded.
- esotericn 7y agoDevelopers who work on adtech nonsense, GDPR popups, etc, should take a hard look in the mirror. Yeah, you might make a bit of money, and yeah, maybe your colleagues, in your sick system, give you a bit of respect. One day, I think you're going to wake up and realise that you wasted your talents. Like a war veteran who thought what they were doing was right, that the ends justified the means, until suddenly one day it all came crashing down around them. You have the choice, here and now. You're sitting in front of a general purpose computer. You can make fun and interesting tools - you can make stuff to break down barriers - the pathways you can take your craft are unlimited. Choose wisely.
- jdjjdflknfjj 7y agoYou realize those GDPR popups are mandated by law? What would you have creators do? You think people like putting those on their web sites? Adtech helps pay creators, it is not entirely a bad thing either.
- walterstucco 7y ago> Adtech helps pay creators, it is not entirely a bad thing either. that's called "working in advertising". it's not creation, it's a job.
- neilalexander 7y agoI understand the cookie choice popups are maybe a legal necessity in some places with GDPR and so on, but the implementation of the entire thing is just awful. Each website having their own badly-coded popovers which are either slow, unusable or just outright deceptive, blocking page scrolling and causing unnecessary page reloads. As for advertising taking over the place, it's just getting insane with them being inserted inline in article content and increasing the page load time significantly, appearing at the beginning of videos or, worse, half-way through them, making pages more resource-intensive and less responsive. The web has never been so widely accessible and yet it has never been more inaccessible.
- ziggomat 7y agoBit ironic that all of these articles about how the internet has lost its creativity is always on boring yet slick graphic-designer-cum-ux-designer-in-metropolis looking website.
- peterwwillis 7y agoIt's not colonialism if you can opt-out of it. Which, for most of the nations of the world, you can. Don't get me wrong. We've been manipulated by advertising since the 1850s. The Hidden Persuaders, written in 1957, detailed the ways advertising can manipulate our subconscious to make us do things beyond our control. 'Big Ad' has been a core component of American radio and television since its introduction to the US. When the internet arrived in the '90s, so did a raft of businesses floated solely by ad dollars. Google improved the game with more personalized ads, but this was really just a form of direct marketing, which had existed for a half century. But most of the things we consume, we do because we are consumers, in a consumer society. We have not been captured by a foreign power and forced to work for nearly nothing, with our lands pilfered for goods to power a foreign nation. We are not 'unsalaried slaves'. We are willfully accepting the trade of services for our attention and our dollars - the same way we did with newspapers, and radio and television programs. We have been selling our attention for cheap for a century and a half, buying whatever crap someone feels like printing. In most nations today, we have the complete freedom to pay for and use the internet without advertising or restriction. You can pay for an internet connection, pay for e-mail, send and receive files, communicate, etc, all without ever being sold a diet pill, told to vote for a candidate, or having your data changed out to something more profitable. And you can do all of this with the security of a first-world military power. The global internet is still the most powerful, affordable, un-controlled communications tool in the world. You can talk about empire all you want, but really the only oppressive forces are governments against their own people. Yes, many governments have chilling effects on the rights of their people to have free speech - but those are limits imposed within their borders, and not to the internet as a whole. We still have an internet of creation, and we can still use it to change the world (evidenced by how many nations are rightly afraid of its power to allow people to freely communicate!) The only thing that has left is our imagination, but luckily, no one can take that away from us.
- dosy 7y agoAnd all the techies are acting surprised. Parading their "liberal" arm patches like they had nothing to do with it. How could this possibly have happened? It couldn't be our fault. Let's deny it's a problem. Or let's blame normies, or entropy, emergent systems properties, government. Or corporations. Better yet, let's blame China! But who built this stuff? Who's responsible for the direction of the industry if not for the "democratic" actions of a majority of workers to do or not do particular work? You could have said no. You still can. Makes me think y'all like it better this way. So quit yer pretense of complainin. And enjoy those ad dollars and safer streets!
- greggman2 7y ago> the Internet promised to be a democratising place to be turned to in the flight from the inequalities of the analogue world. Okay, maybe that didn't work out so well > It was presented to us a field in which to find freedoms, boundless creation Mostly yes. People are instagraming, tiktoking, youtubing, blogging, open-sourcing, unity-unrealing, more people are creating more things than ever before. > communication that transcended frontiers Totally true. I talk to friends all over the world. Participate on HN, discourse, discord, slack, email, facebook, etc and it's all free. Some of it sponsored but much of it just plain free, run by volunteers. > and free education for all. Pretty much true. What can't I learn about for free online? Pick nearly any topic and there are youtube channels, blog posts, articles, etc all for free on how to do pretty much anything.
- aww_dang 7y agoI skimmed the comments here. Then I skimmed the article. Getting out there and developing the sites/apps you want to see will bring change. Be proactive. Be the change you want to see. The article is about a lawyer arguing for 'justice' through highly politicized language. YMMV, but I don't think "The Internet of creation" was hindered for want of lawyers, lobbyists or regulations. Similarly, sitting on the sidelines and impotently lamenting the state of the Internet today doesn't help. While this isn't detrimental in the direct sense, it is detrimental if the prevailing belief is that changing the current paradigm is impossible. Creators are still active. New niches for content are still emerging. Entrenched sites/apps are not immortal. Nothing is impossible. It all starts with individual action, one developer at a time. Don't become hypnotized by the bigness of institutions. We've seen solo developers release sea changing software before. Be the change you want to see.
- pacala 7y agoIndie movies are a small niche. The creation you talk about is in the same ballpark: it exists, but mostly negligible.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eitland 7y ago> Getting out there and developing the sites/apps you want to see will bring change. Be proactive. Be the change you want to see. I now have my own stupid blog again[0] trying to add some good old fun and weirdness to the web along with some hopefully useful or thought-provoking posts in between. I wish we could have a thread (possibly even a monthly thread here, like who is hiring) where people could mention their blogs, web sites etc. Back when Google+ arrived we did that and I followed a number of interesting people from HN based on that I think. Maybe it could help us rebuild a mini web of interesting blogs, websites etc. Me, I'd be particularly interested in linking to pages related to electronics, programming, outdoors (but not slick "travel" blogs) etc. A little politics OK, but not much. [0]: link in profile should anyone be interested.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agoNormal people finally got on the internet and the average person can’t create shit. All they can do is bitch and moan, be horrible to others, and be surveilled and controlled. And that’s what we got. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
- pmlnr 7y agoThere's a musician called Kebu, who's work has high similarities to Jean-Michel Jarre's. Question: if Kebu was born the time Jarre was born, wih the same influences, and the same opportunities, could he have created his music without the set path of Jarre? (This is not in any way attacking his work, it's merely a theoretical question). Visionaries are extremely rare. Most of us follow and copy existing work. All that said, I think your words are a bit too harsh. Average person are not that bad at creating, they are bad at willing to create, they tend to lack the drive to do so.
- onion2k 7y agothe average person can’t create shit I think you're confusing not being able to create things with not being able to compete with people who are truly good at what they do. Everyone can create stuff, it's just that most people aren't very good at it because they've not yet mastered what they're doing. The thing is though, that doesn't matter. If they enjoy the creative process then that's more than enough.
- soulofmischief 7y agoA slightly different take on Eternal September: In the old days, when you joined a community it could be very insular. That's okay, there were communities for everything and everyone. So you had to read the rules, learn the lingo, and shut up and lurk for a while so you didn't invoke the wrath of the mods. Or you were gone. Anti-social, attention-seeking, spammy, obnoxious or controlling behavior was simply not tolerated. What right did you have to come into another's home and begin making demands as to how they live their lives? All of that has changed. The above behaviors are the new norm, thanks to the simultaneous nature of the walled gardens of social media and the fact that the walls are low enough that everyone can see into your garden. Suddenly you have nosy neighbors saying, "Hey, I'll be honest, that crabgrass in your lawn is making it harder to appreciate the beauty of my own lawn. Maybe you should clean it up, everyone else is doing it, so you must be anti-social if you don't. The entire meaning of the word "anti-social" has completely changed. I would consider most modern online communities to be extremely anti-social. The only answer is a return to form, going back to individual communities where we can more freely express our opinions, just making sure to network our communities in such a way that compassion and sincerity flourish, and we don't just return to the echo chambers of the 90's (they did exist!).
- firefoxd 7y agoThe internet of creation? You literally cannot think of an idea that someone hasn't built a website for. And then someone see those websites and say, "well theirs sucks, mine will be better" and they build their own. It has never been easier to create something online. I ride with random people on a shared ride and they give me a card with a website they created themselves. It's ugly, it's crappy, but it's exactly in the spirit of the internet of creation. People who created in the 90s were a minority, a small percentage of the total connected. Today, this percentage continues to grow. Though it is still the minority.
- j45 7y agoThere might have been a minority of creators, but there was far less to consume compared to today. The creators in the 90s created because there was very little to consume compared to today. When the creators of the 90s were kids they didn’t consume, because there was little to anything to consume. But creating software was limitless. Creating content in someone’s platform is different than creating your own HTML experience. Both are relevant... but the percentage of creation should be a default skill of all users beyond working for companies for free to create user generated content to sell.
- idoubtit 7y agoThe way most people act on internet has changed dramatically. Web users are usually consumers, and web "creators" are often standard sellers. People got used to the fact the sites are there to attract them in a race for attention. An anecdotal evidence: circa 2000, I published an old French dictionary. I received thousands of emails about it during the first years. Some people just asked about a word, or send their thanks, or noticed some kind of error. Nowadays, the number of visits hasn't changed, but almost nobody sends email. I probably wouldn't answer them anyway. I believe this is an side-effect of a larger change. Maybe writing email is now a harder task. Maybe people aren't used to non-promotion sites outside Wikipedia.
- neilalexander 7y agoIn the past it was much easier to attribute a website to a single person or a small group of people, and maybe they were able to publish contact details like email addresses without fear of them being harvested and spammed. Websites didn't really have comments sections so often so the reliable method for feedback was email. Maybe email was also a lot less tedious back then - it strikes me that these days the main purposes of email accounts are to allow registration with other online services and to hold the huge amount of spam that usually happens as a result of registering for online services. I don't know many people my age (Gen-Y) who would even dream of using their personal email accounts to actually communicate with actual people outside of places where it is strictly required (like applying for jobs), even less so their friends. They're too used to services run by corporate giants (like FAANG) and are being trained to interact in very specific ways, e.g. in direct messages in apps, in the comments sections or through "Like" and "reactions" buttons.
- silveroriole 7y agoI like to fantasise about invite-only internet ‘shards’ off the main internet. Each shard would have a maximum capacity, and that capacity would be small enough that someone could create an index of every page in the shard. You could only be a member of one shard at a time. Shards wouldn’t be topic-based, they’re just deliberately small communities. Like the “mosaic of subculture” and “community of 7000” in A Pattern Language. Yeah we thought it was great that the internet could connect us to anyone, but it turns out that I only liked that as long as “anyone” was likely to be someone similar to me. Now that “anyone” is more likely to be a brand, an advertiser or an influencer tween... no thanks.
- matheusmoreira 7y agoIt appears there's an optimal amount of users for each internet community. Too few users and the traffic will be low to generate any interest. Too many users and the signal to noise ratio decreases and the knowledgeable people start leaving. It seems measured elitism is the only answer.
- pmlnr 7y agoThere's already a system for it: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/ https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
- silveroriole 7y agoInteresting, I hadn’t heard of that - sounds quite similar to Mastodon? I wish they weren’t social networks based around identities, friends and sequences of posts, though. I would much prefer sites and pages to be the primary thing. I don’t like the kind of content that social media encourages, even decentralised social media.
- mxuribe 7y agoHave you considered/looked into Indieweb[0] concepts? While one could argue that it is a sorta type of decentralized "social media"...i would argue that it simply is "sites and pages"...But that can be somewhat be connected to other sites in a loose, decentralized manner - but only if you desire to be connected. Not sure that indieweb is exactly what you seek. But, have a look and see. Good luck! [0] https://indieweb.org https://indieweb.org
- Nasrudith 7y agoDigital colonialism is a deeply ironic phrase that underlies hypocrisy - it has long been favored by communist circles, the fascists wearing communist's clothing types, especially third world nationalists. It is a favorite for attacking any outsidsers who interfere with "their" territory completely independent of coerciveness or actual sins of colonialism. If a doctor came in and brought real medicine into an epidemic they would deride it as colonialism. And yet here they are Johhny come lates now coming in to colonize their daft ideas about colonalism and control when they were late adopters.
- asjw 7y agoWhen you control the means of communication and are a foreign super power, it is colonialism.
- Animats 7y agoRecently I switched from Google search to Bing search. Bing is years behind Google, and today, that's a feature. Microsoft just hasn't bothered to do the obnoxious things Google does now. Bing doesn't have much content of its own. The better search results seem to show up before the ads. It's not flashy, but it's OK.
- afpx 7y agoLet’s assume this trend continues for another couple decades. What happens next? Something has to rise from the ashes, right?
- mcv 7y agoThe Internet of creation is still out there. There are plenty of places on the internet where people make cool stuff. Even YouTube is still a hotbed of creation, despite the platform growing more hostile to it. It's just that next to the internet of creation, there's also a big corporate internet now, and it's pulling in a lot of people and trying to stake claims in parts of the internet of creation. But creation is still thriving.