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Just get used to it. It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the I

Just get used to it. It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. I've been on the Internet under a few identities since 1998, and has since stopped much trying hiding. The more your online notoriety goes, the more your IRL consequences snowball. I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!," and at most it will make people chuckle, and remark on you being famous.

xg15 6y ago
> It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. It's been 30 years and so far it hasn't happened. I also very much doubt it will ever happen as this would go against all we know about basic human psychology. Rumor sites such as this one tap into the same mechanism that makes rumors, conspiracy theories and superstions effective since forever: Once people have decided for whatever reason they trust a particular source of information, it will take some exceptional events to make them distrust it again. Someone else simply stating that the source should not be trusted is by far not enough.
- blululu 6y ago
  30 years is not a lot of time. People who grew up with the internet are only now coming into positions of power. A majority of American Internet users grew up in a very different era, and their experiences and expectations may not be reasonable in the current era. Furthermore they have been passing an understanding of media from the 70’s onto future generations. I suspect that it will take quite a lot of time for society at large to adjust. For example, many kids are taught in school that Wikipedia is not reliable since anyone can edit it, whereas corporate publications are more trustworthy since they are written by experts whose reputation is at stake. Wikipedia is not always reliable but it is verifiable/auditable and this is a criteria of trustworthiness that is not widely appreciated for digital literacy.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
    Why aren't they taught that Wikipedia is a tertiary source? It explicitly doesn't aim to be a source of truth, but rather an accurate summary of other sources.
    - Ekaros 6y ago
      Also we should teach that these other sources on softer topics are sometimes editorialized... I don't see any issues using it for many topics, especially in computer-science and hard sciences. But there are biases with some content.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    Wikipedia's reliability largely depends on how much traffic an article gets. The more eyeballs on an article the more likely people are to point out inaccuracies. It's also much more reliable for scientific and technical subjects that aren't really subject to ideological influence or bias. In my experience, niche pages tend to be the most suceptible to uninformed or biased editors.
  - dfraser992 6y ago
    "Corporate publications are more trustworthy..."? My brief exposure to that arena would lead me to disagree strongly (but I am an engineer and not in marketing). Everything in my experience has to be vetted by multiple layers of the organization or at least people versed in the art of saying something while actually saying nothing. "Corporate publications" is a very broad term, of course, so it depends - financial type things, yes, that has to be pretty 'solid' though there is still room to elide and be disingenuous. Whitepapers are essentially just marketing material; being an engineer and thinking like one is really detrimental, thus I just couldn't do that sort of stuff... And some subset of shareholders will always try to interpret <whatever> is any number of ways, so that is another reason to spin things as needed while not seeming to spin things. Wikipedia has a pretty robust set of internal controls and correction policies IMO. It may not be authoritative, but it tends to be a good starting point, unless the topic is obscure etc. My brief exposure to higher education would be that yeah you don't want to let students treat Wikipedia as a primary/only source (the lazy ones have that attitude), but I wouldn't go so far as 'not reliable'. The fundamental issue is ho do you teach people/children to synthesize different sets of information and decide what is useful and what isn't - i.e. to think for themselves? Part of that effort is also teaching them to be self aware enough to understand how their emotions or emotional issues might color their interpretation of the information, never mind evaluating the source of information first... A lot of parents think it is a really bad idea, teaching children to think for themselves and to be self-aware...
ketamine__ 6y ago
> It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. That was the case before the internet exploded in popularity. People were very suspicious.
- Ekaros 6y ago
  It feels weird how things have changed in past 20 years. Like as child we learned not to trust anything on Internet. Or to share our own information... And then everyone started using social media and sharing everything... Maybe we had the right thing then, if you are using your real name or connectible info keep it professional. And lot of information is false... But now it seems all that has gone away...
  - ketamine__ 6y ago
    Remember when everyone believed people on the internet were different than people you met in person? They were to be avoided. I guess you could say the web was treated like the dark web is treated now.
    - HarryHirsch 6y ago
      "The Internet, where men are men, women are men, and underage girls are men working for the FBI"
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
sn41 6y ago
It comes down to what counts as admissible evidence in court. Also on and off, countries have tried asking travelers to submit all online social n/w profiles, under threat of perjury, during immigration. Every time there is a hue and cry, it gets rolled back, but one has to be vigilant.
theknocker 6y ago
>It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. But then how will the intelligentsia use it to brainwash everyone just like they use every other form of media?
sgnelson 6y ago
"It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value." I have to ask, have you heard of Qanon? Do you remember what happened in Washington DC on January 6th? Because I've been on the Internet for quite a while now, and it's not getting better. It's getting worse. Much much worse.
notacoward 6y ago
> people will ... not take any random thing on the Internet at face value Have you been following US politics lately? A great many people really seem to believe that Trump lost the election only because of massive voter fraud, that his enemies are literally harvesting children's blood for adrenochrome. And we're not talking just about random nobodies here. There's at least one member of the US congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene) who is pretty open about believing this stuff, and two or three more who are less obvious about it. I've been on the internet over a decade longer than you, and the trend has never been toward people being more discerning about what they read. I've already written in this thread about being targeted, and it wasn't even the first time. The other, on LambdaMOO, got written up in a book. OP mentions not one but several examples. These campaigns do have real-world consequences, not just chuckles and remarks about fame. Maybe your experience does not include anything like that, but please don't act like your own experience must be the norm and anyone else's must be the anomaly. That's the most egregious kind of selection bias.
Thorrez 6y ago
>I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!," I don't think she did that. What she did (post tons of negative stuff online) did have negative effects when people applied for jobs: > A relative of one lawyer said she spent months applying for jobs in 2019 without getting any offers. The woman, who asked not to be named because she feared Ms. Atas, said her bills piled up. She worried she might lose her home. Then she decided to apply for jobs using her maiden name, under which she hadn’t been attacked. She quickly lined up three interviews and two offers. When applying for a job, the resume screeners don't know much about you, so they rely on what they find online. With coworkers who actually know you, they don't need to rely on stuff online.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The reality is that someone doing a quick Google for a resume screen, potential date, or whatever is going to devote about 30 seconds to the effort and they'll probably move on if they uncover something sketchy rather than launch into a more detailed investigation.

xg15 6y ago

> It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. It's been 30 years and so far it hasn't happened. I also very much doubt it will ever happen as this would go against all we know about basic human psychology. Rumor sites such as this one tap into the same mechanism that makes rumors, conspiracy theories and superstions effective since forever: Once people have decided for whatever reason they trust a particular source of information, it will take some exceptional events to make them distrust it again. Someone else simply stating that the source should not be trusted is by far not enough.

blululu 6y ago
30 years is not a lot of time. People who grew up with the internet are only now coming into positions of power. A majority of American Internet users grew up in a very different era, and their experiences and expectations may not be reasonable in the current era. Furthermore they have been passing an understanding of media from the 70’s onto future generations. I suspect that it will take quite a lot of time for society at large to adjust. For example, many kids are taught in school that Wikipedia is not reliable since anyone can edit it, whereas corporate publications are more trustworthy since they are written by experts whose reputation is at stake. Wikipedia is not always reliable but it is verifiable/auditable and this is a criteria of trustworthiness that is not widely appreciated for digital literacy.
- maxerickson 6y ago
  Why aren't they taught that Wikipedia is a tertiary source? It explicitly doesn't aim to be a source of truth, but rather an accurate summary of other sources.
  - Ekaros 6y ago
    Also we should teach that these other sources on softer topics are sometimes editorialized... I don't see any issues using it for many topics, especially in computer-science and hard sciences. But there are biases with some content.
- manfredo 6y ago
  Wikipedia's reliability largely depends on how much traffic an article gets. The more eyeballs on an article the more likely people are to point out inaccuracies. It's also much more reliable for scientific and technical subjects that aren't really subject to ideological influence or bias. In my experience, niche pages tend to be the most suceptible to uninformed or biased editors.
- dfraser992 6y ago
  "Corporate publications are more trustworthy..."? My brief exposure to that arena would lead me to disagree strongly (but I am an engineer and not in marketing). Everything in my experience has to be vetted by multiple layers of the organization or at least people versed in the art of saying something while actually saying nothing. "Corporate publications" is a very broad term, of course, so it depends - financial type things, yes, that has to be pretty 'solid' though there is still room to elide and be disingenuous. Whitepapers are essentially just marketing material; being an engineer and thinking like one is really detrimental, thus I just couldn't do that sort of stuff... And some subset of shareholders will always try to interpret <whatever> is any number of ways, so that is another reason to spin things as needed while not seeming to spin things. Wikipedia has a pretty robust set of internal controls and correction policies IMO. It may not be authoritative, but it tends to be a good starting point, unless the topic is obscure etc. My brief exposure to higher education would be that yeah you don't want to let students treat Wikipedia as a primary/only source (the lazy ones have that attitude), but I wouldn't go so far as 'not reliable'. The fundamental issue is ho do you teach people/children to synthesize different sets of information and decide what is useful and what isn't - i.e. to think for themselves? Part of that effort is also teaching them to be self aware enough to understand how their emotions or emotional issues might color their interpretation of the information, never mind evaluating the source of information first... A lot of parents think it is a really bad idea, teaching children to think for themselves and to be self-aware...

ketamine__ 6y ago

> It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. That was the case before the internet exploded in popularity. People were very suspicious.

Ekaros 6y ago
It feels weird how things have changed in past 20 years. Like as child we learned not to trust anything on Internet. Or to share our own information... And then everyone started using social media and sharing everything... Maybe we had the right thing then, if you are using your real name or connectible info keep it professional. And lot of information is false... But now it seems all that has gone away...
- ketamine__ 6y ago
  Remember when everyone believed people on the internet were different than people you met in person? They were to be avoided. I guess you could say the web was treated like the dark web is treated now.
  - HarryHirsch 6y ago
    "The Internet, where men are men, women are men, and underage girls are men working for the FBI"

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

sn41 6y ago

It comes down to what counts as admissible evidence in court. Also on and off, countries have tried asking travelers to submit all online social n/w profiles, under threat of perjury, during immigration. Every time there is a hue and cry, it gets rolled back, but one has to be vigilant.

theknocker 6y ago

>It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value. But then how will the intelligentsia use it to brainwash everyone just like they use every other form of media?

sgnelson 6y ago

"It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value." I have to ask, have you heard of Qanon? Do you remember what happened in Washington DC on January 6th? Because I've been on the Internet for quite a while now, and it's not getting better. It's getting worse. Much much worse.

notacoward 6y ago

> people will ... not take any random thing on the Internet at face value Have you been following US politics lately? A great many people really seem to believe that Trump lost the election only because of massive voter fraud, that his enemies are literally harvesting children's blood for adrenochrome. And we're not talking just about random nobodies here. There's at least one member of the US congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene) who is pretty open about believing this stuff, and two or three more who are less obvious about it. I've been on the internet over a decade longer than you, and the trend has never been toward people being more discerning about what they read. I've already written in this thread about being targeted, and it wasn't even the first time. The other, on LambdaMOO, got written up in a book. OP mentions not one but several examples. These campaigns do have real-world consequences, not just chuckles and remarks about fame. Maybe your experience does not include anything like that, but please don't act like your own experience must be the norm and anyone else's must be the anomaly. That's the most egregious kind of selection bias.

Thorrez 6y ago

>I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!," I don't think she did that. What she did (post tons of negative stuff online) did have negative effects when people applied for jobs: > A relative of one lawyer said she spent months applying for jobs in 2019 without getting any offers. The woman, who asked not to be named because she feared Ms. Atas, said her bills piled up. She worried she might lose her home. Then she decided to apply for jobs using her maiden name, under which she hadn’t been attacked. She quickly lined up three interviews and two offers. When applying for a job, the resume screeners don't know much about you, so they rely on what they find online. With coworkers who actually know you, they don't need to rely on stuff online.

ghaff 6y ago
The reality is that someone doing a quick Google for a resume screen, potential date, or whatever is going to devote about 30 seconds to the effort and they'll probably move on if they uncover something sketchy rather than launch into a more detailed investigation.