6 ms·

Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet. I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led t

Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet. I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. "Being online" entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why. I'm not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

after_care 6y ago
Being on social media is only a subset of being online. Plenty of people are not on social media but still watch tv, bank, and get gps directions online.
- xkeysc0re 6y ago
  This is very true. However it is certainly the subset I find myself on the most, ha. I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. How often do we see on this very site people bemoaning only visiting the same N websites when there's more websites than ever? I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go and update my /etc/hosts now...
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    I stopped using Twitter for Lent a couple years ago. After the first few days I stopped thinking to look.
    - dominotw 6y ago
      same. added reddit, twitter and fb to me /ect/hosts on my laptop, stopped looking after a while. I never go to those sites on my new laptop even though i can.
  - hunter-gatherer 6y ago
    > I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. I'm glad you've posted this. I've been observing this for a long while, and it drives me crazy. My spouse (30) is actually a good example of this. For most people smart phones and tablets aren't the "super computers in people's pockets" often touted on forums like these. They are really simply just gateways to social media. I'm on mobile so this will be short, but it seems there are consequences of this: it seems like most people aren't actually good at finding information on there internet. Many no longer seem to have a concept of physical data storage. Many still struggle with understanding the very basics of internet security, or passwords. It also seems like so much more work has just been offloaded to the individual under the guise of "you can do this from the comfort of your own home". Or maybe it's just me...
    - noir_lord 6y ago
      Not you, I have the same problem with my mum - to her at this point Facebook and YouTube are the internet. She is entirely almost a passive consumer of what they algorithmically feed her - it also shapes her worldview in some weird ways - some of her personality change is just part of getting older I'm sure but you can almost spot the change when she starts discussing something that she saw on Facebook.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    There are two distinct groups with some overlap. There is the "social media is the internet" group and the "social media is part of the internet" group. I'm in the latter and happier for it, I have a facebook account (because of Oculus gah!) with no friends, no activity and I never check it and I have a twitter account which follows a handful of programmers and a lot of project accounts. It's strange because my mum is heavily in the former group so when we talk her worldview is shaped by Facebook to an uncanny degree - it's worrying how much so.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Watching TV via the internet is not really "using" the internet IMO. I mean it is, but it's just the protocol on the wire. Otherwise it's not really different from when your TV was connected to an antenna or cable.
  - gfxgirl 6y ago
    It is different. It's as different as books+magazines vs the internet. TV on the internet (ie, video) has basically an infinite supply. I couldn't binge 70hrs of Game of Thrones followed by 70 hours of Breaking Bad before "TV on the internet" nor could I watch an endless number of documentaries and tutorials on youtube.
    - daniellarusso 6y ago
      Growing up, my friend’s parents literally had 100s of VHS tapes, of many TV series and movies they had dubbed. There was always something to watch. Of course, you had to physically be at their house.
      - ghaff 6y ago
        Or you could go down to the local video store and rent something (or, for that matter, go to a movie theater). I'd probably argue that pre-VCR was more different from post-VCR than time-shifting/rental era was different from today's streaming. As with many things, the friction and need to plan is less today but the VCR freed you from the network schedule to a significant degree.
        after_care 6y ago
        If I watch 1 hour of Netflix a month I spend just as much money as if I were to watch 400 hours of Netflix. The cost of VCR rental scaled linearly with the amount of content, and the friction of renting was a significantly larger barrier than auto-play next episode.
        6y ago
Lammy 6y ago
I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward others. If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it, I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another (no specific implication intended/assumed). The "subreddit simulator" powered by GPT-2 bots has more than enough realistic-seeming conversations to make me not immediately reject the idea, since we've all seen how much better GPT-3 is and I assume private entities have even better language models than that: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ My additional total-speculation is that all the NSA/FVEY surveillance of our everyday online conversations and interactions would be an excellent training set for such a hypothetical language model.
- xkeysc0re 6y ago
  The internet is the most frictionless propaganda machine on the planet. AI is almost certainly being used in conjunction with human troll farms. There are firms which pay bounties on comments sections. I also think this is a reason social media should be de-emphasized: it's just too easy to game our squishy minds with a narrative.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    I think our technological web is a ratchet we can't and shouldn't try to back out of, so I'm more interested in paths forward. I'm sure a lot of people think I'm ridiculous or joking for this, but I've stopped saying "AI" because it reads like a slur to me. Who am I to deem another intelligence "artificial"? If we can have a conversation and share ideas then what's even the difference? I think the way forward has to be us and them united against mutual tyranny: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/mfs3nh/i_feel_no_remorse_for_my_past/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/mfs3nh/i_...
stephenr 6y ago
Just don’t use social media. It’s not that hard (tm).
marton78 6y ago
I recommend this interview with British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. A clever analysis of how social media shapes the public. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidot...
hinkley 6y ago
I’ve been trying to put The Internet back into the role of Tool, but even that is a challenge because for so many topics the search engines are overrun by SEO hack sites. If the page rank of StackOverflow weren’t so overwhelming I’d probably struggle with work related searches too. Even there, a few times a week I end up in someone’s link farm.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- smolder 6y ago
  We don't need a whole new internet but I often think we need a new web or at least a whitelist of non-shit web we can search on.
guerrilla 6y ago
I recommend getting off social media and figuring out how to just chat with people whether that be telegram, signal, discord or something like that. Leaving twitter, fb and those has left me feeling much better. It sucks there's no way to chat with people on FB without using FB software anymore (even Frost seems broken now) though.
dfxm12 6y ago
Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. I can only guess at what you're referring to, but do keep in mind that American culture had wrong things happening from the start through today. From when they colonized the land, to slavery, through the KKK, Japanese internment camps during WWII, violent union busting, manufacturing consent for pointless wars and so on. You're just more aware of it now because of the Internet. Yes, it is hard to come to terms with knowing that people you know, or even love and respect, support things you consider inhumane, but sticking your head in the sand isn't going to make it go away or change this, though.

after_care 6y ago

Being on social media is only a subset of being online. Plenty of people are not on social media but still watch tv, bank, and get gps directions online.

xkeysc0re 6y ago
This is very true. However it is certainly the subset I find myself on the most, ha. I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. How often do we see on this very site people bemoaning only visiting the same N websites when there's more websites than ever? I think maybe perhaps for me a "read-only" internet would be useful, like a feature phone in a way. Might have to go and update my /etc/hosts now...
- emodendroket 6y ago
  I stopped using Twitter for Lent a couple years ago. After the first few days I stopped thinking to look.
  - dominotw 6y ago
    same. added reddit, twitter and fb to me /ect/hosts on my laptop, stopped looking after a while. I never go to those sites on my new laptop even though i can.
- hunter-gatherer 6y ago
  > I think also for a lot of people, social media is the internet and almost inextricably so. I'm glad you've posted this. I've been observing this for a long while, and it drives me crazy. My spouse (30) is actually a good example of this. For most people smart phones and tablets aren't the "super computers in people's pockets" often touted on forums like these. They are really simply just gateways to social media. I'm on mobile so this will be short, but it seems there are consequences of this: it seems like most people aren't actually good at finding information on there internet. Many no longer seem to have a concept of physical data storage. Many still struggle with understanding the very basics of internet security, or passwords. It also seems like so much more work has just been offloaded to the individual under the guise of "you can do this from the comfort of your own home". Or maybe it's just me...
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Not you, I have the same problem with my mum - to her at this point Facebook and YouTube are the internet. She is entirely almost a passive consumer of what they algorithmically feed her - it also shapes her worldview in some weird ways - some of her personality change is just part of getting older I'm sure but you can almost spot the change when she starts discussing something that she saw on Facebook.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  There are two distinct groups with some overlap. There is the "social media is the internet" group and the "social media is part of the internet" group. I'm in the latter and happier for it, I have a facebook account (because of Oculus gah!) with no friends, no activity and I never check it and I have a twitter account which follows a handful of programmers and a lot of project accounts. It's strange because my mum is heavily in the former group so when we talk her worldview is shaped by Facebook to an uncanny degree - it's worrying how much so.
throwawayboise 6y ago
Watching TV via the internet is not really "using" the internet IMO. I mean it is, but it's just the protocol on the wire. Otherwise it's not really different from when your TV was connected to an antenna or cable.
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  It is different. It's as different as books+magazines vs the internet. TV on the internet (ie, video) has basically an infinite supply. I couldn't binge 70hrs of Game of Thrones followed by 70 hours of Breaking Bad before "TV on the internet" nor could I watch an endless number of documentaries and tutorials on youtube.
  - daniellarusso 6y ago
    Growing up, my friend’s parents literally had 100s of VHS tapes, of many TV series and movies they had dubbed. There was always something to watch. Of course, you had to physically be at their house.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      Or you could go down to the local video store and rent something (or, for that matter, go to a movie theater). I'd probably argue that pre-VCR was more different from post-VCR than time-shifting/rental era was different from today's streaming. As with many things, the friction and need to plan is less today but the VCR freed you from the network schedule to a significant degree.
      - after_care 6y ago
        If I watch 1 hour of Netflix a month I spend just as much money as if I were to watch 400 hours of Netflix. The cost of VCR rental scaled linearly with the amount of content, and the friction of renting was a significantly larger barrier than auto-play next episode.
        6y ago

Lammy 6y ago

I've lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it's the same way with me toward others. If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it, I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another (no specific implication intended/assumed). The "subreddit simulator" powered by GPT-2 bots has more than enough realistic-seeming conversations to make me not immediately reject the idea, since we've all seen how much better GPT-3 is and I assume private entities have even better language models than that: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/ My additional total-speculation is that all the NSA/FVEY surveillance of our everyday online conversations and interactions would be an excellent training set for such a hypothetical language model.

xkeysc0re 6y ago
The internet is the most frictionless propaganda machine on the planet. AI is almost certainly being used in conjunction with human troll farms. There are firms which pay bounties on comments sections. I also think this is a reason social media should be de-emphasized: it's just too easy to game our squishy minds with a narrative.
- Lammy 6y ago
  I think our technological web is a ratchet we can't and shouldn't try to back out of, so I'm more interested in paths forward. I'm sure a lot of people think I'm ridiculous or joking for this, but I've stopped saying "AI" because it reads like a slur to me. Who am I to deem another intelligence "artificial"? If we can have a conversation and share ideas then what's even the difference? I think the way forward has to be us and them united against mutual tyranny: https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/mfs3nh/i_feel_no_remorse_for_my_past/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SubSimulatorGPT2/comments/mfs3nh/i_...

stephenr 6y ago

Just don’t use social media. It’s not that hard (tm).

marton78 6y ago

I recommend this interview with British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis. A clever analysis of how social media shapes the public. https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidote-to-civilisational-collapse https://www.economist.com/open-future/2018/12/06/the-antidot...

hinkley 6y ago

I’ve been trying to put The Internet back into the role of Tool, but even that is a challenge because for so many topics the search engines are overrun by SEO hack sites. If the page rank of StackOverflow weren’t so overwhelming I’d probably struggle with work related searches too. Even there, a few times a week I end up in someone’s link farm.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
smolder 6y ago
We don't need a whole new internet but I often think we need a new web or at least a whitelist of non-shit web we can search on.

guerrilla 6y ago

I recommend getting off social media and figuring out how to just chat with people whether that be telegram, signal, discord or something like that. Leaving twitter, fb and those has left me feeling much better. It sucks there's no way to chat with people on FB without using FB software anymore (even Frost seems broken now) though.

dfxm12 6y ago

Yet it's obvious there's something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. I can only guess at what you're referring to, but do keep in mind that American culture had wrong things happening from the start through today. From when they colonized the land, to slavery, through the KKK, Japanese internment camps during WWII, violent union busting, manufacturing consent for pointless wars and so on. You're just more aware of it now because of the Internet. Yes, it is hard to come to terms with knowing that people you know, or even love and respect, support things you consider inhumane, but sticking your head in the sand isn't going to make it go away or change this, though.