11 ms·

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 i

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.
    - vkou 6y ago
      This is wrong on so many levels. 1. Bad ideas spreading does, in fact, harm me. For instance, bad ideas, in the vein of 'COVID is a hoax created by Bill Gates and Soros' and 'Wearing masks is tyrrany' are currently killing people, and are causing economic damage. 2. If speech is so meaningless that ignoring it makes it's impact on my life go away, why do people care about having free speech? How can it both be so meaningless, and so important at the same time? 3. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to ignore politics. Even if you don't care for it, politics cares deeply about you. When politics stops caring about me, I'll stop looking at 'the crap'.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    That is anti-free speech. Not that social networks are bound by the First Amendment, but it's literally preventing me from saying something freely by my own volition if too many people before me already said the exact same thing. Hard pass. It is my understanding that Telegram and Whatsapp are currently actively doing this kind of thing, to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation, according to the companies. I still disagree with this practice on principle. The effects of free speech on free people is increased freedom. If those using free speech are not themselves free, less optimal results may occur; freedom is an inherent good; free actions are judged on their merits and their effects.
    - AgentME 6y ago
      If you go to a bar or a park and play loud music over everyone, or amplify your voice loudly enough to try to have a conversation with everyone simultaneously, then they can kick you out. These locations can define their range of acceptable behavior, and that usually includes a lot of norms about socializing and letting people in their own subgroups be free from egregious distractions. Social media can similarly construct and define its own norms. No single location or specific social media site has a monopoly on speech. We have a large choice between them, and especially online, the barriers to creating your own space are low. Already on Facebook, I generally can't make a post that's shown to other people automatically who are disconnected from my friend group. Is Facebook limiting my free speech by doing that already? Hypothetically, if Facebook did stuff like decreasing the volume, er, show rate, to far-away people if my post is re-shared from my friends and so-on to very far outside of my immediate friend group, is that then censorship?
      - lopmotr 6y ago
        On social media, people choose who to listen to so nobody can "play loud music" to those who don't want to hear it. Censorship is to protect people from wrong-think that they want to hear, not to protect them from what they don't want to hear.
  - jychang 6y ago
    This is one of those ideas that sound good in theory but then immediately causes bad effects. The problem with cutting and pasting isn't bots, it's people. Uncle Joe posting 5 links a day from <bad news source> is completely allowed under your system, and yet if there are a million Uncle Joes on your network (and there definitely is a large portion of the population like that), then you'd just be back to square one.
    - vkou 6y ago
      Uncle Joe is unlikely to have thousands of followers. And if he does, those followers are again, unlikely to each have thousands of followers. Remember spam chain e-mails back in the 0's? There were a lot of stupid viral ideas going around in them, but their reach was rather limited, and they were, generally speaking, not very successful in breaking into the social zeitgeist. "15 million people liked this" is a lot of social proof. "Uncle Joe + a few dozen other people liked this" is not nearly as much social proof... And viral ideas live and die by the amount of social proof they have. It's quite possible that what I suggest may not be the best possible fix. In fact, I'll go so far to say that it's not. But I have a hard time imagining that we currently live in the best possible world, such that no amount of tweaking the parameters of these sites will result in improvement. The current outcomes are horrible.
      - ianwalter 6y ago
        I think some version of this idea has promise. It's kind of like social distancing and COVID-19.
- snapetom 6y ago
  We have that to a certain extent with Nextdoor. They take precautions on invites, neighborhoods you live in, and names. Yet, it's one of the messiest of clusterfucks.
  - javajosh 6y ago
    It's always easier to destroy than to create, and computers are great amplifiers of ideas; it makes sense then that as ideas become more common, more of them would be destructive.
  - volkk 6y ago
    That's a solid point and I wonder if the reason is simply because of the way its marketed and the initial userbase that sort of paved the way for the rest of the app. When I hear of nextdoor, I simply think of local Karens screaming about kids being too loud outside. Sure, there are some decent conversations happening too, but mostly its got that vibe. It's not really touted as a "lets chat about anything" tool, mostly just local neighborhood gossip (at least where I live, and I live in a "cool/hip" neighborhood, can't imagine how bad it is in the suburbs).
    - snapetom 6y ago
      It's terrible at least in my burbs. The cynic in me thinks that Nextdoor is just proof that the fundamental thing that makes social media terrible - being a megaphone for egos, pettiness, and narcism - are not overcome by real identities and scope. In my group, there are people that like to stir the pot, and then there are people that love reacting to the stir.
    - unexpected 6y ago
      NextDoor is the way it is because they don't do any content moderation at NextDoor HQ - they depend on local "Leads" to do the work. Unfortunately, this model doesn't work. The same person that wants run your HOA and drive you crazy is the same person that becomes a Lead. Once one Lead gets in, only they themselves can promote another person to Lead. In my neighborhood, we had one thoughtful Lead, and one insane Lead. The thoughtful lead carefully deliberated about adding more Leads, while the insane Lead picked her cronies - and then eventually "overthrew" the thoughtful Lead. NextDoor has terrible content moderation and no penalties for infringing users. It's absolutely vile, amplifying the most minority of opinions with no consequences.
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I was on the social networks before facebook, we called them bulletin boards, or IRC back then, and one of the things you didn't do was write your real name. You could be closer to people that way, you could share things you didn't want people to know about you, and it worked. The reason it worked, was that you would gather based on your interests and there was no giant company optimizing things for clicks - that is also why the original reddit worked so well: there is a small space for your niche.
  - codethief 6y ago
    Also, you could easily sign up under a new name if need be to start over (e.g., when you lost an argument or overreacted or something). Snowden mentions his in "Permanent Record".
  - iso947 6y ago
    I was on usenet before then and you did use your own name
- SiVal 6y ago
  A better approach than frozen mini-nets is just to require any company above a certain number of users to open its protocol like email. You could then get your access to the system via any ISP, and you would be the one who decided what opinions were allowed to reach you by who you subscribed to without the mandatory "safety service" provided by a single party. They could still offer that service as an option but wouldn't be able to mandate it.
  - rorykoehler 6y ago
    Huge fan of making utilities out of the most successful services as a default modus operandi.
    - SiVal 6y ago
      Yes, and it should apply to all online systems as they grow into the millions of users, because not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network. So not just communications but commerce such as Amazon should be forced to transition (in stages) or stop growing. They could do whatever they wanted with their customers (pricing, who and how to serve, terms of service, etc.) when they were small enough that users could in practice leave them for a competitor just as easily as they could cut off service. But if they allowed themselves to grow to into the millions of users, they would have to gradually transition to purely uninvolved, invisible infrastructure, like an underground water pipe. Their users would deal with smaller middlemen instead of the background infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider would have no way to impose terms of service or philosophical opinions or pricing controls or whatever, which only the middlemen would be allowed, and if the middlemen all conspire, the infrastructure provider wouldn't be able to deny service to a new middleman who offered an alternative. Basically, the small players deal freely with small players, and the biggest players, instead of gaining leverage, would have to serve them more and control or compete less (or remain small and retain the full freedom of a small player).
  - dane-pgp 6y ago
    Interestingly, the GDPR comes close to the requirement you suggest. It defines a "right to data portability"[0] saying that users "shall have the right to have [their] personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." If this were interpreted by a court or regulator (perhaps as part of an EU anti-trust investigation) as a requirement to have new data automatically exported on an on-going basis, then that is very similar to requiring effectively federation between big services. [0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  We could have both. Opt in social networks with real ids for serious stuff and entertainment Social media Free for all Slike we have now for uhhh entertainment.
snapetom 6y ago
Haha. Remember when we all thought that the internet was going to spread democracy, open ideas, and freedom? Good times, good times.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  It did, didn't it? Facebook and Twiter took credit for creating a few democracies in the middle east during the Arab Spring.
  - analyte123 6y ago
    The Arab Spring lead to possibly one democracy (Tunisia), otherwise it lead to minor reforms, horrific civil war (Syria, Yemen, Libya), or a theocratic dictatorship and then a military coup (Egypt).
    - varjag 6y ago
      Syria is largely a result of foreign interference. Namely, Iran early on and Russia since 2015. Without them, Assad would've been done with 7 years ago. Libya, where international community did stop the dictator early, ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife. It's like an A/B test for non-interventionism. The coup in Egypt was so swift that there was no time for then hypothetical Islamist dictatorship to form.
      - analyte123 6y ago
        What makes one thing "foreign interference" and the other the "international community"? Besides that, I agree with you on Syria: many deaths could have been avoided if the US had refrained from sending billions of dollars of money and weapons to various armed groups there.
      - worik 6y ago
        Lybia too the result of foreign interference. Europe and USA
Reedx 6y ago
Yeah, also as a teenager in the 90s I distinctly remember thinking that the internet was going to make everyone smarter. The world's information at our fingertips! It'll unlock a new golden age for the entire globe! Oh, how naive...
- cheald 6y ago
  I think the error is in mistaking knowledge for wisdom. Knowledge is a powerful tool, but without the wisdom to productively apply it, can be used for great destruction.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    These days I see a lot of smarts without knowledge.
- neltnerb 6y ago
  To be fair, we've been alive at this point twice that long... kind of hard to blame 15 year old me for poorly predicting events more than 15 years out. ;-)
- worik 6y ago
  It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed. We are in a "eternal September". It will pass (not literally eternal) I would not go back. It is brilliant
  - djaychela 6y ago
    >It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is, and in addition it's meshed with the bugs in our code (confirmation bias springs to mind) to allow disinformation to spread, and people to seek sources that confirm their beliefs rather than actually inform them of the truth.
    - echelon 6y ago
alexashka 6y ago
It's turned into what most people are. Too bad that most people are a 'terrible neighbourhood'.
boplicity 6y ago
Neighborhood isn't the right metaphor; it is as big as the world now, and should be compared to it. There are many "neigbhorhoods" on the internet. Unfortunately, many of them are quite bad. There are still good ones. For example, I run an online event that brings people together hundreds of people from 6 continents who each write marathon style for 24 hours. That type of event is exactly the "positive" potential of the internet that I dreamed about when I was a kid in the 90s. Unfortunately, one thing is true: the bad don't just dominate, they're way overcrowded.
macintux 6y ago
I received my first online death threat in 1990. Had I realized then it was only going to get worse...
- jodrellblank 6y ago
  ... then what? I think you're implying you would not have used the internet, but that seems unlikely. Since you are still here, you must have decided that the benefits outweigh the death threats?
gorgoiler 6y ago
Build your own new neighborhoods on top of ubiquitous high speed global connectivity, and tune out the mega websites, or even the web parts of The Internet completely. That’s what I do. Whenever I feel afraid I go ping some of my IPv6 addresses or measure the pond temperature remotely, or the current rainfall at school. If you can’t shake yourself away from the web bits, GitHub with its sheer volume of creative expression (even as unpalatable as centralized monocultures may be) is something to love about this current moment in intarwebs history.
sneak 6y ago
Please do not conflate giant corporate walled, censored outrage-farms designed for rubes with “the internet”. You will find it is a very nice place if you block Facebook and Instagram at your router and build and cultivate communities yourself. I am endlessly tired of antisocial people complaining about the modern internet simply because approximately 100% of their society uses it now. If you’re antisocial, that’s fine: seek out smaller, cultivated communities and protocols. But don’t hate on the fact that anyone can talk to anyone else now. That’s a feature, not a bug.

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.
  - vkou 6y ago
    This is wrong on so many levels. 1. Bad ideas spreading does, in fact, harm me. For instance, bad ideas, in the vein of 'COVID is a hoax created by Bill Gates and Soros' and 'Wearing masks is tyrrany' are currently killing people, and are causing economic damage. 2. If speech is so meaningless that ignoring it makes it's impact on my life go away, why do people care about having free speech? How can it both be so meaningless, and so important at the same time? 3. It takes an incredible amount of privilege to ignore politics. Even if you don't care for it, politics cares deeply about you. When politics stops caring about me, I'll stop looking at 'the crap'.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  That is anti-free speech. Not that social networks are bound by the First Amendment, but it's literally preventing me from saying something freely by my own volition if too many people before me already said the exact same thing. Hard pass. It is my understanding that Telegram and Whatsapp are currently actively doing this kind of thing, to stop the spread of misinformation and disinformation, according to the companies. I still disagree with this practice on principle. The effects of free speech on free people is increased freedom. If those using free speech are not themselves free, less optimal results may occur; freedom is an inherent good; free actions are judged on their merits and their effects.
  - AgentME 6y ago
    If you go to a bar or a park and play loud music over everyone, or amplify your voice loudly enough to try to have a conversation with everyone simultaneously, then they can kick you out. These locations can define their range of acceptable behavior, and that usually includes a lot of norms about socializing and letting people in their own subgroups be free from egregious distractions. Social media can similarly construct and define its own norms. No single location or specific social media site has a monopoly on speech. We have a large choice between them, and especially online, the barriers to creating your own space are low. Already on Facebook, I generally can't make a post that's shown to other people automatically who are disconnected from my friend group. Is Facebook limiting my free speech by doing that already? Hypothetically, if Facebook did stuff like decreasing the volume, er, show rate, to far-away people if my post is re-shared from my friends and so-on to very far outside of my immediate friend group, is that then censorship?
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      On social media, people choose who to listen to so nobody can "play loud music" to those who don't want to hear it. Censorship is to protect people from wrong-think that they want to hear, not to protect them from what they don't want to hear.
- jychang 6y ago
  This is one of those ideas that sound good in theory but then immediately causes bad effects. The problem with cutting and pasting isn't bots, it's people. Uncle Joe posting 5 links a day from <bad news source> is completely allowed under your system, and yet if there are a million Uncle Joes on your network (and there definitely is a large portion of the population like that), then you'd just be back to square one.
  - vkou 6y ago
    Uncle Joe is unlikely to have thousands of followers. And if he does, those followers are again, unlikely to each have thousands of followers. Remember spam chain e-mails back in the 0's? There were a lot of stupid viral ideas going around in them, but their reach was rather limited, and they were, generally speaking, not very successful in breaking into the social zeitgeist. "15 million people liked this" is a lot of social proof. "Uncle Joe + a few dozen other people liked this" is not nearly as much social proof... And viral ideas live and die by the amount of social proof they have. It's quite possible that what I suggest may not be the best possible fix. In fact, I'll go so far to say that it's not. But I have a hard time imagining that we currently live in the best possible world, such that no amount of tweaking the parameters of these sites will result in improvement. The current outcomes are horrible.
    - ianwalter 6y ago
      I think some version of this idea has promise. It's kind of like social distancing and COVID-19.
snapetom 6y ago
We have that to a certain extent with Nextdoor. They take precautions on invites, neighborhoods you live in, and names. Yet, it's one of the messiest of clusterfucks.
- javajosh 6y ago
  It's always easier to destroy than to create, and computers are great amplifiers of ideas; it makes sense then that as ideas become more common, more of them would be destructive.
- volkk 6y ago
  That's a solid point and I wonder if the reason is simply because of the way its marketed and the initial userbase that sort of paved the way for the rest of the app. When I hear of nextdoor, I simply think of local Karens screaming about kids being too loud outside. Sure, there are some decent conversations happening too, but mostly its got that vibe. It's not really touted as a "lets chat about anything" tool, mostly just local neighborhood gossip (at least where I live, and I live in a "cool/hip" neighborhood, can't imagine how bad it is in the suburbs).
  - snapetom 6y ago
    It's terrible at least in my burbs. The cynic in me thinks that Nextdoor is just proof that the fundamental thing that makes social media terrible - being a megaphone for egos, pettiness, and narcism - are not overcome by real identities and scope. In my group, there are people that like to stir the pot, and then there are people that love reacting to the stir.
  - unexpected 6y ago
    NextDoor is the way it is because they don't do any content moderation at NextDoor HQ - they depend on local "Leads" to do the work. Unfortunately, this model doesn't work. The same person that wants run your HOA and drive you crazy is the same person that becomes a Lead. Once one Lead gets in, only they themselves can promote another person to Lead. In my neighborhood, we had one thoughtful Lead, and one insane Lead. The thoughtful lead carefully deliberated about adding more Leads, while the insane Lead picked her cronies - and then eventually "overthrew" the thoughtful Lead. NextDoor has terrible content moderation and no penalties for infringing users. It's absolutely vile, amplifying the most minority of opinions with no consequences.
tomjen3 6y ago
I was on the social networks before facebook, we called them bulletin boards, or IRC back then, and one of the things you didn't do was write your real name. You could be closer to people that way, you could share things you didn't want people to know about you, and it worked. The reason it worked, was that you would gather based on your interests and there was no giant company optimizing things for clicks - that is also why the original reddit worked so well: there is a small space for your niche.
- codethief 6y ago
  Also, you could easily sign up under a new name if need be to start over (e.g., when you lost an argument or overreacted or something). Snowden mentions his in "Permanent Record".
- iso947 6y ago
  I was on usenet before then and you did use your own name
SiVal 6y ago
A better approach than frozen mini-nets is just to require any company above a certain number of users to open its protocol like email. You could then get your access to the system via any ISP, and you would be the one who decided what opinions were allowed to reach you by who you subscribed to without the mandatory "safety service" provided by a single party. They could still offer that service as an option but wouldn't be able to mandate it.
- rorykoehler 6y ago
  Huge fan of making utilities out of the most successful services as a default modus operandi.
  - SiVal 6y ago
    Yes, and it should apply to all online systems as they grow into the millions of users, because not surprisingly, network effects are pervasive on the network. So not just communications but commerce such as Amazon should be forced to transition (in stages) or stop growing. They could do whatever they wanted with their customers (pricing, who and how to serve, terms of service, etc.) when they were small enough that users could in practice leave them for a competitor just as easily as they could cut off service. But if they allowed themselves to grow to into the millions of users, they would have to gradually transition to purely uninvolved, invisible infrastructure, like an underground water pipe. Their users would deal with smaller middlemen instead of the background infrastructure provider. The infrastructure provider would have no way to impose terms of service or philosophical opinions or pricing controls or whatever, which only the middlemen would be allowed, and if the middlemen all conspire, the infrastructure provider wouldn't be able to deny service to a new middleman who offered an alternative. Basically, the small players deal freely with small players, and the biggest players, instead of gaining leverage, would have to serve them more and control or compete less (or remain small and retain the full freedom of a small player).
- dane-pgp 6y ago
  Interestingly, the GDPR comes close to the requirement you suggest. It defines a "right to data portability"[0] saying that users "shall have the right to have [their] personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible." If this were interpreted by a court or regulator (perhaps as part of an EU anti-trust investigation) as a requirement to have new data automatically exported on an on-going basis, then that is very similar to requiring effectively federation between big services. [0] https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-20-gdpr/
rorykoehler 6y ago
We could have both. Opt in social networks with real ids for serious stuff and entertainment Social media Free for all Slike we have now for uhhh entertainment.

snapetom 6y ago

Haha. Remember when we all thought that the internet was going to spread democracy, open ideas, and freedom? Good times, good times.

lopmotr 6y ago
It did, didn't it? Facebook and Twiter took credit for creating a few democracies in the middle east during the Arab Spring.
- analyte123 6y ago
  The Arab Spring lead to possibly one democracy (Tunisia), otherwise it lead to minor reforms, horrific civil war (Syria, Yemen, Libya), or a theocratic dictatorship and then a military coup (Egypt).
  - varjag 6y ago
    Syria is largely a result of foreign interference. Namely, Iran early on and Russia since 2015. Without them, Assad would've been done with 7 years ago. Libya, where international community did stop the dictator early, ended up infinitely better even with ongoing civil strife. It's like an A/B test for non-interventionism. The coup in Egypt was so swift that there was no time for then hypothetical Islamist dictatorship to form.
    - analyte123 6y ago
      What makes one thing "foreign interference" and the other the "international community"? Besides that, I agree with you on Syria: many deaths could have been avoided if the US had refrained from sending billions of dollars of money and weapons to various armed groups there.
    - worik 6y ago
      Lybia too the result of foreign interference. Europe and USA

Reedx 6y ago

Yeah, also as a teenager in the 90s I distinctly remember thinking that the internet was going to make everyone smarter. The world's information at our fingertips! It'll unlock a new golden age for the entire globe! Oh, how naive...

cheald 6y ago
I think the error is in mistaking knowledge for wisdom. Knowledge is a powerful tool, but without the wisdom to productively apply it, can be used for great destruction.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  These days I see a lot of smarts without knowledge.
neltnerb 6y ago
To be fair, we've been alive at this point twice that long... kind of hard to blame 15 year old me for poorly predicting events more than 15 years out. ;-)
worik 6y ago
It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed. We are in a "eternal September". It will pass (not literally eternal) I would not go back. It is brilliant
- djaychela 6y ago
  >It has made everyone, if not smarter then, better informed I don't agree with this. While it's made it possible to be better informed, it isn't the case that everyone is, and in addition it's meshed with the bugs in our code (confirmation bias springs to mind) to allow disinformation to spread, and people to seek sources that confirm their beliefs rather than actually inform them of the truth.
  - echelon 6y ago

alexashka 6y ago

It's turned into what most people are. Too bad that most people are a 'terrible neighbourhood'.

boplicity 6y ago

Neighborhood isn't the right metaphor; it is as big as the world now, and should be compared to it. There are many "neigbhorhoods" on the internet. Unfortunately, many of them are quite bad. There are still good ones. For example, I run an online event that brings people together hundreds of people from 6 continents who each write marathon style for 24 hours. That type of event is exactly the "positive" potential of the internet that I dreamed about when I was a kid in the 90s. Unfortunately, one thing is true: the bad don't just dominate, they're way overcrowded.

macintux 6y ago

I received my first online death threat in 1990. Had I realized then it was only going to get worse...

jodrellblank 6y ago
... then what? I think you're implying you would not have used the internet, but that seems unlikely. Since you are still here, you must have decided that the benefits outweigh the death threats?

gorgoiler 6y ago

Build your own new neighborhoods on top of ubiquitous high speed global connectivity, and tune out the mega websites, or even the web parts of The Internet completely. That’s what I do. Whenever I feel afraid I go ping some of my IPv6 addresses or measure the pond temperature remotely, or the current rainfall at school. If you can’t shake yourself away from the web bits, GitHub with its sheer volume of creative expression (even as unpalatable as centralized monocultures may be) is something to love about this current moment in intarwebs history.

sneak 6y ago

Please do not conflate giant corporate walled, censored outrage-farms designed for rubes with “the internet”. You will find it is a very nice place if you block Facebook and Instagram at your router and build and cultivate communities yourself. I am endlessly tired of antisocial people complaining about the modern internet simply because approximately 100% of their society uses it now. If you’re antisocial, that’s fine: seek out smaller, cultivated communities and protocols. But don’t hate on the fact that anyone can talk to anyone else now. That’s a feature, not a bug.