14 ms·
Let the internet be grimy
- nuc1e0n 3y agoChaos can certainly be destructive. But chaos can also be creative.
- ilikeitdark 3y agoI for one, miss the old, grimey internet. Reddit is/was so good because of the possibility that you might find something disturbing while using it. Just about everyone is represented on there. YouTube was also much better when the sketchiness was easier to accidentally run into.
- swah 3y agoIt happens with Youtube sometimes, but you have to search for the exact name of the creator you heard somewhere else. Or you find very "pure creators" when you search how to fix your toilet.
- hnick 3y agoWatching YouTubers come up with weird euphemisms to avoid saying "COVID" (to avoid the risk of automatic demonetisation) drove home how much self censorship there must be around content creation in general. I've also seen a few joke about whether they're allowed to swear or not yet since apparently the algorithm cares if they swear in the first 15 seconds, lest an easily damaged listener finds them by mistake.
- derefr 3y agoApparently you can't monetize a YouTube video that says the word "kill", even in the context of educational videos about wildlife ecology. So you get serious educational content creators saying that a bird "un-alives" a fish.
- userbinator 3y agoIf only Orwell was still alive today.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jrmg 3y agoThis sounds like an urban legend.
- tourmalinetaco 3y agoI know true crime youtubers tend to avoid the word like a plague, so take that for what you will.
- bitwize 3y agoI've seen it myself. Casual Geographic does this a lot: https://m.youtube.com/@mndiaye_97 https://m.youtube.com/@mndiaye_97 The thing is, the phrase has an origin in a parody of censorship. In one episode of Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man teams up with Deadpool. Deadpool, being fourth-wall-savvy and well aware that he is in an animated kids' show, talks rather frankly about his plans to "un-alive" the criminal they are pursuing. To which Spider-Man responds "Un-alive... you mean KILL him?!" Mr. Pool was applying standards and practices to his own speech that were common on 80s and 90s animated programs, in which characters obviously wielding rifles would assiduously avoid talking about killing or death. And now people are using his neologism to avoid being punished on a video platform ostensibly for adults primarily.
- RobotToaster 3y agoApparently you can't mention silencers at all? which even as a non American seems weird.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoAssuming you're talking about gun silencers/suppressors, the US has a very confusing history with them in general. The way in which they made it into Congress's list of heavily regulated weapons is an interesting story of inept politicians at work. I've also never understood why suppressors would be seen as anything other than a good thing, if we wanted to regulate them it'd make more sense to require them for carry guns rather than make them hard to get. Shooting an unsuppressed handgun without hearing protection is really bad for your hearing, and carrying a surpressed pistols also much trickier if we're concerned with how many guns are legally carried in public.
- Nasrudith 3y agoYou know the abundance of Hollywood bullshit on AI going to kill us all? The same thing happened long ago with silencers as they forget about hearing damage from firearms because it isn't seen in movies but worry about "the dangers" of firearms being suppressed to non-hearing damaging levels by equating it with the classic "mouse-fart" level of volume. Hollywood has a lot to answer for in its damage to epistemology.
- flagrant_taco 3y agoAs far as I understand it these restrictions on suppressors predate any meaningful impact of Hollywood action films. Suppressors were included in restrictions from the prohibition era largely targeting the fear of the use of automatic weapons by organized crime (the mob). Feds pictured everyone in the mafia carrying military-grade Thompsons (Tommy guns) despite the fact that they were horribly expensive, produced in small quantities, and didn't sell well. There are actually congressional record of the hearings for the weapons law that make clear no justification was given for including suppressors, it just wasn't pressed by anyone involved.
- bobsmooth 3y agoCheckout rdrama.net
- Loocid 3y ago>Reddit is/was so good because of the possibility that you might find something disturbing while using it. Why do you consider that good? There are plenty of places on the internet where you can find disturbing content, why does it have to something you can just stumble upon?
- sli 3y agoBecause it's a relatively safe level of risk compared to, say, 4chan's /b/. People love to dabble in risk in safe ways. I'd argue that's what many genres of fiction are explicitly for, e.g. horror, violent games, etc.
- Loocid 3y agoBut it's only that way because Reddit placed limits which goes against the "let the internet be grimy" hot-take. Back in the day there were subreddits that would rival the depravity of /b/.
- watwut 3y agoThey never stayed contained I their own subs. They just needed to go out of their way to subs of their perceived enemies.
- Tao3300 3y agoYeah, we need something where the risk level is a little lower than the "it's a crime if I don't call the FBI and tell them I saw this" level.
- andsoitis 3y ago> Why do you consider that good? There are plenty of places on the internet where you can find disturbing content, why does it have to something you can just stumble upon? Because what's disturbing to me is not disturbing to someone else. Because, just like when I walk in a city, I run into interesting and surprising and occasionally things that test my sensibilities. This is good because nobody can decide on my behalf what I should find disturbing or not.
- LexiMax 3y agoOne of the reasons I find myself continuing to use the fediverse is because in many ways it reminds me of the old internet. There are parts of it that are rowdy and salacious like old Reddit and 4chan, but if just want a shared space to nerd out with like-minded people about hobbies and shared interests, you can have the early-2000's hobby forum experience as well. And it's all very brand-unfriendly - there's relatively few celebrities, no advertising space to sell, no algorithm to optimize for, and nothing preventing a possible promotional post from a corporate account from appearing next to something NSFW in someone's timeline if that's who the user is following.
- nefarious_ends 3y agowhere can I get started learning more about this fediverse?
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoFor the most early-Reddit-like experience, I would recommend Lemmy. I was kinda interested in checking it out for a while but suffered from a bit of choice paralysis not knowing where to start, but since most of them are federated, you see content from a bunch of instances at once, so that removes a bit of the risk. I ended up creating an account on lemmy.world which is (afaik) the largest instance by user count. Beehaw is (afaik) the second largest, and it has more of a "safety"/highly moderated approach - which is one of the reasons I wanted to distance myself from Reddit, so I crossed that one off my list. This map was posted on HN if you want to examine the relative sizes of the instances and see the lay of the land: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/ https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
- Eavolution 3y agoPersonally I prefer using kbin, that's another option. Kbin and lemmy both can communicate so it doesn't matter which you use. feddit.de and kbin.social are kbin instances.
- twic 3y agoGreat map! Sadly retarded.dev seems to be down, and there's no way i'm visiting cybercrime.zip at work.
- Tao3300 3y agoCan I find out on Threads what happens to a man when his shirtsleeve gets caught in an industrial lathe? Can I find offensive jokes? Or will I just get headlines about someone who got in trouble for an offensive joke? Can I post the raunchy limerick I've never written down for fear of being cancelled, doxxed, etc?
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> Can I post the raunchy limerick I've never written down for fear of being cancelled, doxxed, etc? You can already do that on Facebook. Whether you see any consequences is more of a function of whether someone sets out to get you for something than it is of what you write.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 3y ago[flagged]
- chromanoid 3y agoWhile I agree with the sentiment of the article I can do without link traps that take me to a chainsaw execution gif under the guise of wedding bloopers.
- version_five 3y agoThis was lightly discussed yesterday under a different title, the new one reflects the content better. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36649965 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36649965
- rodgerd 3y agoOne of the things that Twitter used to do well was have a balance of pseudonymity and real identities, and allow multiple identities per person; the latter of those particularly reflects how humans actually work, with separate personae for separate contexts. Other than ownership, I think that the worst thing for Thread is that carries over Facebook's real identity obsession.
- bobsmooth 3y agoBut what if I read something that upsets me? People shouldn't be allowed to say anything that might offend my delicate sensitivities.
- 8jef 3y agoSeeing people getting upset at nothing is always fun to watch.
- irishloop 3y agoWho decides what's nothing or what isn't? Shall the bully be the arbiter of what is pain or what counts? Can people just say anything and if you don't like it its your problem?
- asynchronous 3y agoOn the internet you can simply turn off the device and stop listening.
- 8jef 3y agoNothing is in the eye of the watcher, neither arbiter nor bully, presumably.
- rodgerd 3y agoThat large numbers of people threaten to murder retail workers for having a rainbow in their store suggests there's a bit more to it than "the internet".
- 1710522266 3y ago[flagged]
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- lusus_naturae 3y agoWhy though? Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse. Not to mention the fact that one person's grimy is another's milquetoast, so what do you do about that? Moderation is the organic balance that resulted from years of trial and error. I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. What would really be saying something is if people stopped using platforms they don't like. But that's like taking a drug user away from his dealer--they both need each other in a perverse, symbiotic relationship. It's not that hard to leave platforms anyways, teens have already mostly stopped using FB. The most uncharitable bone in my body thinks that people who don't migrate off Twitter etc. like being the "cool" guy who doesn't like that stuff and having others around to read that. But I suppose that's just my opinion.
- 2h 3y ago> Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn. the point is, currently NO ROAD is the Autobahn. thats not a balance, thats censorship.
- lukevp 3y agoReddit has tons of NSFW stuff. There are plenty of less-moderated platforms available if you choose to engage with them.
- catiopatio 3y agoReddit has porn, but that’s not a convincing argument —- porn isn’t inimical to their ideological strictures. Meanwhile, they absolutely forbid expressing common, mainstream political viewpoints that are inimical to their ideology.
- bigfudge 3y agoCan you give an example of a mainstream view that is banned? I’m genuinely curious. I wonder if we will have different definitions of mainstream? It seems like a global audience of 5,000 might be mainstream and warrant a home according to some of the accounts here, whereas I would argue that this is still incredibly niche and these people might not expect to find anywhere in real life that would tolerate their speech either.
- gary_0 3y agoThe Old Internet was mostly populated by English-speakers who could afford Internet access and had the attention span to work through the process of getting online. The ratio of legit hackers to Septemberites was a lot higher. Corporations had only the vaguest impression of how to exploit Internet users for profit. Foreign nation-states didn't yet have gigabit pipelines pumping out propaganda and misinformation. Cyberspace hadn't been industrialized yet. Most of the junk you had to clear out of your forum beyond the usual dick pill spam was Serdar Argic[0] bot posts, Time Cube[1] style schizoposting, or trolling from the likes of GNAA[2]. You didn't really even know what they were on about, most of the time. You never felt like you were censoring a legitimate opinion, deleting stuff like that, and anyways, nobody complained. We were there to talk about Star Wars Episode I, make "all your base" jokes, or try to get our Linux drivers working because Bill Gates was the devil. If you got banned from a popular website, it didn't affect your life outside the Internet at all. (Nowadays, if you die on the Internet, you die in real life.) Google had no trouble keeping spam blogs out of the page 1 results, but gave you some interesting links if you looked up "santorum". Half the Internet seemed to think 9/11 was an inside job, and there were some frothy arguments about it, but believing either way usually didn't affect the rest of your identity. It was a wonderful and crazy place, but it was the product of a particular time. And even though I'm angry that the Internet is now just bland junk posted inside digital gated communities, I doubt lightning is going to strike twice. Look to the future, not to the past. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serdar_Argic [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNAA
- brucethemoose2 3y agoGrimy was fine before relentless engagement optimization. Its not fine when the very worst actors are the ones most motivated to game the algorithm.
- gary_0 3y ago> engagement optimization It turns out force-feeding the general public enraging hyperbole and scary conspiracy theories sells the optimal amount of advertising, and doing anything else with a tech company is a dereliction of fiduciary duty. Once upon a time I thought the Internet was going to be the antidote to cable news! I was so naive.
- scyclow 3y agoI'm all in on the grime, but I feel like this is one of the main reasons people are averse to the current crypto landscape: People generally prefer to live in shopping malls than the wild west.
- asynchronous 3y agoReally it sounds like the author is advocating for a new type of internet- one that requires sufficiently advanced technical knowledge to interact with, similar to back in the day.
- D13Fd 3y ago>I feel like this is one of the main reasons people are averse to the current crypto landscape: People generally prefer to live in shopping malls than the wild west. Somehow I think crypto having zero legitimate use case has more to do with it.
- null0pointer 3y agoSecure digital transfer of value without a trusted intermediary is a legitimate use case.
- newoldhead 3y agoin practice "security" only comes from Monero and buying it anonymously via cash
- JuanPosadas 3y agoActually needing that is extraordinarily rare.
- motohagiography 3y agoTwitter was a more equitable place when it was brand safe for pharmaceutical companies, and when people could publicly debase themselves and denounce their acquaintences without fear of mockery for aligning to absurd official narratives. The reasoning appears to be something along the lines of, if you aren't getting your news and commentary from former spies and retired secret policemen, how can you be sure you are not being brainwashed? If you can't believe what our elected representatives tell you in their own words from their own twitter accounts, what else is there to believe? The preponderance of evidence and every recent study shows that your experiences of privilege and problematic beliefs have always been the root cause of human suffering, and unless you awaken to the new reality that you are individually insignificant and your very existence is a burden on the majority of the rest of humanity - and to the existence of the planet itself - not only you are among the Left Behind, but we will make sure your friends, employers, and acquaintences are made afraid to even know your name. The irony of how these Huxlian "trust and safety teams," suppressed content is that they did it to persuade us that the rest of their nonsense was real. The Internet as a coherent thing hasn't existed since about 2018, it's just another paradigmatic hegemon, which, too, shall pass. It's more probable we weren't all meant to know each other or see each other, because it implies a zero sum power struggle in a false captivity, which trivializes and ignores the infinite vastness of the planet and life on it. Maybe the path to enlightenment really does involve taking more pictures of your butt, however, I think I'm ready to go all in on betting against that. Social media is dead. The only thing left to do is figure out how to get rid of the smell.
- hooverd 3y agoElon killing the Blue Check was extremely funny, mostly because it went from an indicator of notability to an indicator that a person is going to talk about crypto scams or the Jewish Question.
- throwawaymobule 3y agoI too found the total 180° on who was complaining about 'bluechecks' quite amusing, especially when complete sentences match up. I may just be experiencing frequency bias though, as I've long been amused/annoyed by words and phrases quickly coming to mean radically different things.
- marcus_holmes 3y agoThat screenshot of early Twitter reminded me of the naivety of the early social platforms. We used to just tweet or post any random thing that came into our heads, without worrying about it. No concerns over "how many likes will it get?" or "will I get dogpiled for saying this?". It was nice. Obviously doomed, but nice. I miss that naivety.
- asynchronous 3y agoAn ongoing meme is that 2013 Twitter was a unique space that will probably never again resurface for that exact reason.
- sen_armstrong 3y agoYou’re not gonna like what they said about 2024 TikTok... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36674184)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- asjfka 3y ago> The internet, on the other hand, was feudalism. I don't think the author has the slight idea what does the word 'feudalism' mean. If anything the current Internet where users build themselves on big corporations' domains and get their data sucked for profit is much more akin of feudalism than the internet of old.
- Nasrudith 3y agoNobody seems to know what feudalism is these days with all of the idiots being taken at face value. Feudalism is about a system of allegiances and obligations that supported personal power. The Wagner Group attempted coup is far more feudalist than any of the first world problems in tech.
- 4booru 3y ago[dead]
- redog 3y ago> "Anyone can ruin it for everyone."
- JohnFen 3y agoWhat I miss about the old internet is that it wasn't primarily commercial. Now that it's mostly commercial in nature, it has become a much less useful and interesting space. Also, it's become uglier. "Uglier" in that antiseptic, overly clean sense that you see in physical commercial spaces like shopping malls.