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Not sure if I have data to back this up but my theory around political turmoil and echo chambers is as follows: - Before widespread internet use, say year 2000

Not sure if I have data to back this up but my theory around political turmoil and echo chambers is as follows: - Before widespread internet use, say year 2000, all communities were local. News were local + nation wide, people still focused on their physical proximity of 20 miles that affected them the most. Today, none of my friends read local news. Local news outlets are being bankrupted left and right. - Anonymity on the internet. People can say whatever they want without attaching their name, face and self-pride. This creates extremely unproductive conversations without consequences. Platforms such as Twitter propel this behavior to new heights. When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory. - Foreign interference - when internet use was not widespread, it was difficult to infiltrate a foreign election campaign and interfere with it. - Data collection and manipulation - Targeted newsfeeds that feed these echo chambers could not possibly reach critical mass before the internet. Echo chambers were physical places to go to - Hells Angels or joining the Evangelical Christian church. No such limits exist now. - Scale - The internet allows unprecedented scale to operate on. Echo chambers reverb into unimaginable self-resonance. Joe Rogan can say something and millions could hear it. +1M subscriber channels on YouTube span thousands. That was practically impossible unless you were on national TV. The internet has lot of positives (free voice, commerce, sharing of ideas, services, etc.) and its drawbacks are now surfacing. I want to go back to 90's when we had healthy debates between republicans and democrats. We were one country. One voice. And people debated about issues and not about other people's clans. We wanted internet to be the left/middle of the Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights [1] but ended up creating something thats not too far from the right side of the canvas. Total chaos and loss of decency and respect for each other. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#/media/File:The_Garden_of_Earthly_Delights_by_Bosch_High_Resolution.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieronymus_Bosch#/media/File:T...

peruvian 6y ago
Facebook is where the antivax/5G/Bill Gates/anti-mask/etc movements flourished so it seems people don't care about anonymity any more.
- ManBlanket 6y ago
  Conflating anti-mask with anti-vax or the notion 5G caused a virus is an absurd straw-man. Refusing to vaccinate a child is a little different than not bothering to strap a spit-covered rag to their face and acting like it's a panacea for Covid-19.
  - hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
    It's actually not an absurd straw man, because, similar to getting a vaccine, a big part of wearing a mask is demonstrating respect for others. I certainly don't think it's some sort of panacea, but unlike shutting down businesses the cost is virtually nothing. The fact that the tiniest of inconveniences, in order to show respect for your fellow humans, is met with cries of "my freedom!!" is incredibly sad to me. And talk about a straw man: "strap a spit-covered rag to their face". Most people wash their clothes. I certainly hope you don't "strap a shit covered rag (i.e. underwear)" to their bottom.
    - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
      Sorry, but I have to agree with GP. Anti-vaxx/5G/etc.. movements were anti-science. Anti-mask is not anti-science so long as there is no reasonable standard of evidence/data for people to discuss. As it stands, the WHO is against wearing masks, but in London where I live, it's required by law on public transport (lest you get fined). So... which is it?
robomartin 6y ago
I agree with all your points, except, as a others have noted, the point of anonymity. I have seen a number of incomprehensibly violent (verbally) threads in my town FB group. These are people who live here, who's kids go to the same schools, shop at the same stores, etc. It's incomprehensible, to be honest. I used to think this had to do more with isolation from the potential for immediate physical violence, and yet even that seems to have been invalidated by what people seem to be willing to do to each other in real life. I don't think the root cause is the internet. It's optimization algorithms. From my perspective we have reached a moment in time when regulatory control might be the only solution. I am definitely a small government guy. That doesn't mean no government, just the judicious application of the massive power government can wield. Over the last several years we have watched two loved family members diverge deeper and deeper into ideological pits of hatred, all fueled 100% by Facebook. One of them on the ideological right and the other on the left. I only use FB to keep in touch with close family. It has been very painful to deal with these two. I've had to snooze them for months at a time in order to not have the walls of hatred they produce pollute my life. What's sad is that we all watched this happen in slow motion over several years. In speaking with other family members from time to time, comments like "Did you notice that uncle Steve..." (made-up name). Once the problem was obvious it was too late, they won't reason with anyone and logical arguments are pointless. This process is a familiar one from another domain: Self radicalization of terrorists. The fact that the FB algorithm (and, to be fair, others) will almost instantly send you full-tilt into a narrow corner of the universe, keep you there and dig deeper and deeper into that hole is the problem. The algorithm has no "return to normal" functionality. Try it. Go to FB and watch a video you would not normally click on. Within a few clicks you are trapped in that general class of videos. I ran a test on this a while back. Getting out of the hole they dig for you takes significant effort. Which means people will tend to continue clicking on the things that drop them deeper into the hole. I understand the utility of this when wanting to learn about how to remodel a bathroom. However, there are a range of topics or areas that should never descend into these gradients and should have a strong automatic reset function. The easy one here is politics. Do not facilitate entry into resonant chambers in any subject related to politics. I know it's hard to define this but it is hard to argue that these algorithms have not caused harm. On your point about communities, news, etc. being mostly local at some point in the past, you hit it right on the nail. Politico did a great article on this that opened my eyes many years ago and helped me understand why things have been so terribly screwed-up. Here it is: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...
libraryatnight 6y ago
If you'd asked teenage me in the 90s if the internet I loved then was going to turn into this, I'd have thrown my computer in the trash. As a convenience tool its grown leaps and bounds, but as a "place" it's turned into a terrible neighborhood.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  It would be cool have local "intranets", it sounds insane but hang on for a sec - social media can only exist in these small intranets, say max 1000 people. Everyone should be required to put their name and face to their profiles before saying anything. Sounds exactly like China though :( This is the problem and it's a pretty tough one democracies around the world will need to face.
  - vkou 6y ago
    If you want to fix most of the garbage of social media, and actually turn it into a marketplace of ideas, slow the speed at which information spreads through it. Put a hard cap on a post's re-tweets/shares, and aggressively ban bots that try to copy&paste to circumvent this.
    - everdrive 6y ago
      This is easily one my favorite arguments against 5G. Why exactly do we need more mobile bandwidth? Is anyone doing anything useful with it?
      - iso947 6y ago
        Watching movies Talking face to face with friends and family
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      Everyone wants to limit what other people can read and write because they want to impose their beliefs onto the rest of the world. No. Your ideas aren't the "correct" ones. Just censor your personal information instead. Stop looking at all the crap and it'll be as if it doesn't exist. Almost everything I see on Twitter or Facebook is either interesting technical things, advertising, real people's daily lives, and the odd cat video.
tester756 6y ago
Web 2.0 was a mistake :/
remarkEon 6y ago
One data point in favor of your theory is that local elections and laws - sometimes down to the city level - are now national news stories. It never used to be like this, and now we’re in a situation where resentment builds for people you’ve never met, live 1000 miles away, that you’d have no idea even existed before all this. Some my say this is a good thing, but I flatly disagree.
cousin_it 6y ago
Cults (which I'd define as groups that respond to criticism/mockery of their sacred cows with action instead of argument) aren't new. They've been rising, taking over huge territories and then falling, since the dawn of history. It's just a bug in human nature. The early internet was anti-cult and insisted on actual arguments, and I thought it would endure, but it's over now.
chongli 6y ago
I agree with all of your points except for anonymity. Some of the most toxic internet battles I’ve seen were on Facebook, where everyone was using their real name, picture, etc. On the other hand, some of the most insightful discussions I’ve participated in were right here on Hacker News. So I think there’s another explanatory variable in this case. What’s the big difference between HN and Facebook? HN is a self-selected community of people which has established a culture based on strong values of discussion, charity, mutual respect, and highly engaged moderation. Facebook, on the other hand, has only outsourced moderation in order to keep out illegal material. It doesn’t have any interest whatsoever in promoting healthy, engaging discussions.
- systemvoltage 6y ago
  Good point. This is good then, we don't have to give up anonymity to be decent and we, the HN community, are a living example of that. What if any social media platform is required, by law, to put up a banner and 20 minute delay before their voices are broadcasted. The banner indicates, just like Cigarette box warnings, "Please be courteous, introspect and assess your comments before posting it. Be be a decent human, talk about issues and not other people, and have a productive objective conversation." and allow people to edit their posts for 20 mins. This would be opposed by the shareholders so it needs to be a law and cannot be left up to the companies to do it as it reduces engagement and consequently ad-revenue. It also would be nice to have @dang x 1,000,000 to do moderation on the internet scale. Honest, decent and positive "internet social workers". It would be a well paid job.
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    @dang does a pretty damn good job, and I'm surprised I don't see a lot more negatives about him 'censoring' things. Yet people even on hackernews blow a gasket at any censorship on fb, reddit, or twitter... I guess maybe because here is more topical and censoring is to keep things on-topic so they 'allow' that kind of censoring?
    - infogulch 6y ago
flyinglizard 6y ago
I reckon discussion used to be moderated by the elites. Ideas too radical (anti-vaxx, etc) would not have received widespread coverage, people who are too extreme would not either. Editors and network owners could apply prejudice and moderation. This is all gone now, instead we have people flocking into extremes in endless feedback loops (some intentional, some psychological, some algorithmic). I'm sure new mechanisms for self moderation will grow out of this. The generation growing into these platforms as their only known reality will need to take the lead and set up new rules which would allow society to keep existing. This is a work in progress.
Reedx 6y ago
If Facebook and Twitter wanted to make good on the mantra of "making the world a better place", they could do it today simply by disabling things that are reinforcing echo chambers, rewarding anger and generating outrage. e.g., Disable algorithmic feeds, remove sharing/RTing and stuff like Trending. Engagement metrics would plummet, yes, but they would literally make the world a better place.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  So, what would a feed consist of then?
  - asalahli 6y ago
    Posts by your friends in chronological order?
    - slg 6y ago
      That would do nothing to fight echo chambers.
      - DSingularity 6y ago
        What exactly do you think causes echo chambers? When algorithms inSocial networks reward bad behaviors bad behaviors will dominant. One of those bad behaviors is lazily espousing the dominant viewpoints in pursuit of social acceptance. Another is avoiding broadcasting certain beliefs out of fear of holding the unpopular opinion. Who disagrees with a highly comment? These are the behaviors which create mono cultures and echo chambers.
        slg 6y ago
        I don't think echo chambers are necessarily as maliciously or narcissistically inspired as you do. They are a natural result when people have complete control over what they hear and they primarily seek to hear things that reinforce their existing worldview.
seesawtron 6y ago
I might digress but those who would want to understand the beauty behind Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights , I would recommend this basic and insightful documentary without the usual background mysterious/sassy music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8BdeQueWYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8BdeQueWYc
president 6y ago
I think what happened was that once the internet became widespread and ubiquitous, it empowered a lot of people who were otherwise unable to acquire a massive audience and spout nonsense propaganda and narratives. In the earlier days of the internet, there was a larger portion of sane people because the barriers to get onto the internet were higher. Also, many crazies didn't understand the power of the internet until in the last decade.
- ipython 6y ago
  Nah, the crazies definitely existed in the “old” internet (I’m looking at you, time cube guy!) You had to seek them out though. The Excite or Yahoo! homepage definitely didn’t “suggest” them.
rorykoehler 6y ago
Another facet of this phenomenon is American political discourse spilling over into countries where it doesn’t make any sense. I see it in Ireland for example.
- luckylion 6y ago
  I suspect that this is owed to the fact that the US is an empire, albeit not an explicit one where it's clear who is a province and who isn't. I believe that people realize that American politics is much more important to their future than local politics, and that their countries will follow whatever way the US go, with some delay but little choice. The US political conflicts form the US, and that then forms it for everyone in the provinces.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    There is definitely an aspect of that but some of the stuff doesn't make any sense. The Irish were colonised and slaves themselves for example.
pwdisswordfish2 6y ago
I think this comment is too easily conflating "the internet" with "the web". Specifically, gigantic billion-page websites that people now call "platforms". The architecture and capacity of the internet we now know allows for them, but they are not an inherent property of the internet. Web != Internet
loopz 6y ago
You be who you are. Disregard the regardless. Bring it on!
gearhart 6y ago
I agree with everything you say, but I have a more positive interpretation of where the current shitshow is going. We’ve found a new Wild West of opportunity in the internet and the first people to understand how it works and build something to take advantage of it have won the game. The winners we have now are incredibly simplistic - twitter’s model propagates attention and consequently hyperbole and controversy. Facebook’s model propagates bubbles and consequently groupthink and a lack of critical thinking. However, there are other models. Reddit and hackernews aren’t perfect but they do foster valuable debate. People as a majority group are starting to appreciate the benefits and disadvantages of the models that their platforms represent. Previously the major platforms succeeded because they were the first, or the most powerfully viral. Now that we have more mature platforms, I think the choice people are making between them is more reasoned and we’re getting better results. Facebook is losing mindshare to platforms like niche publishers, balanced news organisations, and forums like Reddit and hackernews. The internet had such potential, and what we’ve got now is not living up to it, but I think that we’re just slowly getting there and that dream is still a possibility.
- concordDance 6y ago
  Reddit has been accelerating censorship recently (so many shut down subs...), becoming increasingly left wing and echo-chambery, so I'm not sure that's a good example.
dangoor 6y ago
> I want to go back to 90's when we had healthy debates between republicans and democrats. We were one country. One voice. And people debated about issues and not about other people's clans. "Make America Great Again", huh? I actually do have a point: I 100% agree that the spot we're in right now is appalling (in America and in some other countries as well). But there actually have been times in America's history when the debates were unhealthy. Go back to the 90s, you say? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich > Political scientists have credited Gingrich with playing a key role in undermining political decorum in the United States, and hastening political polarization and partisanship. The Internet has added fuel to a fire that had already started.
- ezconnect 6y ago
  Your politicians sold you out to big business and the internet showed the majority of population that they are being deceived by the elites and the population is feeling the deception because they are now becoming poorer because of the decisions of the business that owns the politician. It will take time to get back to good USA again because it took decades to destroy it.
coffeefirst 6y ago
That’s about right. I’ll add that, on big platforms at least, nothing exists to enforce social norms. If you talk like an internet commenter in real life, you will have no friends and people will avoid you. The few web communities that stayed decent found ways to enforce their local norms.
- pasquinelli 6y ago
  if you talk like a news anchor in real life you will have no friends and people will avoid you.
pldr2244 6y ago
Actually, quite a number of places around the world still engage in healthier politics than America. Want to know why America suffers so much from such partisanship and extreme ideologies? It’s your non-mandatory voting. Don’t blame the internet, which serves other countries well. Blame your special political system for incentivising the rise of extremes over the rise of politicians who “have” to care about the majority.
- volkl48 6y ago
  There's only about 10 countries in the world which have enforced mandatory voting, and a couple more where it's on the books but never enforced. And plenty of those are not exactly examples of good governance or non-extreme politics. (Ex: Brazil). So I don't feel your claim is very well supported by the evidence.
- 3131s 6y ago
  FPTP voting is a the problem, sure, but mandatory voting solves nothing.
- andrewzah 6y ago
  > It’s your non-mandatory voting. Erm, no. What actually kills voter turnout is lack of polling venues. If voting were a quick, painless process on a national holiday, we would see much higher turnouts. As it is, the current situation is so bad one can't help but think it was purposefully engineered to be that way. Voting should not have to take hours due to lack of venues. Hopefully mail-in ballots will become the norm, allowing people to vote easily without having to go to a venue.
Chathamization 6y ago
One thing that people need to keep in mind as well is that people who are obsessively online are going to have a much greater presence than those who have a more balanced life, and people who are more judicious about there output are going to have much less of a presence than people who throw out content without any thought. A lot of people assume that online content is representative of the majority of the community, when it's likely representative of a very small but very active minority that very well might be mentally unstable. The 1% rule of internet culture is well known, but there's evidence that things are even more skewed than that[1]. It's likely that the design of much of the current web ends up greatly amplifying the voices of some of the most unhealthy people in the community, to the point where they end up driving the discourse. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
zanny 6y ago
This comes from such a place of profound privilege. The Internet has given voice to extremists, anti-intellectualism, conspiracies, echo-chambers, etc. It also largely enabled the movements that have liberated the rights of LGBT and also brought to light the extent of racist police brutality. Trans people as a minority group practically did not exist before the Internet allowed them to interact - because their numbers are relatively few to the total population (something like in 1 in 100) - and because their condition is so heavily stigmatized and persecuted - and now something like 1.5 million people in the US have at least a chance not to be part of a ~66% suicide rate because they can actually figure out what is wrong with them in ways the so great "90s" never would have offered them in the siloed and managed culture prescribed by local and national homogeneity. The 90s were a time of untold ignorance of the masses. The camaraderie of ideology was only in a bubble of white entitlement. It was the decade of mandatory minimums following up the decade of drug war escalation following up the decade of said drug war. The 90s were a time when the totally unchallenged and unaccountable military industrial complex was still nation building around the world, from the Middle East in the first gulf war to American involvement in Cuba, South America, Africa, Asia. A continuation of behavior dating back almost a century since the US became a world power. The people of the US were allowed to be blissfully ignorant of all of this by being consigned to only an approved narrative via increasingly state colluding cable networks. The rise of cable predated the Internet but precipitated partisanship. The election of Reagan was hugely partisan, it was considered an expulsion of socialist and leftist thought entirely from the states as a near climax of the cold war, where as physical tensions waned the ideological coup de grace was being cast by radical globalist capitalism. It nigh enshrined the US as a formal Christian nation. This was all during continued unabated mass murder of minorities. There is a reason all of Martin Luther Kings contemporaries didn't live to see 40. Just the white children of the 70s and 80s were allowed to grow up surrounded by Hasbro and Nintendo in blissful ignorance to injustice around them than be put in a stadium with every other person screaming where you can't help but overhear the oppressed voices those in power would rather prefer be muffled. The Internet is a tool. It can, and has, and will be used for evil and good. It is more a reflection of our culture that being given what is fundamentally both the decommodification of information in material concerns and the total abolition of distance as a restriction on the transfer of information between any and all persons who can afford it that it is treated as a failure for making people accountable to form their own coherent and rational ethics. We, as a society broadly, chose the centralization and gamification and psychological exploitation of Facebook et al because they represented economic growth over social wellbeing or individual happiness. It is a choice we can reverse, collectively, but we likely won't because we as a culture worship money above all else. And Facebook (sec. centralized algorithmitized social media) is very profitable, both in monetary and power dynamic value.
rootusrootus 6y ago
I have two thoughts: 1. Facebook uses real names and people still say the nastiest things, sometimes to their own family. 2. Maybe you have forgotten that the political debate in the 90s was not healthy. That was the era of the Clinton impeachment, and Newt Gingrich brought us to a whole new low in dirty politics.
anigbrowl 6y ago
All that existed during the 90s, just on a much smaller scale. There were toxic corners of usenet and BBS echo chambers. It's just much faster and more efficient (for some definitions of efficiency...).
m12k 6y ago
While reading your comment I had this weird sense of Deja Vu - I've been reading a book about the problems brought on by globalized trade, and there's a surprising number of parallels. Local companies shuttering. Transfer pricing. Tax havens. Moral hazards when company owners live across the globe from customers and employees. Shell companies and fraud. Connecting the world globally in communications and trade has created enormous new opportunities - both good and bad. But we're only now starting to understand the enormity of the latter, and we're pretty much still at square one when it comes to dealing with these new global problems.
partiallypro 6y ago
My theory is that the echo chambers have always exists, they are just much more public now and happen at a slightly faster pace.
shp0ngle 6y ago
> - Foreign interference - when internet use was not widespread, it was difficult to infiltrate a foreign election campaign and interfere with it. Hahahahaha
rapind 6y ago
"Foreign interference" is as old as the hills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention
noduerme 6y ago
I ran a BBS from my parents phone line in the early 90s and had as much techno-optimistic exuberance as you'd ever want. Everything you've said here is absolutely true. But I'd narrow it down to two basic laws: 1. The ability to run a site has fallen into the hands of people who have no idea how it works and aren't responsible for their actions (i.e, their personal stake has to do with share value and not maintaining a community), and 2. More importantly, the ability to share content has become too easy for people who aren't capable of any of the thought or curiosity that used to be required to reach a bare level of competence for their private musings to be translated into easily-accessed public speech. The hurdle of technical competence was a useful, if imperfect, stand-in which barred the vast illiterate masses from creating echo chambers of mutually self-reinforcing ignorance. We all had a right to free speech in the 90s, but no one had a right to be heard. Facebook, Twitter, et al simply lowered the bar to being heard to the point where noise overwhelmed signal.
C19is20 6y ago
"We were one country. One voice". No you weren't.
KKKKkkkk1 6y ago
When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory. If the Internet is making it easier to be unpleasant, then that's great. I don't think we could have the kind of discussion that we are having as a result of George Floyd's killing if we insisted on being pleasant. The United States was founded by unpleasant and inflammatory people.
- concordDance 6y ago
  We could do without that kind of "discussion". I've mostly just seens people shouting at each other (or preaching to their choirs) about that here on the internet. Lots of sharing of little anecdotal stories and selective stats with lots of cancellations and insults hurled. Can you imagine a "the problem is black culture" right wing conservative trying to have a civil discussion with a BLM protestor in the current climate?
  - pasquinelli 6y ago
    they used to do that sort of thing on jerry springer. actually, now i think of it, oprah did it too. how the hell else can a conversation between those two go productively? ever? unless by discussion you mean ordering food or some necessary social intercourse, which does in fact still happen even to this very day.
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dheera 6y ago
Honest questions here: A. Why does Facebook need to change anything ahead of the 2020 elections? Why can't they just run themselves properly all the time? B. Why is Facebook overly concerned with the US elections, but not overly concerned with the Taiwanese, German, Indian, or any other elections? As a global platform it seems sad that they are paying so much extra attention to the US than democracies everywhere else.
trhway 6y ago
>I want to go back to 90's when we had healthy debates between republicans and democrats. We were one country. One voice. And people debated about issues and not about other people's clans. i came here only 20 years ago, so can comment only indirectly - recently watched a Bill Maher standup from something like 91 - and pretty much the only difference was clothes. In particular it was somewhat eerrie how he was talking about Anita Hill while short before me watching it there had been Kavanaugh story.
ekianjo 6y ago
Where do you see anonymity on the internet now? People constantly get doxxed or lose jobs for what they said on social networks.
colordrops 6y ago
Before widespread use of the internet, protests and riots due to police brutality were waved off as "those people acting up". Progressive candidates never got any traction. No one had any real sense of what was happening on the other side of the country, let alone Europe or Asia. Information was controlled and broadcast by a few small entities that were mainly interested in propping up the establishment. Look up operation mockingbird. Let's not be Pollyanna-ish about pre-internet times.
toohotatopic 6y ago
In that picture, there is a cat eating mice and a bird eating frogs. If you look close, it's not just peace and harmony. The nice thing on the internet is that you don't have to listen to the indecent people. It's just that Facebook doesn't offer a comfortable way to filter the input stream. If indecency were a problem, people would move to Mastodon and implement their filters.
pasquinelli 6y ago
- Before widespread internet use, say year 2000, all communities were local. News were local + nation wide, people still focused on their physical proximity of 20 miles that affected them the most. Today, none of my friends read local news. Local news outlets are being bankrupted left and right. talk radio was popular in the 90s and is the same sort of echo chamber that you'd find on facebook. - Anonymity on the internet. People can say whatever they want without attaching their name, face and self-pride. This creates extremely unproductive conversations without consequences. Platforms such as Twitter propel this behavior to new heights. When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory. okay, but if the conversation has no consequence then why does it matter? does twitter matter? i know it seems to matter, but is that not just an effect of every individual person who comprises the media being on twitter representing their company or promoting themselves personally? - Foreign interference - when internet use was not widespread, it was difficult to infiltrate a foreign election campaign and interfere with it. this was the point that prompted me to comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention - Data collection and manipulation - Targeted newsfeeds that feed these echo chambers could not possibly reach critical mass before the internet. Echo chambers were physical places to go to - Hells Angels or joining the Evangelical Christian church. No such limits exist now. i really don't understand this. is the idea that all the time you're not in church or at the hells angels club you're soaking up some stuff from the surrounding culture? wouldn't that balance out given how weak of an influence the internet is on one's identity compared to being physically at a place with other people who are physically there, literally forming an actual group of people? - Scale - The internet allows unprecedented scale to operate on. Echo chambers reverb into unimaginable self-resonance. Joe Rogan can say something and millions could hear it. +1M subscriber channels on YouTube span thousands. That was practically impossible unless you were on national TV. you're opining that now there are more echo chambers compared to when there was one? first, that's questionable on its own, but that wasn't how things were before the internet was pervasive. the democrats and republicans as they are now were not different in the 90's. there was a time that there were liberal republicans and conservative democrats, then the democrats veered away from the legacy of the new deal, and the republicans congealed around neo conservatism. now we have two homogenous brands that are competing with each other. this all was in place during the clinton admin, which is why he got impeached for getting a blow job. perhaps your memory is fuzzy on the 90s.
blablabla123 6y ago
But Internet has also centralized a lot after the 90s from the infrastructure side. With a modem it was a no-brainer to expose a service on the open internet, now with DSL Routers being standard it's a bit more difficult - of course this has good reasons also. So people would just try out various server software and run it, today only few people would do that. Even among the tech-savvy population, most would resort to SaaS. Especially P2P software had a hard time, nowadays popular P2P networks seem to be just there to do stuff that would be too risky otherwise instead of actually democratizing information. I mean in the 90s it was normal that people would build a homepage with content they like, now it has to have cutting edge design and be super entertaining for the visitor. So what happens is, only professional Content creators create content like before the internet. (I wouldn't count Twitter messages as content, that's barely enough space to voice a differentiated opinion...) With the local news that's of course a thing, on the other hand my parents and other people of that generation used to usually read a local newspaper and a nation-wide magazine or newspaper. I don't think the group of people actively engaging in local politics has ever been really large. Not sure whether to count sharing political "artifacts" on Facebook should be considered actively participating in politics. It's just clicking one button.
twirlock 6y ago
We've got PR spooks citing Hieronymus Bosch for why we all need to broadcast our identities on the internet, and that's the top comment.
jagannathtech 6y ago
So the democratisation of information and media platform has angered and irked the elitists and gatekeepers of information. Great!!
everdrive 6y ago
>- Before widespread internet use, say year 2000, all communities were local. News were local + nation wide, people still focused on their physical proximity of 20 miles that affected them the most. Today, none of my friends read local news. Local news outlets are being bankrupted left and right. I think this is generally true, and don't want to downplay the enormous role the internet has played in demolishing local communities. However, technology has been chipping away at this problem for a long time: - Radio - Auotomobile - Television, then cable & satellite television All of these have served to break down local barriers and expand a person's sense of community. I've heard this a number of times, and agree strongly: the internet is the worst of a small town, and the worst of a big city combined: moralizing busy-bodies, also filled with the sort of dregs of humanity you only encounter once the population is large enough to reveal the uglier outliers.

peruvian 6y ago

Facebook is where the antivax/5G/Bill Gates/anti-mask/etc movements flourished so it seems people don't care about anonymity any more.

ManBlanket 6y ago
Conflating anti-mask with anti-vax or the notion 5G caused a virus is an absurd straw-man. Refusing to vaccinate a child is a little different than not bothering to strap a spit-covered rag to their face and acting like it's a panacea for Covid-19.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
  It's actually not an absurd straw man, because, similar to getting a vaccine, a big part of wearing a mask is demonstrating respect for others. I certainly don't think it's some sort of panacea, but unlike shutting down businesses the cost is virtually nothing. The fact that the tiniest of inconveniences, in order to show respect for your fellow humans, is met with cries of "my freedom!!" is incredibly sad to me. And talk about a straw man: "strap a spit-covered rag to their face". Most people wash their clothes. I certainly hope you don't "strap a shit covered rag (i.e. underwear)" to their bottom.
  - iamstupidsimple 6y ago
    Sorry, but I have to agree with GP. Anti-vaxx/5G/etc.. movements were anti-science. Anti-mask is not anti-science so long as there is no reasonable standard of evidence/data for people to discuss. As it stands, the WHO is against wearing masks, but in London where I live, it's required by law on public transport (lest you get fined). So... which is it?

robomartin 6y ago

I agree with all your points, except, as a others have noted, the point of anonymity. I have seen a number of incomprehensibly violent (verbally) threads in my town FB group. These are people who live here, who's kids go to the same schools, shop at the same stores, etc. It's incomprehensible, to be honest. I used to think this had to do more with isolation from the potential for immediate physical violence, and yet even that seems to have been invalidated by what people seem to be willing to do to each other in real life. I don't think the root cause is the internet. It's optimization algorithms. From my perspective we have reached a moment in time when regulatory control might be the only solution. I am definitely a small government guy. That doesn't mean no government, just the judicious application of the massive power government can wield. Over the last several years we have watched two loved family members diverge deeper and deeper into ideological pits of hatred, all fueled 100% by Facebook. One of them on the ideological right and the other on the left. I only use FB to keep in touch with close family. It has been very painful to deal with these two. I've had to snooze them for months at a time in order to not have the walls of hatred they produce pollute my life. What's sad is that we all watched this happen in slow motion over several years. In speaking with other family members from time to time, comments like "Did you notice that uncle Steve..." (made-up name). Once the problem was obvious it was too late, they won't reason with anyone and logical arguments are pointless. This process is a familiar one from another domain: Self radicalization of terrorists. The fact that the FB algorithm (and, to be fair, others) will almost instantly send you full-tilt into a narrow corner of the universe, keep you there and dig deeper and deeper into that hole is the problem. The algorithm has no "return to normal" functionality. Try it. Go to FB and watch a video you would not normally click on. Within a few clicks you are trapped in that general class of videos. I ran a test on this a while back. Getting out of the hole they dig for you takes significant effort. Which means people will tend to continue clicking on the things that drop them deeper into the hole. I understand the utility of this when wanting to learn about how to remodel a bathroom. However, there are a range of topics or areas that should never descend into these gradients and should have a strong automatic reset function. The easy one here is politics. Do not facilitate entry into resonant chambers in any subject related to politics. I know it's hard to define this but it is hard to argue that these algorithms have not caused harm. On your point about communities, news, etc. being mostly local at some point in the past, you hit it right on the nail. Politico did a great article on this that opened my eyes many years ago and helped me understand why things have been so terribly screwed-up. Here it is: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bubble-real-journalism-jobs-east-coast-215048 https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/25/media-bub...

libraryatnight 6y ago

If you'd asked teenage me in the 90s if the internet I loved then was going to turn into this, I'd have thrown my computer in the trash. As a convenience tool its grown leaps and bounds, but as a "place" it's turned into a terrible neighborhood.

systemvoltage 6y ago
It would be cool have local "intranets", it sounds insane but hang on for a sec - social media can only exist in these small intranets, say max 1000 people. Everyone should be required to put their name and face to their profiles before saying anything. Sounds exactly like China though :( This is the problem and it's a pretty tough one democracies around the world will need to face.
- vkou 6y ago
  If you want to fix most of the garbage of social media, and actually turn it into a marketplace of ideas, slow the speed at which information spreads through it. Put a hard cap on a post's re-tweets/shares, and aggressively ban bots that try to copy&paste to circumvent this.
  - everdrive 6y ago
    This is easily one my favorite arguments against 5G. Why exactly do we need more mobile bandwidth? Is anyone doing anything useful with it?
    - iso947 6y ago
      Watching movies Talking face to face with friends and family
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Everyone wants to limit what other people can read and write because they want to impose their beliefs onto the rest of the world. No. Your ideas aren't the "correct" ones. Just censor your personal information instead. Stop looking at all the crap and it'll be as if it doesn't exist. Almost everything I see on Twitter or Facebook is either interesting technical things, advertising, real people's daily lives, and the odd cat video.

tester756 6y ago

Web 2.0 was a mistake :/

remarkEon 6y ago

One data point in favor of your theory is that local elections and laws - sometimes down to the city level - are now national news stories. It never used to be like this, and now we’re in a situation where resentment builds for people you’ve never met, live 1000 miles away, that you’d have no idea even existed before all this. Some my say this is a good thing, but I flatly disagree.

cousin_it 6y ago

Cults (which I'd define as groups that respond to criticism/mockery of their sacred cows with action instead of argument) aren't new. They've been rising, taking over huge territories and then falling, since the dawn of history. It's just a bug in human nature. The early internet was anti-cult and insisted on actual arguments, and I thought it would endure, but it's over now.

chongli 6y ago

I agree with all of your points except for anonymity. Some of the most toxic internet battles I’ve seen were on Facebook, where everyone was using their real name, picture, etc. On the other hand, some of the most insightful discussions I’ve participated in were right here on Hacker News. So I think there’s another explanatory variable in this case. What’s the big difference between HN and Facebook? HN is a self-selected community of people which has established a culture based on strong values of discussion, charity, mutual respect, and highly engaged moderation. Facebook, on the other hand, has only outsourced moderation in order to keep out illegal material. It doesn’t have any interest whatsoever in promoting healthy, engaging discussions.

systemvoltage 6y ago
Good point. This is good then, we don't have to give up anonymity to be decent and we, the HN community, are a living example of that. What if any social media platform is required, by law, to put up a banner and 20 minute delay before their voices are broadcasted. The banner indicates, just like Cigarette box warnings, "Please be courteous, introspect and assess your comments before posting it. Be be a decent human, talk about issues and not other people, and have a productive objective conversation." and allow people to edit their posts for 20 mins. This would be opposed by the shareholders so it needs to be a law and cannot be left up to the companies to do it as it reduces engagement and consequently ad-revenue. It also would be nice to have @dang x 1,000,000 to do moderation on the internet scale. Honest, decent and positive "internet social workers". It would be a well paid job.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  @dang does a pretty damn good job, and I'm surprised I don't see a lot more negatives about him 'censoring' things. Yet people even on hackernews blow a gasket at any censorship on fb, reddit, or twitter... I guess maybe because here is more topical and censoring is to keep things on-topic so they 'allow' that kind of censoring?
  - infogulch 6y ago

flyinglizard 6y ago

I reckon discussion used to be moderated by the elites. Ideas too radical (anti-vaxx, etc) would not have received widespread coverage, people who are too extreme would not either. Editors and network owners could apply prejudice and moderation. This is all gone now, instead we have people flocking into extremes in endless feedback loops (some intentional, some psychological, some algorithmic). I'm sure new mechanisms for self moderation will grow out of this. The generation growing into these platforms as their only known reality will need to take the lead and set up new rules which would allow society to keep existing. This is a work in progress.

Reedx 6y ago

If Facebook and Twitter wanted to make good on the mantra of "making the world a better place", they could do it today simply by disabling things that are reinforcing echo chambers, rewarding anger and generating outrage. e.g., Disable algorithmic feeds, remove sharing/RTing and stuff like Trending. Engagement metrics would plummet, yes, but they would literally make the world a better place.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
So, what would a feed consist of then?
- asalahli 6y ago
  Posts by your friends in chronological order?
  - slg 6y ago
    That would do nothing to fight echo chambers.
    - DSingularity 6y ago
      What exactly do you think causes echo chambers? When algorithms inSocial networks reward bad behaviors bad behaviors will dominant. One of those bad behaviors is lazily espousing the dominant viewpoints in pursuit of social acceptance. Another is avoiding broadcasting certain beliefs out of fear of holding the unpopular opinion. Who disagrees with a highly comment? These are the behaviors which create mono cultures and echo chambers.
      - slg 6y ago
        I don't think echo chambers are necessarily as maliciously or narcissistically inspired as you do. They are a natural result when people have complete control over what they hear and they primarily seek to hear things that reinforce their existing worldview.

seesawtron 6y ago

I might digress but those who would want to understand the beauty behind Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights , I would recommend this basic and insightful documentary without the usual background mysterious/sassy music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8BdeQueWYc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8BdeQueWYc

president 6y ago

I think what happened was that once the internet became widespread and ubiquitous, it empowered a lot of people who were otherwise unable to acquire a massive audience and spout nonsense propaganda and narratives. In the earlier days of the internet, there was a larger portion of sane people because the barriers to get onto the internet were higher. Also, many crazies didn't understand the power of the internet until in the last decade.

ipython 6y ago
Nah, the crazies definitely existed in the “old” internet (I’m looking at you, time cube guy!) You had to seek them out though. The Excite or Yahoo! homepage definitely didn’t “suggest” them.

rorykoehler 6y ago

Another facet of this phenomenon is American political discourse spilling over into countries where it doesn’t make any sense. I see it in Ireland for example.

luckylion 6y ago
I suspect that this is owed to the fact that the US is an empire, albeit not an explicit one where it's clear who is a province and who isn't. I believe that people realize that American politics is much more important to their future than local politics, and that their countries will follow whatever way the US go, with some delay but little choice. The US political conflicts form the US, and that then forms it for everyone in the provinces.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  There is definitely an aspect of that but some of the stuff doesn't make any sense. The Irish were colonised and slaves themselves for example.

pwdisswordfish2 6y ago

I think this comment is too easily conflating "the internet" with "the web". Specifically, gigantic billion-page websites that people now call "platforms". The architecture and capacity of the internet we now know allows for them, but they are not an inherent property of the internet. Web != Internet

loopz 6y ago

You be who you are. Disregard the regardless. Bring it on!

gearhart 6y ago

I agree with everything you say, but I have a more positive interpretation of where the current shitshow is going. We’ve found a new Wild West of opportunity in the internet and the first people to understand how it works and build something to take advantage of it have won the game. The winners we have now are incredibly simplistic - twitter’s model propagates attention and consequently hyperbole and controversy. Facebook’s model propagates bubbles and consequently groupthink and a lack of critical thinking. However, there are other models. Reddit and hackernews aren’t perfect but they do foster valuable debate. People as a majority group are starting to appreciate the benefits and disadvantages of the models that their platforms represent. Previously the major platforms succeeded because they were the first, or the most powerfully viral. Now that we have more mature platforms, I think the choice people are making between them is more reasoned and we’re getting better results. Facebook is losing mindshare to platforms like niche publishers, balanced news organisations, and forums like Reddit and hackernews. The internet had such potential, and what we’ve got now is not living up to it, but I think that we’re just slowly getting there and that dream is still a possibility.

concordDance 6y ago
Reddit has been accelerating censorship recently (so many shut down subs...), becoming increasingly left wing and echo-chambery, so I'm not sure that's a good example.

dangoor 6y ago

> I want to go back to 90's when we had healthy debates between republicans and democrats. We were one country. One voice. And people debated about issues and not about other people's clans. "Make America Great Again", huh? I actually do have a point: I 100% agree that the spot we're in right now is appalling (in America and in some other countries as well). But there actually have been times in America's history when the debates were unhealthy. Go back to the 90s, you say? From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newt_Gingrich > Political scientists have credited Gingrich with playing a key role in undermining political decorum in the United States, and hastening political polarization and partisanship. The Internet has added fuel to a fire that had already started.

ezconnect 6y ago
Your politicians sold you out to big business and the internet showed the majority of population that they are being deceived by the elites and the population is feeling the deception because they are now becoming poorer because of the decisions of the business that owns the politician. It will take time to get back to good USA again because it took decades to destroy it.

coffeefirst 6y ago

That’s about right. I’ll add that, on big platforms at least, nothing exists to enforce social norms. If you talk like an internet commenter in real life, you will have no friends and people will avoid you. The few web communities that stayed decent found ways to enforce their local norms.

pasquinelli 6y ago
if you talk like a news anchor in real life you will have no friends and people will avoid you.

pldr2244 6y ago

Actually, quite a number of places around the world still engage in healthier politics than America. Want to know why America suffers so much from such partisanship and extreme ideologies? It’s your non-mandatory voting. Don’t blame the internet, which serves other countries well. Blame your special political system for incentivising the rise of extremes over the rise of politicians who “have” to care about the majority.

volkl48 6y ago
There's only about 10 countries in the world which have enforced mandatory voting, and a couple more where it's on the books but never enforced. And plenty of those are not exactly examples of good governance or non-extreme politics. (Ex: Brazil). So I don't feel your claim is very well supported by the evidence.
3131s 6y ago
FPTP voting is a the problem, sure, but mandatory voting solves nothing.
andrewzah 6y ago
> It’s your non-mandatory voting. Erm, no. What actually kills voter turnout is lack of polling venues. If voting were a quick, painless process on a national holiday, we would see much higher turnouts. As it is, the current situation is so bad one can't help but think it was purposefully engineered to be that way. Voting should not have to take hours due to lack of venues. Hopefully mail-in ballots will become the norm, allowing people to vote easily without having to go to a venue.

Chathamization 6y ago

One thing that people need to keep in mind as well is that people who are obsessively online are going to have a much greater presence than those who have a more balanced life, and people who are more judicious about there output are going to have much less of a presence than people who throw out content without any thought. A lot of people assume that online content is representative of the majority of the community, when it's likely representative of a very small but very active minority that very well might be mentally unstable. The 1% rule of internet culture is well known, but there's evidence that things are even more skewed than that[1]. It's likely that the design of much of the current web ends up greatly amplifying the voices of some of the most unhealthy people in the community, to the point where they end up driving the discourse. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

zanny 6y ago

This comes from such a place of profound privilege. The Internet has given voice to extremists, anti-intellectualism, conspiracies, echo-chambers, etc. It also largely enabled the movements that have liberated the rights of LGBT and also brought to light the extent of racist police brutality. Trans people as a minority group practically did not exist before the Internet allowed them to interact - because their numbers are relatively few to the total population (something like in 1 in 100) - and because their condition is so heavily stigmatized and persecuted - and now something like 1.5 million people in the US have at least a chance not to be part of a ~66% suicide rate because they can actually figure out what is wrong with them in ways the so great "90s" never would have offered them in the siloed and managed culture prescribed by local and national homogeneity. The 90s were a time of untold ignorance of the masses. The camaraderie of ideology was only in a bubble of white entitlement. It was the decade of mandatory minimums following up the decade of drug war escalation following up the decade of said drug war. The 90s were a time when the totally unchallenged and unaccountable military industrial complex was still nation building around the world, from the Middle East in the first gulf war to American involvement in Cuba, South America, Africa, Asia. A continuation of behavior dating back almost a century since the US became a world power. The people of the US were allowed to be blissfully ignorant of all of this by being consigned to only an approved narrative via increasingly state colluding cable networks. The rise of cable predated the Internet but precipitated partisanship. The election of Reagan was hugely partisan, it was considered an expulsion of socialist and leftist thought entirely from the states as a near climax of the cold war, where as physical tensions waned the ideological coup de grace was being cast by radical globalist capitalism. It nigh enshrined the US as a formal Christian nation. This was all during continued unabated mass murder of minorities. There is a reason all of Martin Luther Kings contemporaries didn't live to see 40. Just the white children of the 70s and 80s were allowed to grow up surrounded by Hasbro and Nintendo in blissful ignorance to injustice around them than be put in a stadium with every other person screaming where you can't help but overhear the oppressed voices those in power would rather prefer be muffled. The Internet is a tool. It can, and has, and will be used for evil and good. It is more a reflection of our culture that being given what is fundamentally both the decommodification of information in material concerns and the total abolition of distance as a restriction on the transfer of information between any and all persons who can afford it that it is treated as a failure for making people accountable to form their own coherent and rational ethics. We, as a society broadly, chose the centralization and gamification and psychological exploitation of Facebook et al because they represented economic growth over social wellbeing or individual happiness. It is a choice we can reverse, collectively, but we likely won't because we as a culture worship money above all else. And Facebook (sec. centralized algorithmitized social media) is very profitable, both in monetary and power dynamic value.

rootusrootus 6y ago

I have two thoughts: 1. Facebook uses real names and people still say the nastiest things, sometimes to their own family. 2. Maybe you have forgotten that the political debate in the 90s was not healthy. That was the era of the Clinton impeachment, and Newt Gingrich brought us to a whole new low in dirty politics.

anigbrowl 6y ago

All that existed during the 90s, just on a much smaller scale. There were toxic corners of usenet and BBS echo chambers. It's just much faster and more efficient (for some definitions of efficiency...).

m12k 6y ago

While reading your comment I had this weird sense of Deja Vu - I've been reading a book about the problems brought on by globalized trade, and there's a surprising number of parallels. Local companies shuttering. Transfer pricing. Tax havens. Moral hazards when company owners live across the globe from customers and employees. Shell companies and fraud. Connecting the world globally in communications and trade has created enormous new opportunities - both good and bad. But we're only now starting to understand the enormity of the latter, and we're pretty much still at square one when it comes to dealing with these new global problems.

partiallypro 6y ago

My theory is that the echo chambers have always exists, they are just much more public now and happen at a slightly faster pace.

shp0ngle 6y ago

> - Foreign interference - when internet use was not widespread, it was difficult to infiltrate a foreign election campaign and interfere with it. Hahahahaha

rapind 6y ago

"Foreign interference" is as old as the hills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention

noduerme 6y ago

I ran a BBS from my parents phone line in the early 90s and had as much techno-optimistic exuberance as you'd ever want. Everything you've said here is absolutely true. But I'd narrow it down to two basic laws: 1. The ability to run a site has fallen into the hands of people who have no idea how it works and aren't responsible for their actions (i.e, their personal stake has to do with share value and not maintaining a community), and 2. More importantly, the ability to share content has become too easy for people who aren't capable of any of the thought or curiosity that used to be required to reach a bare level of competence for their private musings to be translated into easily-accessed public speech. The hurdle of technical competence was a useful, if imperfect, stand-in which barred the vast illiterate masses from creating echo chambers of mutually self-reinforcing ignorance. We all had a right to free speech in the 90s, but no one had a right to be heard. Facebook, Twitter, et al simply lowered the bar to being heard to the point where noise overwhelmed signal.

C19is20 6y ago

"We were one country. One voice". No you weren't.

KKKKkkkk1 6y ago

When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory. If the Internet is making it easier to be unpleasant, then that's great. I don't think we could have the kind of discussion that we are having as a result of George Floyd's killing if we insisted on being pleasant. The United States was founded by unpleasant and inflammatory people.

concordDance 6y ago
We could do without that kind of "discussion". I've mostly just seens people shouting at each other (or preaching to their choirs) about that here on the internet. Lots of sharing of little anecdotal stories and selective stats with lots of cancellations and insults hurled. Can you imagine a "the problem is black culture" right wing conservative trying to have a civil discussion with a BLM protestor in the current climate?
- pasquinelli 6y ago
  they used to do that sort of thing on jerry springer. actually, now i think of it, oprah did it too. how the hell else can a conversation between those two go productively? ever? unless by discussion you mean ordering food or some necessary social intercourse, which does in fact still happen even to this very day.
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dheera 6y ago

Honest questions here: A. Why does Facebook need to change anything ahead of the 2020 elections? Why can't they just run themselves properly all the time? B. Why is Facebook overly concerned with the US elections, but not overly concerned with the Taiwanese, German, Indian, or any other elections? As a global platform it seems sad that they are paying so much extra attention to the US than democracies everywhere else.

trhway 6y ago

>I want to go back to 90's when we had healthy debates between republicans and democrats. We were one country. One voice. And people debated about issues and not about other people's clans. i came here only 20 years ago, so can comment only indirectly - recently watched a Bill Maher standup from something like 91 - and pretty much the only difference was clothes. In particular it was somewhat eerrie how he was talking about Anita Hill while short before me watching it there had been Kavanaugh story.

ekianjo 6y ago

Where do you see anonymity on the internet now? People constantly get doxxed or lose jobs for what they said on social networks.

colordrops 6y ago

Before widespread use of the internet, protests and riots due to police brutality were waved off as "those people acting up". Progressive candidates never got any traction. No one had any real sense of what was happening on the other side of the country, let alone Europe or Asia. Information was controlled and broadcast by a few small entities that were mainly interested in propping up the establishment. Look up operation mockingbird. Let's not be Pollyanna-ish about pre-internet times.

toohotatopic 6y ago

In that picture, there is a cat eating mice and a bird eating frogs. If you look close, it's not just peace and harmony. The nice thing on the internet is that you don't have to listen to the indecent people. It's just that Facebook doesn't offer a comfortable way to filter the input stream. If indecency were a problem, people would move to Mastodon and implement their filters.

pasquinelli 6y ago

- Before widespread internet use, say year 2000, all communities were local. News were local + nation wide, people still focused on their physical proximity of 20 miles that affected them the most. Today, none of my friends read local news. Local news outlets are being bankrupted left and right. talk radio was popular in the 90s and is the same sort of echo chamber that you'd find on facebook. - Anonymity on the internet. People can say whatever they want without attaching their name, face and self-pride. This creates extremely unproductive conversations without consequences. Platforms such as Twitter propel this behavior to new heights. When it was local, you'd lose friends for being unpleasant, you'd lose credibility in your community for being inflammatory. okay, but if the conversation has no consequence then why does it matter? does twitter matter? i know it seems to matter, but is that not just an effect of every individual person who comprises the media being on twitter representing their company or promoting themselves personally? - Foreign interference - when internet use was not widespread, it was difficult to infiltrate a foreign election campaign and interfere with it. this was the point that prompted me to comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention - Data collection and manipulation - Targeted newsfeeds that feed these echo chambers could not possibly reach critical mass before the internet. Echo chambers were physical places to go to - Hells Angels or joining the Evangelical Christian church. No such limits exist now. i really don't understand this. is the idea that all the time you're not in church or at the hells angels club you're soaking up some stuff from the surrounding culture? wouldn't that balance out given how weak of an influence the internet is on one's identity compared to being physically at a place with other people who are physically there, literally forming an actual group of people? - Scale - The internet allows unprecedented scale to operate on. Echo chambers reverb into unimaginable self-resonance. Joe Rogan can say something and millions could hear it. +1M subscriber channels on YouTube span thousands. That was practically impossible unless you were on national TV. you're opining that now there are more echo chambers compared to when there was one? first, that's questionable on its own, but that wasn't how things were before the internet was pervasive. the democrats and republicans as they are now were not different in the 90's. there was a time that there were liberal republicans and conservative democrats, then the democrats veered away from the legacy of the new deal, and the republicans congealed around neo conservatism. now we have two homogenous brands that are competing with each other. this all was in place during the clinton admin, which is why he got impeached for getting a blow job. perhaps your memory is fuzzy on the 90s.

blablabla123 6y ago

But Internet has also centralized a lot after the 90s from the infrastructure side. With a modem it was a no-brainer to expose a service on the open internet, now with DSL Routers being standard it's a bit more difficult - of course this has good reasons also. So people would just try out various server software and run it, today only few people would do that. Even among the tech-savvy population, most would resort to SaaS. Especially P2P software had a hard time, nowadays popular P2P networks seem to be just there to do stuff that would be too risky otherwise instead of actually democratizing information. I mean in the 90s it was normal that people would build a homepage with content they like, now it has to have cutting edge design and be super entertaining for the visitor. So what happens is, only professional Content creators create content like before the internet. (I wouldn't count Twitter messages as content, that's barely enough space to voice a differentiated opinion...) With the local news that's of course a thing, on the other hand my parents and other people of that generation used to usually read a local newspaper and a nation-wide magazine or newspaper. I don't think the group of people actively engaging in local politics has ever been really large. Not sure whether to count sharing political "artifacts" on Facebook should be considered actively participating in politics. It's just clicking one button.

twirlock 6y ago

We've got PR spooks citing Hieronymus Bosch for why we all need to broadcast our identities on the internet, and that's the top comment.

jagannathtech 6y ago

So the democratisation of information and media platform has angered and irked the elitists and gatekeepers of information. Great!!

everdrive 6y ago

>- Before widespread internet use, say year 2000, all communities were local. News were local + nation wide, people still focused on their physical proximity of 20 miles that affected them the most. Today, none of my friends read local news. Local news outlets are being bankrupted left and right. I think this is generally true, and don't want to downplay the enormous role the internet has played in demolishing local communities. However, technology has been chipping away at this problem for a long time: - Radio - Auotomobile - Television, then cable & satellite television All of these have served to break down local barriers and expand a person's sense of community. I've heard this a number of times, and agree strongly: the internet is the worst of a small town, and the worst of a big city combined: moralizing busy-bodies, also filled with the sort of dregs of humanity you only encounter once the population is large enough to reveal the uglier outliers.