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> But it's also our window into basically the entire wealth of human knowledge If you're consuming all of your coverage through reddit, I think you're conflati

by fein 5y ago

> But it's also our window into basically the entire wealth of human knowledge If you're consuming all of your coverage through reddit, I think you're conflating one side's propaganda with "knowledge". It (the internet) used to be a window into a wealth of human knowledge, but at the current state of things it is merely another vector to help you mainline <insert large company's> propaganda engine and, for most that don't run ad blockers, stuff you full of advertisements. Ten, maybe 15 years ago your statement would have been more true, but the internet has become progressively smaller and the content more curated by big money interests than any time in the past.

fartcannon 5y ago
Reddit and Facebook basically the same thing these days. Both seem to have audiences 35+, both are full of PR/propaganda and both have valuable niche information. The internet sucks now, basically.
- emteycz 5y ago
  There is now an infinitely larger internet that's not Facebook or Reddit than there ever was. The internet is just as awesome as it used to be, and now the awesomeness has virtually infinite scale. Just don't visit Reddit and Facebook (and Twitter).
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    I am a millennial, the source of reddits power. I am also blinded by it. How do you access the rest of this infinitely awesome internet? Google searching for things doesn't help me and it seems like most new things are behind locks/discord instances.
    - Shared404 5y ago
      Context: Am early 20's. Am also on mobile atm, so sorry for any bad formatting. Follow links, not search engines. Use HN, or link aggregators to find sites interesting to you. I've founf goodwebsites.org to have some interesting reads - but that is only curated by page quality, not content. Some sites linked there have very innacurate content much like the rest of the internet. Also, https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ has a list of sites, many of which are interesting.
      - fartcannon 5y ago
        Thanks! I'll look around. Tragic that search engines no longer work.
        Shared404 5y ago
        No problem. It's how it goes. Any system that can be gamed will be - it's just a matter of time. I do have a short list of search engines at https://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/ https://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/ , some of those may help on occasion as well.
    - notreallyserio 5y ago
      I use kagi and it's "noncommerial" lens that attempts to surface some of the old-school content internet randos create. It works pretty well. (It does end up including some commercially sourced content but IME it's less of the typical ad-sponsored nonsense.)
- mdoms 5y ago
  My impression of Reddit is that it's riddled with 15-21 year olds. I wonder if there's some accurate demographic data available.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Could be. Maybe it's just the sub's I find myself in. Or some kind of selection bias.
- nunez 5y ago
  I recently re-discovered the Wikipedia Current Events portal, located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events. It’s an unbiased index of major events happening in the world crowdsourced and vetted by Wikipedia contributors with sources to the news articles they came from. This + non-front Reddit subs like /r/PoliticalDiscussion + Hacker News gives me as much of a 360 degree sphere of coverage as I can come up with that doesn’t take hours to curate and vet. That said, yes, the Internet is an ad-optimized heap of disinformation, misinformation, and FUD, generally speaking. (I found /r/politicaldiscussion and /r/neutralpolitics by searching for “unbiased political subreddits site:reddit.com” on Google. I always recommend newcomers to Reddit to unsubscribe from all of the default subreddits (as they are heavily manipulated) and use Google to find subs relevant to their interests.)
- ianbutler 5y ago
  The current internet is captured in semi open but hard to search and discover groups like Slack, Discord, Telegram, Facebook groups etc. That’s where the majority of useful information has moved and just like before Google indexed classical webpages, there’s currently nothing indexing that information because the gates are pretty well defended and the current players don’t have an interest or are actively trying to keep those gates up.
shadowgovt 5y ago
The Internet used to be full of potential, but very empty. I remember. It took a ton of human labor (literal billions of human-hours) to get as much on as we have now. Unfortunately, that, of course, means for any given topic, the signal-noise ratio suffers (consider, in one's own mind, how much knowledge is useful and how much is pop music lyrics).

by fein 5y ago

fartcannon 5y ago

Reddit and Facebook basically the same thing these days. Both seem to have audiences 35+, both are full of PR/propaganda and both have valuable niche information. The internet sucks now, basically.

emteycz 5y ago
There is now an infinitely larger internet that's not Facebook or Reddit than there ever was. The internet is just as awesome as it used to be, and now the awesomeness has virtually infinite scale. Just don't visit Reddit and Facebook (and Twitter).
- fartcannon 5y ago
  I am a millennial, the source of reddits power. I am also blinded by it. How do you access the rest of this infinitely awesome internet? Google searching for things doesn't help me and it seems like most new things are behind locks/discord instances.
  - Shared404 5y ago
    Context: Am early 20's. Am also on mobile atm, so sorry for any bad formatting. Follow links, not search engines. Use HN, or link aggregators to find sites interesting to you. I've founf goodwebsites.org to have some interesting reads - but that is only curated by page quality, not content. Some sites linked there have very innacurate content much like the rest of the internet. Also, https://1mb.club/ https://1mb.club/ has a list of sites, many of which are interesting.
    - fartcannon 5y ago
      Thanks! I'll look around. Tragic that search engines no longer work.
      - Shared404 5y ago
        No problem. It's how it goes. Any system that can be gamed will be - it's just a matter of time. I do have a short list of search engines at https://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/ https://a-shared-404.com/other-stuff/ , some of those may help on occasion as well.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    I use kagi and it's "noncommerial" lens that attempts to surface some of the old-school content internet randos create. It works pretty well. (It does end up including some commercially sourced content but IME it's less of the typical ad-sponsored nonsense.)
mdoms 5y ago
My impression of Reddit is that it's riddled with 15-21 year olds. I wonder if there's some accurate demographic data available.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Could be. Maybe it's just the sub's I find myself in. Or some kind of selection bias.
nunez 5y ago
I recently re-discovered the Wikipedia Current Events portal, located here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events. It’s an unbiased index of major events happening in the world crowdsourced and vetted by Wikipedia contributors with sources to the news articles they came from. This + non-front Reddit subs like /r/PoliticalDiscussion + Hacker News gives me as much of a 360 degree sphere of coverage as I can come up with that doesn’t take hours to curate and vet. That said, yes, the Internet is an ad-optimized heap of disinformation, misinformation, and FUD, generally speaking. (I found /r/politicaldiscussion and /r/neutralpolitics by searching for “unbiased political subreddits site:reddit.com” on Google. I always recommend newcomers to Reddit to unsubscribe from all of the default subreddits (as they are heavily manipulated) and use Google to find subs relevant to their interests.)
ianbutler 5y ago
The current internet is captured in semi open but hard to search and discover groups like Slack, Discord, Telegram, Facebook groups etc. That’s where the majority of useful information has moved and just like before Google indexed classical webpages, there’s currently nothing indexing that information because the gates are pretty well defended and the current players don’t have an interest or are actively trying to keep those gates up.

shadowgovt 5y ago

The Internet used to be full of potential, but very empty. I remember. It took a ton of human labor (literal billions of human-hours) to get as much on as we have now. Unfortunately, that, of course, means for any given topic, the signal-noise ratio suffers (consider, in one's own mind, how much knowledge is useful and how much is pop music lyrics).