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> "...the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now..." that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we

> "...the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now..." that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we can draw a simple one here for illustrative purposes: there's public and private information, and omni-indexing/-archiving is the "wrong course" only for private information, with private information encompassing more than just sensitive data, including any personal information a person chooses not to divulge publicly. humanity has absolutely advanced from indexing all public information, even considering the exponential rise of disinformation and idle bullshit. instantaneous knowledge coalition and mass multiway communication are the two astonishing advances stemming from the internet. and now we're dealing with the inevitable but unintended negative consequences of these amazing advances.

floatingatoll 5y ago
Your chosen dichotomy is both common and insufficient, and I am with you in disliking it. The dichotomy I'm considering is threefold instead: Worldwide, Community, and Secret. This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context. My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them. What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.) ps. I forgot Secrets! Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.

floatingatoll 5y ago

Your chosen dichotomy is both common and insufficient, and I am with you in disliking it. The dichotomy I'm considering is threefold instead: Worldwide, Community, and Secret. This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context. My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them. What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.) ps. I forgot Secrets! Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.