Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV.
It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
That makes my old hacker heart smile.
cogman10 50 days ago [-]
> real ones not insane made up ones
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
He claimed no one else understood his theory (stating that only he alone was smart enough), so it wasn't really possible to disprove it.
bitwize 50 days ago [-]
There was never any doubt that not enough people would take TimeCube guy seriously enough to tip major U.S. elections. That is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE for the racists, fascists, pedophiles, and other scum that formed the core of the 4chan edgelord set.
longbrass 50 days ago [-]
TimeCube guy’s shtick was continuously improved upon and is now a TT meme about manipulating time by a “Global Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author
Ranked #1 Speaker in the World.”
So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
foxglacier 50 days ago [-]
That idea is kind of the problem with social media now. People found a way to justify its importance to pretend it's worth investing their emotions in. But just imagine how, say, satanic rituals looked to religious people back when that was a thing to worry about, or really anything where lots of other people disagree with your cultural beliefs. You can always imagine how it might be a disaster if you don't start a culture war to kill those "bad" beliefs. It happened again with covid where people turned on each other for their beliefs because other people disagreeing with you might have some bad consequence. Never mind that almost nobody critically evaluates their own beliefs and just assumes they're on the moral high ground because that's where they happened to land in life. People even found a way to justify fighting flat-earthers because anybody who believes such nonsense must be the same type of people who believe other non-mainstream things and those other things could be dangerous to society. At the end of the day though, it's just basic human bigotry which always has some sort of justification.
You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.
MarcelOlsz 50 days ago [-]
There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.
__MatrixMan__ 50 days ago [-]
Ideally it will look from the outside like people are abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made of the participation of people that each user knows via face-to-face interactions.
donatj 50 days ago [-]
When normies started asking me how to set up their own Plex, I knew something had shifted.
kouru225 50 days ago [-]
Anecdotal, but I’ve met like 3 or 4 new plex people in the last year. They’re all just starting out.
hattmall 48 days ago [-]
Wow, that's funny I've heard a few of my friends lately talk about Plex servers and stuff. I'm just like, uhm Plex was like 10 yrs ago!
But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.
Carrok 50 days ago [-]
You should encourage them to move to Jellyfin. It's better, and actually free.
_factor 50 days ago [-]
Bad play, move them to plex first, much easier and still converted. Once they’re used to plex, then have the Jellyfin discussion.
MarcelOlsz 50 days ago [-]
Better how? Lots of seedbox provides still don't offer Jellyfin.
defrost 50 days ago [-]
Many do .. and many offer docker and howto guides.
You're right. Plex is rolling out some plex-pass crap and jumping their pricing from 120 to 250usd for a lifetime pass. Hard pass for me, installed Jellyfin last night.
znpy 50 days ago [-]
> Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).
TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.
The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.
> A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.
Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
rightbyte 50 days ago [-]
> Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.
Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?
YesBox 50 days ago [-]
There were definitely insane views.
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
asdf6969 50 days ago [-]
You should respect those people for actually looking into it. I do believe the moon landing is real but it’s based almost on blind faith. Same thing for almost everything I believe about the world. Stay open minded and don’t criticize people who put effort into things you’ve never bothered to research. You’ll be surprised how often you don’t know much about anything.
kristiandupont 50 days ago [-]
That's true, but conspiracy theorists are not typically out on some philanthropic mission. It's a hobby -- they are doing it because conspiracy theories are fun. That's why they aren't actually interested in things where there is real, tangible evidence. They want to find hidden clues and feel like they are in the know.
Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.
lurk2 50 days ago [-]
It was definitely there, but the scale of it was different back then and it was decidedly less mean-spirited by the early 2010s. I can remember when I first started using YouTube, I had someone from my city threaten to kill my entire family. A few years later when the 2012 Mayan Calendar Apocalypse was trending, another guy tried to justify his beliefs that it was real by claiming to have “top contacts” in a federal intelligence agency.
You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.
YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
Gollapalli 50 days ago [-]
Being recommended low viewership channels is a positive.
Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
lurk2 49 days ago [-]
I used to feel the same way, but something changed in the last few years to make these videos less appealing to me; they are usually low-viewership simply because they aren’t very good. For certain subjects like religion and philosophy, the novelty-seeking factor is completely gone for me - the best channels are the biggest ones, and everything else is guaranteed to be a grift, an inaudibly-recorded lecture, or an embryonic cult.
I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300
view videos in your feed are just market testing.
One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
AlecSchueler 50 days ago [-]
> it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
That you knew of.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 49 days ago [-]
Remember the tongue map?
YesBox 49 days ago [-]
Hindsight is 20/20.
bsenftner 50 days ago [-]
This 1000x.
aucisson_masque 51 days ago [-]
Abandoning is not the answer.
I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.
Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone.
As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.
jimmydddd 51 days ago [-]
Re: Left behind
My elderly parents can't even go out to eat dinner in the town they've lived in for 60 years because they don't have the phone app to pay the parking meters in town. So they have to drive out of town to a restaurant with a parking lot.
ddejohn 51 days ago [-]
And then throw QR code menus into the mix. I'm 35 and I have to zoom so far in to be able to read the menu, which then also involves having to scroll horizontally to fully read most menu items, which makes it easy to lose your place, etc.
Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.
SirFatty 50 days ago [-]
Not to mention that at this point, QR codes are vector for phishing. People aren't nearly careful enough scanning those things.
I'm happy that died around me. QR code menus suck.
bee_rider 51 days ago [-]
That’s a shame. We’ve mostly been switched to some app-powered thing in my town as well, but they included some kiosk things as well.
IMO, the apps are quite nice actually and I enjoy not having to ever run out to a meter anyway, but requiring a phone should not be considered meeting accessibility requirements.
neuralRiot 49 days ago [-]
You need to download-install an app , enter your info, your vehicle info, your credit card, the location where you’re parking, the time (which is non-refundable/ transferible if you pay too much) to park. Sometimes all this BS takes longer than the time you wish to park, I rather risk getting a ticket or just go somewhere else. All this because cities just lease the operation to 3rd parties.
bee_rider 49 days ago [-]
It is sort of a pain the first time. But once you have it set up, it can be quite convenient (of course, as long as the app is well written and saves/detects the right data, that is!). But yeh, I definitely agree it can be a pain.
51 days ago [-]
cogman10 50 days ago [-]
Honestly, I wonder if this is something that could be legally challenged under the ADA. Exclusions due to your age aren't legal and not owning a smart phone is very much an age thing.
bmitc 48 days ago [-]
Do the signs not have phone numbers on them for both calling and texting?
user9999999999 50 days ago [-]
if that's true, that's extremely rage inducing. also that sounds like an accessibility violation. which town is this?
dasil003 50 days ago [-]
fuck those apps though, seriously
bongodongobob 51 days ago [-]
Society changes. Smartphones are 20 years old at this point and no longer require you to drop $1k+ up front for one. Should smart phones be required for everything? No. But progress is gonna progress. Who even carries coins with them these days?
bigstrat2003 50 days ago [-]
Requiring a smartphone isn't progress. Offering the option to use a smartphone is progress.
bmitc 48 days ago [-]
To a degree, regularly getting coins to pay with is more effort than just having a phone. And these signs always have textable and callable numbers in my experience.
bongodongobob 50 days ago [-]
Yeah it is. The amount of work and bullshit to collect coins from parking meters is beyond stupid when we can do it digitally.
dartos 50 days ago [-]
Why is it beyond stupid to allow payment using a currency without needing several layers of non-government middlemen (Apple and ParkMobile, for example)
Seems beyond stupid to require me to have an Apple program or a Google program and specific hardware to pay for parking when I can just have the coins in my pocket.
Especially since ParkMobile could just decide not to support the version of android I’m running, so that I’m forced to purchase a new device.
Coins aren’t subject to code rot.
A bonus is that meter toll collectors would have a job.
SoftTalker 50 days ago [-]
A nice middle ground is meters that take payment cards. That does exclude people who don't have them but most of those meters take apps as well, and the people who have neither a credit card nor a smartphone probably don't have a car either.
It is annoying though to have to install half a dozen different parking apps for the lots that have partnered with different app providers. It would be nice if public parking lot apps would interoperate.
theoreticalmal 50 days ago [-]
What’s the difference between requiring users to pay via app vs requiring users to pay via payment card? Both require extra effort / extra knowledge / extra hardware to make the payment, beyond the “default” national currency
dartos 50 days ago [-]
I think using a card is friendlier than using an app.
It takes fewer “clicks” so to speak and is more accessible to the elderly.
But anything government which doesn’t require to keep track of a purchaser’s identity should accept cash. Otherwise what’s the point of cash if your own state doesn’t accept it.
n4r9 50 days ago [-]
> using a card is friendlier than using an app
This is so obviously true for non-tech elderly folk that don't already have smartphones. I can hardly believe it's in question.
Card:
1. Receive free card from bank in mail.
2. Keep card in your wallet/purse which you already take every time you go out.
3. Memorise PIN (the tricky bit, to be fair).
4. Wave or insert card for payment.
Phone app:
1. Either find a phone shop and ask for help, or figure out how to securely buy a smartphone online.
2. Figure out how to set your phone up. This involves a lot of confusing decisions such as whether to create an apple/google account, which services to enable, etc... .
3. Learn how to search for, install, and use phone apps. The parking app will vary depending on where you choose to park.
4. Set up google/apple pay or your card payment details on required apps.
5. Learn how to connect your phone to wifi if you end up parking in an area with internet but no phone signal.
6. Remember to take your smartphone with you every time you plan to drive and park somewhere.
7. Muddle your way through what is often a bloated, ad-ridden app every time you want to park.
thfuran 50 days ago [-]
> Memorise PIN (the tricky bit, to be fair).
Not even that, for a credit card.
latentcall 50 days ago [-]
Everybody even the elderly have debit or credit cards. You have your card, you insert it, and walk away with two hours of parking.
An app often requires some account setup with spam emails to follow.
mixmastamyk 50 days ago [-]
Card—specific info given on a need-to-know basis. App—all info broadcast to everyone all the time, often for sale. Requires hardware, power, data plan.
GolfPopper 50 days ago [-]
Shifting work from the people selling something (i.e. parking) to those buying it is not progress from the POV of the buyers.
How a particular change impacts you will, of course, strongly color your perception of it.
If you're someone who always has coinage readily available, forcing you to install an app and create an account on a device you may not have, or be familiar with, plus feeding said app an up-to-date payment method (accompanied by concerns of financial loss) and eating the cost of transaction fees is not going to be seen as progress.
If you never use currency and having coinage on hand is an extra effort, and don't mind installing and using yet-another-app on your current smartphone, then doing away with coins seems much less hostile.
And, of course, if you own/operate parking meters, reducing your own overhead is a win for you, as long as the meters keep getting used enough that your profits go up.
Which ends up actually benefiting the public more, I don't know.
devilbunny 49 days ago [-]
My 2001 car has three little slots at the front inside of the center console for quarters, nickels, and dimes. Holds about 8-10 of each. Plenty of money for the occasional meter or small toll.
icehawk 50 days ago [-]
Requiring an app to park my car is beyond stupid.
bongodongobob 50 days ago [-]
Putting metal tokens in a bucket is smart?
dartos 50 days ago [-]
Metal tokens that don’t change in functionality at the whims of a random VP at some private company?
Yes. High tech != smart.
singleshot_ 49 days ago [-]
Yes, that’s correct. Secure, simple, standardized, predictable, robust. Adding a computer to the equation diminishes it in every single way.
icehawk 49 days ago [-]
You don't always have to optimize for smart.
Using coins or credit card is a far better experience downloading an app.
n4r9 50 days ago [-]
The machine can offer credit/debit card payment as well.
latentcall 50 days ago [-]
Yep. Some rich dude’s company named something dumb doesn’t control my ability to park somewhere .
I can put quarters in the meter.
rightbyte 50 days ago [-]
I prefer that to apps, yes.
meristohm 49 days ago [-]
I carry coins and preferentially use cash. I'm a male in my 40s and took seriously The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood.
I've narrowed what I use my now-6yo phone for. I know most of my neighbors, and I value mutual aid, participatory democracy, and "public luxury, private sufficiency". Surveillance capitalism sucks- it's unhealthy, and it extracts wealth to people whose intrinsic value is each no better than anyone else's.
My county forcing Microsoft 2FA as the only option for the government entity I work for, in which I'm the youngest by far and we don't accept having to buy a phone just to use an account, reeks of capitalism.
distances 50 days ago [-]
For what it's worth, I always carry cash, including coins. I pay the smallest purchases (like a sandwich) with coins.
donatj 51 days ago [-]
Some may even be oblivious to the fact that the article is from 2004 ;)
Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
unyttigfjelltol 51 days ago [-]
Spam exploded in 2003[1] to the modern experience of it. Before that, spam was somewhat infrequent, even without countermeasures.
I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes to administrators.
When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, there were two big selling points for me - storage and spam.
Diederich 51 days ago [-]
...and search. That was amazing.
znpy 50 days ago [-]
I can confirm it was amazing.
I got my first gmail address via an invite and it was light-years ahead of everything else.
Nowadays it's possibly worse than most other providers, and it doesn't filter spam as well as it used to. Nowadays I just dislike it.
bbaron63 51 days ago [-]
I remember the first spam I ever received. It was in 1998 on my first day working at AOL. It promised an advanced degree from a prestigious, unaccredited institution. The spammers were somewhat honest back then.
slmkbh 51 days ago [-]
My brain swapped the second zero to a two... But I did think the 1990 reference a little odd..
bsenftner 51 days ago [-]
Actually, as the patent author of what are now called deep fakes, 2004 was when I got formal in my research to create the tech, with full knowledge of what it has become, and a mission to prevent the Orwellian uses active today.
RajT88 51 days ago [-]
Back then, we called it "Photoshop"
specproc 50 days ago [-]
Counterpoint, my father is very IT literate, at least he was. Managed IT for a large government organisation in Europe, taught me code. Has done his best to keep up over the years.
He's completely useless these days, particularly around social media, but increasingly around everything else. I worry about him.
It's difficult to imagine what it would look like, but I'm increasingly of the opinion the best way forward is a hard break with tech. Minimal engagement outside of what's needed for the daily basics.
It's transparently wrecking our brains and societies. We can't build a better Internet, we need to escape it.
zoobab 51 days ago [-]
"Abandoning is not the answer."
Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
kuhzaam 51 days ago [-]
Even the 90s and early 2000s! The internet used to be way more endearing back then, with way more individually operated websites, blogs, etc.
cardanome 50 days ago [-]
What a twist that my regret is not that I have spent so much time of my youth on the internet but that I have not spent more time on the internet when it was still good.
tmtvl 50 days ago [-]
Autoplay midis, blink tags, FFFF00 yellow text on an FFFFFF white background, terribly low quality jpegs.
...man, I miss it.
zoobab 50 days ago [-]
"Under construction" animated GIFs!
ch_sm 50 days ago [-]
Haha, Autoplay midis. I had forgotten that we used to do that.
blueflow 51 days ago [-]
Or what? The Internet is not required to have a peaceful life.
chungus 51 days ago [-]
For those not familiar, this post is by John Walker[0] one of the co-founders of Autodesk who made AutoCAD. He passed away last year[1]
Wow, definitely familiar with his work, though haven't used AutoCAD for quite some time. Pretty sure my fingers still remember some of the text commands.
kragen 50 days ago [-]
redraw
redraw
redraw
NotYourLawyer 50 days ago [-]
I hadn’t heard that he died, sad.
kelseydh 51 days ago [-]
> But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers.
This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.
However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.
fzeroracer 51 days ago [-]
Technically he's not wrong about spam, it's just that the classical view of spam is no longer applicable. When you think of the rise of AI-generated content and SEO-focused design, it is almost impossible to use the internet without being inundated by a deluge of low quality spam. Everywhere we go we're served ads for scam products, have to figure out if someone is an actual person or a bot and so forth.
And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
lurk2 50 days ago [-]
I came across an interesting example of this on Reddit a few days ago. While searching for something on Google, I found a result that was posted on /r/Gifted. I saw that a moderator had suggested that the OP take a psychometric test. This wouldn’t be that weird given the subject of the subreddit, but it had nothing to do with the thread’s topic. I assumed this was the mod trying to cash in on his position on the board and clicked through to his profile to see that he was still making comments like this. When I checked back in the thread I realized it was 5 months old, but the moderator’s comment was only 20 minutes old.
It turns out it was an AI generating responses to every single thread linking to this test.
Here’s one example:
> In my experience, I found skipping grades to be challenging initially due to the abrupt environmental and academic changes. It took me a few weeks to adjust to the pace and social dynamics, but it eventually became rewarding. It's important to approach it with openness and patience. By the way, if anyone is curious about their potential for advanced learning, the Gifted Test at [redacted] can provide insight - it's been validated by licensed psychometricians.
Yeah, looks like the subreddit has been taken over completely. You can see that the original founder of the subreddit had resigned shortly before... and his farewell-post has been deleted by the new mods. The other mods all seem to be inactive, and going through one of their histories, I found them talking about being harassed and bullied a relatively few comments before ceasing /r/gifted comments
I brought this up in modmail with them, to see if any of the uncorrupted mods would respond, under their names. The responses denied my claims and mocked me, before banning me, but notably, all of the responses were under the group-mod username: so either none of the old mods were willing to respond under their usernames, or it wasn't the new mods responding. (Hint: it was almost certainly the latter.)
I reported it to the Reddit admins, but have heard nothing back. I don't expect too much because if the worst the new mods are doing is spamming affiliate links, that's relatively tame and far down the priority list.
bsenftner 51 days ago [-]
Do not use ad networks, none of them, they are the source of all this Internet scummery. The spam, the low quality ads for fraud products, and the ads themselves are virus delivery networks. If you really need advertising to support your product, do you really have a product? Or are ya just gossip, er "social media". Social media is just gossip, monetized, what was before recognized as the lowest form of communication now monetized and washed from that dirty name "gossip", now it's "media", "social media"... what fools mass culture is composed.
kevin_thibedeau 50 days ago [-]
You also have to block the trackers that feed your behavioral data to the brokers that, in turn, fuels the invasive profiling the advertisers use to bid against.
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
that strikes me as odd. I don't see scam ads, ever (you mean like embedded in web pages?) I also don't see much spam anymore, mainly because gmail does a decent job of it. But I still run a few narrow email servers - spam is out there but a lot of it is avoidable though good configuration.
zyx321 51 days ago [-]
Rather than "spam", the usual term I see for genAI content is "slop" (original meaning: a mixture of kitchen waste and leftovers that is barely good enough for the pigs)
immibis 50 days ago [-]
Spam by any other name is just as annoying.
pajko 51 days ago [-]
There was not even an AI back then, what would he say now?
> When I'm feeling down I call it “Internet Gated Communities”, when in an optimistic mood, “The Faculty Club”. This may lead to what many observers refer to as “the Balkanisation of the Internet”—a fragmentation of the “goes everywhere, reaches everybody” vision of the global nervous system into disconnected communities. This may not be such a bad thing.
This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.
Grimblewald 50 days ago [-]
Precisely this, old internet was fun and good because it was a defacto walled garden. A very specific group of people had access to the internet. Want to bring that magic back? recreate that crowd / demographic. It is really that simple. The internet, once truly connecting everyone, was always just going to mirror the physical human world, because why would it not?
lurk2 50 days ago [-]
Facebook is a walled garden; it requires you to sign up before viewing most content. Quora, Instagram, and Pinterest are the same way.
> Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).
dash2 50 days ago [-]
> Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners.
This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)
lurk2 50 days ago [-]
> If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web.
People go to these platforms for a reason, my point is that the reason isn't because they are walled off. It seems like you are arguing that the chief (if inadvertent) benefit to users of a walled garden is that users don't have to deal with undesirable behavior because access to the platform is restricted by a login wall. This isn't how I would understand a service being "walled off" - Hacker News is not a walled garden even though I need an account to access some of its features. The important distinction is that most (all?) of the content on Hacker News can be accessed without an account. Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora are examples of services going the other way - they lock down content, not for the benefit of the users, but for the benefit of themselves. They save on not having to serve the content to unregistered users, keep the content on their platform, and encourage unregistered users to sign up.
The chief benefit of the open web was always permissive read access, not permissive write access.
jhbadger 49 days ago [-]
But a lot of times the "benefit" is simply that people they know are there. Which is the problem with all these open platforms like Mastodon. People can get the argument that it is better in theory to use an open platform. But nobody wants to use a social platform alone.
dash2 49 days ago [-]
A good enough service and smart enough marketing can solve the bootstrap problem. Companies do it all the time!
harvey9 50 days ago [-]
Is that a market where FB traffic is free on otherwise metered connections?
6510 50 days ago [-]
A group of humans (with all kinds represented) blurs out all refined qualities almost by definition.
Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.
Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days.
There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)
This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.
Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)
NickC25 51 days ago [-]
I haven't abandoned it at all, but I do try to regulate my internet time.
I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my company.
I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running track.
The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social media.
fibonachos 50 days ago [-]
This is basically where I’m at. It’s mostly become a utility.
safety_sandals 51 days ago [-]
I already did. I don't use the Internet anymore.
avgDev 51 days ago [-]
Hello stranger, nice to see you on the interwebz.
meltyness 50 days ago [-]
He doesn't use the internet any less either, though.
AnimalMuppet 51 days ago [-]
I'm curious about how you posted here, then...
scottLobster 50 days ago [-]
My dad used to be a Professor at a major State university, and he talked about how one of his older colleagues, who was a professor of Electrical Engineering, had his secretary (yes, he had a secretary) print out his emails for him every morning and put them in his physical inbox. He'd read them, type up his responses, print them out, and have her transcribe and send the responses later in the day.
Just sad really.
wincy 50 days ago [-]
I can only hope to one day be rich and successful enough that this could be my life.
MITSardine 50 days ago [-]
This must still be somewhat common. I recall e-mails from administration at my previous French lab had in their signature something to the effect of "Think of the environment, do not print this e-mail".
I actually had an example of something similar before my eyes. My advisor's advisor's advisor (...), emeritus, occupied the office next to mine and printed his Fortran code to work on at home. He debugged on paper, then typed it down the next day in the office. His whole career had been at the crossroads of math and computer science, his main contribution algorithms and software, and he did not have a computer at home (says he). This software debugged by hand (and typed with the index fingers) is still used in commercial software!
piotrpdev 50 days ago [-]
I'm confused, did he type them up on a computer that was not connected to the internet/school network but was physically connected to a printer close by? Why didn't he and the secretary copy emails from/to some form of portable storage?
doubled112 50 days ago [-]
One time I had a client print an email, write on it, and fax it back.
Don’t try to understand the work flow. That’s impossible. Just try to realize the truth.
reportgunner 46 days ago [-]
Before "Information Systems" there was no need for a company/college wide network; computers with printers on the same desk were a replacement for the typewriter.
vvchvb 50 days ago [-]
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mr_mitm 50 days ago [-]
Your dad's colleague's professor was just like Donald Knuth!
I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.
51 days ago [-]
api 51 days ago [-]
The Internet is BGP, IP, and the like.
Systems that run on the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there's definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening.
I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.
nullpoint420 50 days ago [-]
Let’s not pretend it’s easy to become a BGP peer as an individual.
api 50 days ago [-]
Very much not what I meant. I meant the system that carries packets is the Internet, not the services and protocols that run on top. Stuff above L3 comes and goes.
jmholla 50 days ago [-]
@dang, it's small, but there's a spelling error in the title. Intenet -> Internet
Etheryte 50 days ago [-]
HN doesn't support tagging users, if something is off, you can use the flag button or send an email.
bentt 49 days ago [-]
That's like saying you should abandon the Earth. There's a multitude of ways to be a part of and use The Internet.
Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.
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chairmansteve 50 days ago [-]
The internet is the new daytime TV.
yazantapuz 51 days ago [-]
If for internet we think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like...then YES.
"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."
imoreno 50 days ago [-]
You don't need to abandon "the Internet". Maybe we could improve on the TCP/IP stack or the ISP model but it's hardly a priority. What we need is to abandon the web and start a divergent platform.
It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords it's all about the money and they've already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother?
Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.
rchaud 51 days ago [-]
> "As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices outside the rule of law."
I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.
cookie_monsta 51 days ago [-]
Betteridge's law in full effect
wruza 51 days ago [-]
Well I sort of abandoned it now. I visit here and, occasionally, the articles posted here. Also a thin slice of very curated youtube content. And software documentation. And porn. That’s it.
Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.
Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.
dkjaudyeqooe 51 days ago [-]
I think it's not abandoning the internet, it's abandoning the web, which is arguably the worst and best thing about the internet.
Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.
Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return control to the user.
derefr 51 days ago [-]
> Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.
What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre.
Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend.
But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best.
My rubric for what constitutes "the web":
• Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!)
• If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)
• Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)
• Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.")
Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics.
But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.)
If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)
But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies."
(This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")
anal_reactor 51 days ago [-]
> Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.
Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse.
> You are an elitist
Correct.
drekipus 50 days ago [-]
> Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.
in real life and online
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haunter 51 days ago [-]
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someperson 51 days ago [-]
If everybody is connected to the internet, shouldn't the mean and median IQ be exactly 100?
rorytbyrne 51 days ago [-]
He thinks the IQ of white people (North America and Europe) is 100. He’s implying the rest of the world are lower IQ.
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
The only thing he clearly stated is that he thinks the global average isn't 100. That could imply miscalibration depending on how you think the metric ought to work. He's also implied that he thinks the correlation between internet usage and high IQ is stronger the farther back you go.
Both of those things seem like fairly reasonable hypothesis to me. You are the one inserting race into it.
pixodaros 50 days ago [-]
The blogger says that the average IQ in Europe and North America is 100 but that "the mean IQ of the world is a tad less than 90 today, and it's expected to fall to about 86 by 2050." So the blogger thinks that some races are much stupider than Europeans, and that if their share of the global population rises, average intelligence will fall. That sure sounds like he thinks this is a genetic difference and not poverty, disease, or lack of education.
The blogger cites a website which cites Richard Lynn for these 'facts'. So this is about race and IQ, quod erat demonstratum.
fc417fc802 50 days ago [-]
> So the blogger thinks that some races ...
You are misrepresenting the author. He made no such claim. He did not articulate what he believes the underlying mechanism to be.
It would be perfectly reasonable to inquire about the mechanism, or question the accuracy of the prediction. It is not reasonable to make accusatory conjectures about his beliefs.
pixodaros 49 days ago [-]
The blogger is repeating (with citation) a claim by Richard Lynn, and by the end of his life Richard Lynn was open about being a 'scientific' racist who believed that different races had genes which caused large differences in average intelligence
milesrout 50 days ago [-]
Differences in average IQ between countries is well established and not even controversial AFAIK. What they mean is debated. Their existence cannot really be debated at all.
fc417fc802 50 days ago [-]
IIRC it correlates very strongly with socioeconomic factors, at least within the US. That doesn't make it useless but it does raise an awful lot of questions.
milesrout 50 days ago [-]
The direction of causation between IQ and economic success is pretty difficult because they obviously drive each other.
sshine 51 days ago [-]
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joshuaissac 51 days ago [-]
> And a country like Morocco has an average IQ of around 67. Average!
I don't think that this claim is credible. It comes from Lynn & Becker, who also have Nepal's average IQ at 43,[1] which is in the range where someone with that IQ would be considered mentally disabled, with limited capacity for independent life. That cannot be reconciled with the employment rate in Nepal. And according to Lynn & Becker, the average person from Nepal, Liberia and Sierra Leone has an IQ that puts them in that category.
The truth is that no study that would generate these numbers plausibly has ever been conducted. There is no country-by-country, apples-to-apples international IQ test database. IQ tests are a diagnostic measure, so if you're going out into the field looking for lots of test results, you're either drafting off large-scale psychometrics work done in and by wealthy countries, or you're pulling from mental and developmental health institutions where tests were administered to diagnose patients.
That's exactly what Lynn did: he has "good" IQ data generated for-purpose by the research communities in developed countries, and just uses IQ data from, essentially, mental health institutions elsewhere. He presents these data sets as apples-apples equivalent.
It gets worse: for what should be obvious reasons, there are lots of countries where it isn't easy to get any such data. Lynn doesn't try; instead, his team takes data from neighboring countries and extrapolates.
sshine 50 days ago [-]
Thanks for clarifying that; I didn’t check my sources. For comparison, 81-85 IQ points is where the US disqualifies you four being unable to follow basic training. And 75 IQ points considers you mentally retarded. So for a country average to be way below the retard limit is unlikely.
tptacek 51 days ago [-]
There are no actual studies that provide this kind of country-by-country data on average IQ, only Richard Lynn's fabricated data, which has become folkloric on the Internet.
wegfawefgawefg 51 days ago [-]
naked ape refers to all humans.
you misread it. stop looking to be offended.
haunter 51 days ago [-]
Sorry I was too low IQ to understand the reference, my bad
robertlagrant 51 days ago [-]
It said "ten billion naked apes". Clearly talking about everyone (in a few years' time).
Who cares that the whole is getting dumber? I thought that was the entire idea behind the internet? I didn't create it either and my IQ isn't in the 150s-- it got dumber when it let me on, too.
The problem with the internet today is that the top (i.e. google) is going along with the bottom, the so-called enshittification. They are promoting the types of people this article is complaining about into direct visibility with its monopoly powers on search and discovery.
It's in my niche, of course too. People from India with no connection to the industry and just a wordpress are the #1 query for almost every result for the past ten years. It's nuts. My niche is at the forefront of the enshittification, but soon this will be your niche too.
Google basically kills off every consumer webapp like this to promote garbage wordpresses, content from the hindustantimes and other virtual detritus onto your browser. Look at r/SEO, are they focused on creating quality or scamming people? I'll give you a hint, research their mods' SEO websites. Yet Google cannot seem to get enough of it.
I think it's far from determined that web4 will be web2 but with more third world-problems but it's not looking great for the people who are building consumer apps right now.
mpweiher 51 days ago [-]
"naked apes" are humans. Us. All of us. Not "not yet internet users".
Not exactly. Interpreted charitably, in the context, it could be replaced by "the unwashed masses".
The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few. I don't know how he reconciled that with his apparent distaste for gated communities.
lynx97 51 days ago [-]
Ethernal September is actually a thing, so he isn't that wrong. I get the aversion towards elitism... But those of us who used the Internet in the 90s still know what happened when the "masses" started to flood it.
acheron 51 days ago [-]
The original Eternal September was about AOL users getting access to Usenet in 1993. And yet, “people on AOL in 1993” would easily be in, what, the top 5% in quality of Internet users today? Maybe higher?
Hell, your “masses” flooding the Internet in the later 90s were still much better than the population now.
And here’s this guy writing about how bad things had gotten in 2004. Buckle up, buddy: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Imagine what brave new world the future holds. Never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
Gated communities arbitrarily bar your entry. That is categorically different from having some minimum standard which anyone is welcome to make an attempt at.
blitzar 51 days ago [-]
> The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few.
I mean ... not wrong.
InsideOutSanta 51 days ago [-]
But the decline is not because "stupid people" started using it. The reason is that more people started using it, which made it of tremendous commercial interest and brought all of the dysfunctions of an unregulated free market.
ricdl 51 days ago [-]
I guess he did end up abandoning the internet afterall
cookie_monsta 51 days ago [-]
As shall we all one day
INTPenis 51 days ago [-]
Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners.
What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.
If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.
borgdefenser 51 days ago [-]
This is actually the complete opposite of what I want.
I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.
blueflow 51 days ago [-]
Back to the classic imageboards? They still exist.
betaby 51 days ago [-]
Yes. Mostly hosted in the USA.
Problem is that regional forums in Europe died because of the regulations.
jvidalv 50 days ago [-]
The biggest forum in the world is european.
forocoches(dot)com
And I have more:
mediavida(dot)com ( it means half-life :) )
And then I have random ones:
redcafe(dot)net
foro.acb(dot)com
I read them, and post on them daily, forums are alive and kicking it on europe :)
mvc 51 days ago [-]
Why do you care where a forum with no regulations is hosted?
gnarlynarwhal42 51 days ago [-]
he mentioned regional forums, so I assume a large part of what is missing is a common culture/language instead of whatever conglomeration comes out of the US.
the EU regulations made it harder/less attractive to host a small local forum and I think that was his point
immibis 50 days ago [-]
Which regulations specifically? GDPR?
It may just be because people in Europe interact in real life more and don't need an online forum.
sailfast 50 days ago [-]
Yup. That’s my plan. Forget all these companies and AI. Just let me talk to people and hear what they think is cool.
INTPenis 51 days ago [-]
This has always and will always exist.
But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a real person, and where everyone stands for what they say online.
betaby 51 days ago [-]
> This has always and will always exist.
In many countries internet forums are technically banned by regulations.
HN posted that many user forums in UK were simply deleted because of the excessively heavy burden of the law.
sailfast 50 days ago [-]
Oof. TIL. That’s very disappointing.
neutrinobro 51 days ago [-]
You are free to use facebook.
jll29 50 days ago [-]
You probably meant "You were free before you used facebook."
okeuro49 51 days ago [-]
In the UK, if you hold opinions that are the same as the state, then expressing yourself using your name is safe.
If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at your door.
Actually you've got that wrong - the government/establishment agrees with Pearson, it was a member of the public that complained about her characterising pro-Palestinian protestors with a hate slur.
Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I think you are sadly mistaken.
Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-anonymity right now ).
7bit 51 days ago [-]
All the Chinese activists are truly happy about all the transparency about their person and their beliefs. I can hear them rejoicing in their cells.
DrScientist 51 days ago [-]
You are looking at the problem the wrong way.
If you have a democracy then the laws of the land should be those that are agreed by general consent - give or take - and as such applying those laws to people in a way that means they are accountable for their actions isn't a problem - in fact it's the long standing bedrock of civilisation.
The problem in China isn't that they can catch people breaking their laws, it's a problem with how those laws are set in the first place.
So the real issue is stopping a move towards authoritarianism which is a whole larger conversation.
So in the issue above - about the journalist - the question should be about whether the particular hate speech law is correct, rather than worrying about if they appear to breach it whether they can be caught.
throwway120385 51 days ago [-]
The problem is that it is very easy to slide quickly into authoritarianism, as we're seeing in the US. I don't see how "transparency" is served by knowing who someone is or associating them with every piece of speech they've ever uttered. The only use of a system like that is to police thoughtcrime.
7bit 50 days ago [-]
No, YOU are looking at it naively.
In the past 100 years the following countries have slipped from democracies to authoritarian states: Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua.
Some of them recovered, others never did. Look at Turkey for example. If you think you are safe, you aren't.
DrScientist 50 days ago [-]
So your answer is it's inevitable that any country will slip into authoritarianism so we must live as if we are in one already - and create a whole society around being able to subvert authority.
Have you considered that massively enables organised criminal elements in democracies and increases the chances of a slide into authoritarianism?
7bit 49 days ago [-]
What are you talking about? I don't want to change anything. You are the one advocating that social media should require any comments being identifiable via id...
DrScientist 49 days ago [-]
First I'm not advocating it - I'm saying it's inevitable - because if you want to not change society away from a model where people are responsbile for their actions, then you need enable that accountability.
It's a bit like in the good-old days of the internet when everyone trusted everyone else - life was simple and good. Then the bad actors came, and so did SSL, firewalls, n factor auth etc etc. Search engine results became less good as people gamed the rankings.
You have to adapt.
In Europe we take a different view from America - in America mass school shootings are a price worth paying for the right to own a gun. In the UK there is a presumption that they really isn't any good reason for owning a handgun, nevermind an assault rifle, so it's pretty hard to get one.
Freedom is multi-dimensional - and not absolute. I'm free of worrying my child will be shot at school, but less free to own a gun.
Same goes for freedoms on the internet - in the end it's about a pragmatic choice about what's best and I'm saying that pragmatic choice is already encapsulated in centuries of legal tradition - the internet doesn't change that - people, in the end, need to be accountable for their actions.
INTPenis 50 days ago [-]
Your thinking is very black and white if you believe that there won't be other forums and places for activists to organize.
okeuro49 51 days ago [-]
The UK justice secretary goes to pro-Palestinian protests.
I doubt she wants this state of affairs to change.
On the other hand, if your house gets burgled, you get a crime reference number and told to take it up with your insurance company.
DrScientist 51 days ago [-]
> The UK justice secretary goes to pro-Palestinian protests.
So? Justice secretary has nothing to do with the police - justice is the courts.
Home secretary is ultimately in charge of the policing policy and in the UK they have no day to day influence over polices actions - the police are quite decentralised. Are you from the UK?
And in terms of the wider government they are supporting Israel's assault in Gaza directly with intelligence and weapon systems and are silent on the daily atrocities - that's hardly pro-palestinian.
vvchvb 50 days ago [-]
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markhahn 51 days ago [-]
very peculiar incident. it's a stretch to construe this as "opinions not same as state" though.
I can see on the one side that police should only ever investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false allegations.
on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some form of scrutiny.
yard2010 51 days ago [-]
Democracy must not have to kill itself to prove that it exists.
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ImHereToVote 51 days ago [-]
The Yookay is cooked.
Ukv 51 days ago [-]
Are sites that currently try to enforce real name usage, like Facebook, noticeably better for it than mostly-pseudonymous sites like HN/Reddit?
It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.
borgdefenser 51 days ago [-]
I think using your last name, counter intuitively makes discussion less civil.
In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.
When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.
The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.
Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
I don't follow your logic - surely communicating from behind a mask encourages rudeness, no? Your comments seem to focus only on the recipient's authenticity or maskedness.
Are you assuming that the author's own identity will always be masked or throwaway like a sockpuppet? That seems very much like a design choice of the forum.
Izkata 50 days ago [-]
This is the general assumption made by people who already aren't like that, but it's not really how it ends up working. Either they don't care their identity is also visible, or they forget in the moment. The ones that don't care now also have a real identity to target instead of just a pseudonym.
bdw5204 51 days ago [-]
All the use of real names on social media accomplishes is a chilling effect on speech. Especially if your opinions differ from those of your employer or customers. Or if people who disagree with you are engaging in harassment campaigns or domestic terrorism against their political opponents.
This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
yes, realnames depends on out-of-band harrassment being illegal and suppressed.
but it also means responsibility, which acts in the opposite direction.
a realnames policy doesn't preclude also offering pseudonyms for sensitive cases.
to me, it seems like the real issue is sockpuppetry - basically a Sybil attack on authenticity/reputation/responsibility.
Lanolderen 51 days ago [-]
Facebook is pretty dogshit at it.
I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it. Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret Dontknow is pretty obvious..
"That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times."
(This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also prescient commentary on modern trends)
_Algernon_ 51 days ago [-]
This is not something I want.
I want social media to disappear.
The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.
pacifika 51 days ago [-]
Yes it would make for a good law that whenever a recommendation algorithm is used the user must be able to fully control how the results are filtered and ordered including disabling it, and the service must remember the preference.
aleph_minus_one 51 days ago [-]
>
The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.
Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know quite some people who do this!).
erikerikson 51 days ago [-]
Then why are you on here?
_Algernon_ 50 days ago [-]
If a tree falls in a forest and I'm not around to hear it, does it still make a sound?
I often read people trashing on social media who are doing so on this site which is very much social media. I don't use other social media sites and appreciate that this one is different than the normal ones. It's still social media as I understand it.
Assuming I'm not wrong about this being social media... If they want social media to disappear, why are they creating more of it by participating here?
I mostly keep my mouth shut, but the embedded contradictions sometimes make me comment to scratch my itch.
Well it is true that newest gives chronological listing. Most of us visit the front page which does not. Instead, it uses the algorithm of user vote aggregation.
Izkata 50 days ago [-]
"Social media" doesn't include forums for a lot of people, it's specifically sites that revolve around user profiles. Things like MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter. Forums have profiles, but they revolve around the thread topics instead.
erikerikson 50 days ago [-]
I get that but we have profiles here too and it is a place where media is shared and created in a social context. I do agree the content isn't organized by profile but while that's sufficient,I wouldn't seem it necessary.
Izkata 50 days ago [-]
Think of it more like an analogue to real life: Instead of a human talking to another human, the profiles are direct representations and the profiles are talking to each other. A forum is kind of sort of more like going to the mall, with the forum threads being stores - the point is the topic (store) even if you're all there together.
erikerikson 50 days ago [-]
Facebook was, while mostly not a public place (at least the way I used it), was always pretty gregarious by their design, in my experience. I admit to this being public and I believe I see how you are making the distinction. I accept it as a valid one to make.
On the other hand, while Facebook and the like had me interacting with those in my relational proximity, here it seems I am relating with people more in my cultural and professional proximity (largely due to the rules and cultural norms here). Sometimes it's just small talk and at others more technical or serious life matters but it's communicating with other humans (and likely a few bots) about life, sharing information and ideas, challenging one another to learn and grow. These seem like deeply social behaviors and that's a big part of why I regard this as social media.
With regard to the mall, that seems far more like Twitter or Reddit than here. While Reddit is less clear, Twitter is widely regarded as social media. On the other end is email that is "a human talking to another human" and regarded as not social media. Not to say you're wrong, just trying to explain my view and offer that as a bit of evidence that the boundaries are not so clear.
7bit 51 days ago [-]
> What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person.
Speak for yourself, please, would you?
I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.
No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours, you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to individuals and democracy alike.
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
Understood - but is it actually realistic to expect pseudonyms to protect expression (in the face of bigdata correlation), or to expect the "right to be forgotten" to actually work?
nodoll 51 days ago [-]
>What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media..
There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does not make one smart man.
burningChrome 51 days ago [-]
Social media when it started was originally more about creating communities of people with similar tastes and interests. In the early days for me, it contributed a lot to my journey as a newly minted developer. I'm not sure I would've learned as much or so fast without it. The amount of stuff I discovered and learned just from being on Twitter and other platforms was simply incredible.
Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you could argue that its not really needed any more - but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
nodoll 50 days ago [-]
> In the early days for me, it contributed a lot to my journey as a newly minted developer.
Yea, it is like a catapult. You need to let go of it at some point to keep moving forward, or it is going to pull you back or at least stop you from making further progress.
>but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Good intentions or In this case, moderation. You know that I cannot go into detail here without pissing the moderators here, right? Yea, exactly my point.
Mountain_Skies 51 days ago [-]
What does it make when those same "idiots" are voters?
bsenftner 51 days ago [-]
The United States of Fascism
7bit 51 days ago [-]
Boom!
nodoll 51 days ago [-]
[flagged]
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
> so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person
I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use the postal service. Why should government provided social media or email or whatever be any different?
MiiMe19 50 days ago [-]
I agree with your point, but you do need to use your address to use the postal service...
fc417fc802 50 days ago [-]
At least in the US, regardless of what the official rules might be (I've never checked) you only need a return address if you want the item to come back to you in the event that delivery fails. If you omit it and drop it in a public box with the correct postage it will reliably show up.
This makes sense because the only realistic way to enforce a non-falsified return address would be to verify government issued ID when accepting the parcel.
It's an interesting point thought that receiving messages does require a physical address. I guess the analogy would be needing to log in to browse the message board but not to post? That would be quite strange.
wizzwizz4 51 days ago [-]
> so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person
So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
42lux 51 days ago [-]
The nice thing is you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.
alex1138 51 days ago [-]
Not strictly accurate if a) they create shadow profiles b) it's almost impossible to permanently delete an account c) the site puts a login wall on every single page forcing you to have an account to access anything
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
You left out d) required for some important task.
alex1138 51 days ago [-]
Yeah like connecting with people you'd like to reach (which Facebook doesn't do a terribly good job of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712) but people here seem to think email/calling is the only acceptable form of social media (but what if you don't have someone's contact info? well, that gets justified as "nobody needs to connect with long lost contacts")
42lux 51 days ago [-]
If you're not banned, why not simply create an account and message them properly? If following the platform's basic guidelines feels like too much effort, perhaps the communication wasn't that important to begin with. The barrier to entry is quite low (for a human) and you don’t even need to connect the account in anyway to your other online personas. The biggest benefit would also be that YOU can be found when people want to connect with you…
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
"Banned", "too much effort", these are straw men.
Real name systems (for routine discourse) are bad. Walled gardens are bad. I should not need to forsake my privacy unless I wish to or alternatively a material need exists.
Don't need to connect the account? What sort of joke is that? They require you to use your government recognized name.
42lux 51 days ago [-]
There are no straw mans here the only thing that shows is your entitlement. Maybe read it again because it looks like you either took everything out of context or didn’t comprehend it.
Your last sentence also just doesn’t make any sense. Why would you worry about platform x if „they“ „know“ everything anyways. I was talking about your anonymous online personas.
Complaining about potential guidelines on one platform when numerous unrestricted spaces exist online seems rather narrow minded, especially given the abundance of alternatives available. Just use it as a modern telephone book. You have total agency over yourself and if or how you use it.
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
True, "banned" was likely a non sequitur as opposed to a straw man. Many of your other remarks are as well.
If multiple services require you to use the same identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to find and link.
The existence of alternative services with different terms does not address the issues raised in this thread. Neither does it change the fact that I think the existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of course I'm going to complain about that.
> Just use it as a modern telephone book.
Other people upload information about me into said book. There are various things that I can't do unless I use said book and those have nothing to do with looking up contact information.
It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the provider of the telephone book could every contact lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
50 days ago [-]
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
isn't this "telephone book" just what the databroker industry does (and has been, and will continue to do)? I'm not even sure there's any bright line distinguishing databrokers from the ad-personalization industry, or credit reporting, etc.
fc417fc802 51 days ago [-]
Sure, I guess? So is someone going to argue something along the lines of privately owned real name walled garden social media being no worse than intentionally sharing all of your personal correspondence and various other metadata with a data broker? I'd be inclined to agree with such an argument but to what end?
balamatom 51 days ago [-]
>You have total agency over yourself and if or how you use it.
Nir Eyal would like a word
>If following the platform's basic guidelines feels like too much effort,
That's the straw elephant in the room
>perhaps the communication wasn't that important to begin with.
And this is the particularly dehumanizing part
>entitlement
Is that what entitlement is? Preferring to avoid using the services of an unethical vendor if possible? Or is the entitlement in the "being able to afford to avoid..."?
immibis 50 days ago [-]
Hang on, so if I got this right, paraphrasing:
You: "You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to"
Them: "Sometimes it's required for some important task"
You: "Why not simply sign up for Facebook and use it?"
42lux 50 days ago [-]
We were talking about a potential new non profit platform not facebook. (Well, I was until one child comment had to bring up fucking Facebook again.) That was the whole point of the discussion and now everyone and their mom ignores it because you all seem to love condescending rage comments. Eh… not worth the keystrokes.
fc417fc802 50 days ago [-]
> We were talking about a potential new non profit platform not facebook.
We were talking about the impact that platforms with real name policies have on society simply by existing and being widely used. Particularly relevant considering that the first comment in the thread was about just such a platform being officially provided by the government and tying accounts to a government issued ID. The second comment in the chain, which you responded to, explicitly referenced Facebook.
> you all seem to love condescending rage comments.
Your arguments don't hold any water and you're having difficulty accepting that fact.
50 days ago [-]
balamatom 51 days ago [-]
Yeah, just like you don't have to own a smartphone if you don't want to.
aleph_minus_one 51 days ago [-]
I know quite some people who do by conscious decision not own a smartphone considering these are surveillance bugs with an inbuilt phone function, for which you even have to pay.
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
not to be persnickety, but you don't have to pay for cellular service. the trackability you're criticizing is not inherent to the smartphone concept.
balamatom 48 days ago [-]
The trackability is not inherent to the cellular service, but to the sensor hardware, operating system, and business model.
akimbostrawman 45 days ago [-]
Cellular service is very much inherently trackable. See cellular triangulation.
wizzwizz4 51 days ago [-]
And their lives are made unnecessarily difficult.
42lux 51 days ago [-]
Wat den eenen sin Uhl, is den annern sin Nachtigall.
balamatom 50 days ago [-]
За кокошка няма прошка, за милиони няма закони!
Terr_ 50 days ago [-]
Oh god no. That's dangerous and unnecessary.
When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?
We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.
Terr_ 50 days ago [-]
To spitball an annoying but way-less-Orwellian response... Imagine your local City Hall has a physical vending-machine. This machine allows you to pay $2 to a charity of your choice in exchange for a kind of special anonymous token that can be used to prove that the $2 donation happened.
Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before."
There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.
ninalanyon 51 days ago [-]
I really don't want to use my folkeregister ID to connect to a social media site. I present as feminine but I am not out to everyone in my family and I really don't want to forced to dox myself ahead of time.
latexr 51 days ago [-]
We definitely do not “need” that. We already had enough years of real name social media before LLMs to know that real names do not stop people from being publicly abusive and that social media is bad for us.
What you’re advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier. You’re advocating for an authoritarian’s wet dream (and a treasure trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that’s the last thing we need.
I vote a hard no on your proposal. I’m opposed to it like I am to Chat Control.
Signed,
A European
markhahn 51 days ago [-]
I guess I have two questions:
- do you think it is so hard to track people by their other behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
- isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the (out-of-band) legal system?
latexr 51 days ago [-]
1. Define “so hard”. It is definitely harder to identify someone by having to trawl through all their posts and infer behaviours than simply clicking a button which gives you access to their legal ID, full name, marriage status, parents names, home address, bank account number, phone number, and so forth. Security and privacy aren’t binaries, but spectrums: each wall you put up is a new opportunity for an adversary to give up.
2. Maybe I don’t understand the question, but I don’t see how that’s relevant or true. Social media is routinely used as evidence in court.
If pseudonyms didn't work, no one would be proposing the policy that he proposes. And nearly everyone seems to propose it or some variation of it.
indigo945 51 days ago [-]
> Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier.
This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and suppress moderate voices.
And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative, which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-encryption political schemes, but the social media question pertains to public, not private, communications.
Signed,
Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)
A European
latexr 51 days ago [-]
> Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation.
Which is an orthogonal issue. Private social media doing it does not mean government-owned social media wouldn’t. In fact, it is precisely because authoritarians already can see it working that they would salivate at the though.
> And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here
You’re agreeing with and rebutting things I haven’t said. I don’t think the proposal was to outlaw other forms of social media. I still think the proposal is bad on its own.
> which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world.
It guarantees no such thing. There’s nothing stopping that real person from asking an LLM and posting the reply directly. That already happens today. Heck, people confidently post screenshots of LLM conversations as if they were fact even when they’re provably wrong.
> If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
I personally don’t use any of those, and neither would I defend them. Again, my argument is those are already bad and OP’s proposal is just as bad and then adds worse things on top.
indigo945 50 days ago [-]
> It guarantees no such thing. There’s nothing stopping that real person from asking an LLM and posting the reply directly.
The point is that it prevents multi-accounting and deliberate astroturfing campaigns. If people personally decide to just trust ChatGPT screenshots as gospel and assume LLM outout as their opinion, that's their own prerogative.
51 days ago [-]
aleph_minus_one 51 days ago [-]
>
And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship.
It wouldn't only update the floodgates, it's rather the idea behind these proposals. :-)
51 days ago [-]
nodoll 51 days ago [-]
[flagged]
m2024 51 days ago [-]
[dead]
Mrdarknezz 51 days ago [-]
No that is a pretty terrible idea
m2024 51 days ago [-]
[dead]
RGamma 51 days ago [-]
Some cryptographic trust anchor and a web of trust yes, government sponsored no.
FuriouslyAdrift 51 days ago [-]
Big "I" Internet will further splinter into more "dark" and un-indexed niches along with walled gardens. Basically, the pre-web internet days (1980s).
I await the new AOL or whatever.
throwaway545673 50 days ago [-]
> Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners
That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.
balamatom 51 days ago [-]
Who's "we" - the AI robots, or the loners?
executesorder66 51 days ago [-]
As a non-American this is a horrendous idea. People need to accept that assholes and misinformation exist. And you will encounter it in real life and on the internet. You can't expect a nanny state to protect you from every slight discomfort you experience. Learn how to deal with it.
Bancakes 51 days ago [-]
First we need social media infrastructure that isn’t made for quick dopamine hits.
zoobab 50 days ago [-]
Belgian minister of Digital just proposed a law which will force mandatory eID for "social media platforms" (whatever that means).
If it is the case, I will leave to greener pastures.
cbsks 51 days ago [-]
Why not start now, Mr. INTPenis?
INTPenis 51 days ago [-]
Did you just assume my gender?
cbsks 51 days ago [-]
My deepest apologies.
MiiMe19 50 days ago [-]
please tell me this is bait. I refuse to believe there are genuinely people with this opinion.
nextts 51 days ago [-]
[flagged]
jiriknesl 51 days ago [-]
[flagged]
msy 51 days ago [-]
Agreed. Europe won't be sovereign until it fully controls its social media, having American billionaires (or the Chinese state) able to manipulate the narrative at will is unviable. Look at the recent situation in Romania with Călin Georgescu or Musk's pro-AFD meddling. It makes the pearl-clutching in the UK about the ownership of the Telegraph look hilariously quaint.
Rendered at 06:54:50 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to hear a dominant narrative.
Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
That makes my old hacker heart smile.
There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the timecube [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
(Admittedly I was also pretty drunk).
https://timecube.ai
So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.
But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.
https://seedboxes.cc/ https://dediseedbox.com/wiki/knowledgebase/jellyfin/ https://www.rapidseedbox.com/blog/jellyfin-vs-plex .. etc.
Not really. I see the stark difference when i visit my parents (in their 60ies).
TV is always on and pretty much always repeating the same things. Little variability, really poor content. It's basically serving the same old thing to the same old people.
The internet instead has much more variability. There's so much plurality of opinions they often clash against each other.
> A lot of younger people I see are shunning it.
What I see is younger people starting to shun social media, which is something that makes my heart smile as well. It seems we're finally shaking off this performative collective craze.
Social media was definitely a mistake that made everything worse. I hope it dies soon.
Ye. Hopefully from cultural change and not government bans though.
Young people seem to prefer small private group chats nowadays?
When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of dust on the lander"), blah etc.
There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was real, because it was the first time I came across something fabricated communicated as fact.
Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.
You would run into people like that maybe once every few months. These days you are basically guaranteed to run across multiple people like that every time you log on.
YouTube figured it out with comments around 2013 or 2014, but it got a lot worse about recommending videos from low-viewership channels in the last few years, which exposes you to a lot of wackos.
Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.
I do still occasionally get some good videos from smaller channels, but smallness is a lot more relative these days. A lot of channels that I have started following in the last few years begin to see growth within less than a year. YouTube has gotten really good at identifying quality content and amplifying it, with the end result being that the 300 view videos in your feed are just market testing.
One thing you can do if you’re into the weirder side of YouTube is to append “before:2012” to the end of your searches; I’ve found some cool stuff doing that.
That you knew of.
I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.
Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to him on someone else phone.
As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.
Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.
https://www.designnews.com/automotive-engineering/scammers-t...
IMO, the apps are quite nice actually and I enjoy not having to ever run out to a meter anyway, but requiring a phone should not be considered meeting accessibility requirements.
Seems beyond stupid to require me to have an Apple program or a Google program and specific hardware to pay for parking when I can just have the coins in my pocket.
Especially since ParkMobile could just decide not to support the version of android I’m running, so that I’m forced to purchase a new device.
Coins aren’t subject to code rot.
A bonus is that meter toll collectors would have a job.
It is annoying though to have to install half a dozen different parking apps for the lots that have partnered with different app providers. It would be nice if public parking lot apps would interoperate.
It takes fewer “clicks” so to speak and is more accessible to the elderly.
But anything government which doesn’t require to keep track of a purchaser’s identity should accept cash. Otherwise what’s the point of cash if your own state doesn’t accept it.
This is so obviously true for non-tech elderly folk that don't already have smartphones. I can hardly believe it's in question.
Card:
1. Receive free card from bank in mail.
2. Keep card in your wallet/purse which you already take every time you go out.
3. Memorise PIN (the tricky bit, to be fair).
4. Wave or insert card for payment.
Phone app:
1. Either find a phone shop and ask for help, or figure out how to securely buy a smartphone online.
2. Figure out how to set your phone up. This involves a lot of confusing decisions such as whether to create an apple/google account, which services to enable, etc... .
3. Learn how to search for, install, and use phone apps. The parking app will vary depending on where you choose to park.
4. Set up google/apple pay or your card payment details on required apps.
5. Learn how to connect your phone to wifi if you end up parking in an area with internet but no phone signal.
6. Remember to take your smartphone with you every time you plan to drive and park somewhere.
7. Muddle your way through what is often a bloated, ad-ridden app every time you want to park.
Not even that, for a credit card.
An app often requires some account setup with spam emails to follow.
How a particular change impacts you will, of course, strongly color your perception of it.
If you're someone who always has coinage readily available, forcing you to install an app and create an account on a device you may not have, or be familiar with, plus feeding said app an up-to-date payment method (accompanied by concerns of financial loss) and eating the cost of transaction fees is not going to be seen as progress.
If you never use currency and having coinage on hand is an extra effort, and don't mind installing and using yet-another-app on your current smartphone, then doing away with coins seems much less hostile.
And, of course, if you own/operate parking meters, reducing your own overhead is a win for you, as long as the meters keep getting used enough that your profits go up.
Which ends up actually benefiting the public more, I don't know.
Yes. High tech != smart.
Using coins or credit card is a far better experience downloading an app.
I can put quarters in the meter.
My county forcing Microsoft 2FA as the only option for the government entity I work for, in which I'm the youngest by far and we don't accept having to buy a phone just to use an account, reeks of capitalism.
Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes to administrators.
[1] https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-trends-2001-2012/
I got my first gmail address via an invite and it was light-years ahead of everything else.
Nowadays it's possibly worse than most other providers, and it doesn't filter spam as well as it used to. Nowadays I just dislike it.
He's completely useless these days, particularly around social media, but increasingly around everything else. I worry about him.
It's difficult to imagine what it would look like, but I'm increasingly of the opinion the best way forward is a hard break with tech. Minimal engagement outside of what's needed for the daily basics.
It's transparently wrecking our brains and societies. We can't build a better Internet, we need to escape it.
Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
...man, I miss it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185
redraw
redraw
This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the intelligence of content on the internet.
However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and spam would stop internet use.
And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what we're seeing.
It turns out it was an AI generating responses to every single thread linking to this test.
Here’s one example:
> In my experience, I found skipping grades to be challenging initially due to the abrupt environmental and academic changes. It took me a few weeks to adjust to the pace and social dynamics, but it eventually became rewarding. It's important to approach it with openness and patience. By the way, if anyone is curious about their potential for advanced learning, the Gifted Test at [redacted] can provide insight - it's been validated by licensed psychometricians.
Every comment was like this. You can see the mod’s profile here: https://www.reddit.com/user/themightymom/
I brought this up in modmail with them, to see if any of the uncorrupted mods would respond, under their names. The responses denied my claims and mocked me, before banning me, but notably, all of the responses were under the group-mod username: so either none of the old mods were willing to respond under their usernames, or it wasn't the new mods responding. (Hint: it was almost certainly the latter.)
I reported it to the Reddit admins, but have heard nothing back. I don't expect too much because if the worst the new mods are doing is spamming affiliate links, that's relatively tame and far down the priority list.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...
https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community, but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the openness they care about.
> Another word is "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because unwalled gardens become slums.
Gardens are not walled off for the benefit of the users; they are instead walled off to benefit the network’s owners. There are three chief factors motivating owners to walk in their networks: Preventing rivals from scraping content or user data, encouraging users to sign up so that their activity can be monetized, and keeping content platform exclusive (most platforms will penalize content that has a competing platform’s watermarks on it).
This is true, but the implication that therefore there are no benefits for the users is false. If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web. (At this point, usually some implicit argument is made that users are foolish and misguided. I'd urge you not to go down that route.)
People go to these platforms for a reason, my point is that the reason isn't because they are walled off. It seems like you are arguing that the chief (if inadvertent) benefit to users of a walled garden is that users don't have to deal with undesirable behavior because access to the platform is restricted by a login wall. This isn't how I would understand a service being "walled off" - Hacker News is not a walled garden even though I need an account to access some of its features. The important distinction is that most (all?) of the content on Hacker News can be accessed without an account. Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora are examples of services going the other way - they lock down content, not for the benefit of the users, but for the benefit of themselves. They save on not having to serve the content to unregistered users, keep the content on their platform, and encourage unregistered users to sign up.
The chief benefit of the open web was always permissive read access, not permissive write access.
Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work or perhaps working on something together brings people together. If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.
Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old days.
There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)
This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.
Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple, cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)
I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess, communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my company.
I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books, and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running track.
The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social media.
Just sad really.
I actually had an example of something similar before my eyes. My advisor's advisor's advisor (...), emeritus, occupied the office next to mine and printed his Fortran code to work on at home. He debugged on paper, then typed it down the next day in the office. His whole career had been at the crossroads of math and computer science, his main contribution algorithms and software, and he did not have a computer at home (says he). This software debugged by hand (and typed with the index fingers) is still used in commercial software!
Don’t try to understand the work flow. That’s impossible. Just try to realize the truth.
https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html
This is why worldcoin may have a bright future: https://world.org/world-id
I think we are moving to gated communities again. The internet will split into several parts. Microsoft always wanted the internet to be a Microsoft thing. So maybe we move into this direction.
Systems that run on the Internet come and go: the open web, the siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of those still exist but there's definitely been a progression of the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening.
I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.
Then again, there are those that believe Mars is the only answer.
An excerpt from Carmen Hermosillo (humdog):
"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many people spill out their emotions – their guts – online and I did so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."
It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords it's all about the money and they've already invested into building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves on that platform will they care, but those users already have the current Web, so why would they bother?
Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their idiosyncrasies into it.
I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens, and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.
Sometimes I accidentally “go out” by following a link with infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It’s not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet- and socio-wise.
Where there’s many people with different views and no established culture, there’s chaos and insanity.
Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in and wasting your time.
Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return control to the user.
What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but it's still bizarre.
Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of web pages — pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages" themselves are almost always static files — though they could maybe be served by a wiki or CMS backend.
But HTML5 web apps that deliver walled-garden social networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely affiliated with "the web" at best.
My rubric for what constitutes "the web":
• Does each piece of content have a readable, human-friendly permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed and 2. through which the public can access the content, without signing up for the service, or being nagged to sign up for the service? (Remember that? That's the web!)
• If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page just send you directly to the link destination — implying that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of where they want their links to go? (Oh, that's definitely the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning, you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things? "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)
• Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-rendered HTML containing the content — such that anyone with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)
• Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to specific relevant parts of the content? (That's extremely "the web.")
Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial topics.
But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's only so much "web" — and most of it was created before the year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-journalism news websites — many of which carry on putting out real new "web" pages every day.)
If you disagree with my definition of "the web" — well, I still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)
But I would argue that this is, explicitly, what "the World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as "not the web, just using web technologies."
(This distinction used to be easy, because all that platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, on a semantic level, not "the web.")
Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse.
> You are an elitist
Correct.
in real life and online
Both of those things seem like fairly reasonable hypothesis to me. You are the one inserting race into it.
The blogger cites a website which cites Richard Lynn for these 'facts'. So this is about race and IQ, quod erat demonstratum.
You are misrepresenting the author. He made no such claim. He did not articulate what he believes the underlying mechanism to be.
It would be perfectly reasonable to inquire about the mechanism, or question the accuracy of the prediction. It is not reasonable to make accusatory conjectures about his beliefs.
I don't think that this claim is credible. It comes from Lynn & Becker, who also have Nepal's average IQ at 43,[1] which is in the range where someone with that IQ would be considered mentally disabled, with limited capacity for independent life. That cannot be reconciled with the employment rate in Nepal. And according to Lynn & Becker, the average person from Nepal, Liberia and Sierra Leone has an IQ that puts them in that category.
1. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i...
That's exactly what Lynn did: he has "good" IQ data generated for-purpose by the research communities in developed countries, and just uses IQ data from, essentially, mental health institutions elsewhere. He presents these data sets as apples-apples equivalent.
It gets worse: for what should be obvious reasons, there are lots of countries where it isn't easy to get any such data. Lynn doesn't try; instead, his team takes data from neighboring countries and extrapolates.
It's almost certainly just a wanky way to say 'human', an allusion to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
The problem with the internet today is that the top (i.e. google) is going along with the bottom, the so-called enshittification. They are promoting the types of people this article is complaining about into direct visibility with its monopoly powers on search and discovery.
It's in my niche, of course too. People from India with no connection to the industry and just a wordpress are the #1 query for almost every result for the past ten years. It's nuts. My niche is at the forefront of the enshittification, but soon this will be your niche too.
Google basically kills off every consumer webapp like this to promote garbage wordpresses, content from the hindustantimes and other virtual detritus onto your browser. Look at r/SEO, are they focused on creating quality or scamming people? I'll give you a hint, research their mods' SEO websites. Yet Google cannot seem to get enough of it.
I think it's far from determined that web4 will be web2 but with more third world-problems but it's not looking great for the people who are building consumer apps right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was good only back when it was for a select few. I don't know how he reconciled that with his apparent distaste for gated communities.
Hell, your “masses” flooding the Internet in the later 90s were still much better than the population now.
And here’s this guy writing about how bad things had gotten in 2004. Buckle up, buddy: you ain’t seen nothing yet.
Imagine what brave new world the future holds. Never assume things are so bad that they can’t get worse.
I mean ... not wrong.
What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand this but many European countries are already primed for it.
If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a stable and safe social media as an alternative.
I would love to go back to people not using their real name and an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit dangerous.
Problem is that regional forums in Europe died because of the regulations.
forocoches(dot)com
And I have more:
mediavida(dot)com ( it means half-life :) )
And then I have random ones:
redcafe(dot)net foro.acb(dot)com
I read them, and post on them daily, forums are alive and kicking it on europe :)
the EU regulations made it harder/less attractive to host a small local forum and I think that was his point
It may just be because people in Europe interact in real life more and don't need an online forum.
But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a real person, and where everyone stands for what they say online.
In many countries internet forums are technically banned by regulations. HN posted that many user forums in UK were simply deleted because of the excessively heavy burden of the law.
If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at your door.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev9nxnygzpo
Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I think you are sadly mistaken.
Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-anonymity right now ).
If you have a democracy then the laws of the land should be those that are agreed by general consent - give or take - and as such applying those laws to people in a way that means they are accountable for their actions isn't a problem - in fact it's the long standing bedrock of civilisation.
The problem in China isn't that they can catch people breaking their laws, it's a problem with how those laws are set in the first place.
So the real issue is stopping a move towards authoritarianism which is a whole larger conversation.
So in the issue above - about the journalist - the question should be about whether the particular hate speech law is correct, rather than worrying about if they appear to breach it whether they can be caught.
In the past 100 years the following countries have slipped from democracies to authoritarian states: Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Argentina, Chile, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua.
Some of them recovered, others never did. Look at Turkey for example. If you think you are safe, you aren't.
Have you considered that massively enables organised criminal elements in democracies and increases the chances of a slide into authoritarianism?
It's a bit like in the good-old days of the internet when everyone trusted everyone else - life was simple and good. Then the bad actors came, and so did SSL, firewalls, n factor auth etc etc. Search engine results became less good as people gamed the rankings.
You have to adapt.
In Europe we take a different view from America - in America mass school shootings are a price worth paying for the right to own a gun. In the UK there is a presumption that they really isn't any good reason for owning a handgun, nevermind an assault rifle, so it's pretty hard to get one.
Freedom is multi-dimensional - and not absolute. I'm free of worrying my child will be shot at school, but less free to own a gun.
Same goes for freedoms on the internet - in the end it's about a pragmatic choice about what's best and I'm saying that pragmatic choice is already encapsulated in centuries of legal tradition - the internet doesn't change that - people, in the end, need to be accountable for their actions.
I doubt she wants this state of affairs to change.
On the other hand, if your house gets burgled, you get a crime reference number and told to take it up with your insurance company.
So? Justice secretary has nothing to do with the police - justice is the courts.
Home secretary is ultimately in charge of the policing policy and in the UK they have no day to day influence over polices actions - the police are quite decentralised. Are you from the UK?
And in terms of the wider government they are supporting Israel's assault in Gaza directly with intelligence and weapon systems and are silent on the daily atrocities - that's hardly pro-palestinian.
I can see on the one side that police should only ever investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false allegations.
on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some form of scrutiny.
It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the personal nature.
In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the idea and words that have been insulted.
When using your last name, it is the real person's identity that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback loop involving two real people's real identity without the constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.
The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads for engagement.
Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to join you have tell someone using both real names that their newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the worst possible form of communication.
Are you assuming that the author's own identity will always be masked or throwaway like a sockpuppet? That seems very much like a design choice of the forum.
This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-dox or be silenced.
but it also means responsibility, which acts in the opposite direction.
a realnames policy doesn't preclude also offering pseudonyms for sensitive cases.
to me, it seems like the real issue is sockpuppetry - basically a Sybil attack on authenticity/reputation/responsibility.
I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it. Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret Dontknow is pretty obvious..
"That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital identity verification for all humans, at all times."
(This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also prescient commentary on modern trends)
I want social media to disappear.
The main issue with social media are the recommendation algorithms, and I don't want the government or private companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want anyone except myself to be in control of them.
Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know quite some people who do this!).
> I want social media to disappear
I often read people trashing on social media who are doing so on this site which is very much social media. I don't use other social media sites and appreciate that this one is different than the normal ones. It's still social media as I understand it.
Assuming I'm not wrong about this being social media... If they want social media to disappear, why are they creating more of it by participating here?
I mostly keep my mouth shut, but the embedded contradictions sometimes make me comment to scratch my itch.
Well it is true that newest gives chronological listing. Most of us visit the front page which does not. Instead, it uses the algorithm of user vote aggregation.
On the other hand, while Facebook and the like had me interacting with those in my relational proximity, here it seems I am relating with people more in my cultural and professional proximity (largely due to the rules and cultural norms here). Sometimes it's just small talk and at others more technical or serious life matters but it's communicating with other humans (and likely a few bots) about life, sharing information and ideas, challenging one another to learn and grow. These seem like deeply social behaviors and that's a big part of why I regard this as social media.
With regard to the mall, that seems far more like Twitter or Reddit than here. While Reddit is less clear, Twitter is widely regarded as social media. On the other end is email that is "a human talking to another human" and regarded as not social media. Not to say you're wrong, just trying to explain my view and offer that as a bit of evidence that the boundaries are not so clear.
Speak for yourself, please, would you?
I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.
No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours, you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to individuals and democracy alike.
There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does not make one smart man.
Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you could argue that its not really needed any more - but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Yea, it is like a catapult. You need to let go of it at some point to keep moving forward, or it is going to pull you back or at least stop you from making further progress.
>but it started out well, not sure when or where it went completely off the tracks.
Good intentions or In this case, moderation. You know that I cannot go into detail here without pissing the moderators here, right? Yea, exactly my point.
I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use the postal service. Why should government provided social media or email or whatever be any different?
This makes sense because the only realistic way to enforce a non-falsified return address would be to verify government issued ID when accepting the parcel.
It's an interesting point thought that receiving messages does require a physical address. I guess the analogy would be needing to log in to browse the message board but not to post? That would be quite strange.
So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
Real name systems (for routine discourse) are bad. Walled gardens are bad. I should not need to forsake my privacy unless I wish to or alternatively a material need exists.
Don't need to connect the account? What sort of joke is that? They require you to use your government recognized name.
Your last sentence also just doesn’t make any sense. Why would you worry about platform x if „they“ „know“ everything anyways. I was talking about your anonymous online personas.
Complaining about potential guidelines on one platform when numerous unrestricted spaces exist online seems rather narrow minded, especially given the abundance of alternatives available. Just use it as a modern telephone book. You have total agency over yourself and if or how you use it.
If multiple services require you to use the same identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to find and link.
The existence of alternative services with different terms does not address the issues raised in this thread. Neither does it change the fact that I think the existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of course I'm going to complain about that.
> Just use it as a modern telephone book.
Other people upload information about me into said book. There are various things that I can't do unless I use said book and those have nothing to do with looking up contact information.
It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the provider of the telephone book could every contact lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
Nir Eyal would like a word
>If following the platform's basic guidelines feels like too much effort,
That's the straw elephant in the room
>perhaps the communication wasn't that important to begin with.
And this is the particularly dehumanizing part
>entitlement
Is that what entitlement is? Preferring to avoid using the services of an unethical vendor if possible? Or is the entitlement in the "being able to afford to avoid..."?
You: "You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want to"
Them: "Sometimes it's required for some important task"
You: "Why not simply sign up for Facebook and use it?"
We were talking about the impact that platforms with real name policies have on society simply by existing and being widely used. Particularly relevant considering that the first comment in the thread was about just such a platform being officially provided by the government and tying accounts to a government issued ID. The second comment in the chain, which you responded to, explicitly referenced Facebook.
> you all seem to love condescending rage comments.
Your arguments don't hold any water and you're having difficulty accepting that fact.
When you get down to it, what's our real minimum requirement for curbing scams and spams?
We do not need to know someone's legal identity, in fact we don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to sockpuppets in a botnet.
Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last year which hasn't already been used on this site before."
There's a lot of technical detail we could go into about how to maximize user privacy (so that you can't be tracked across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing things that were shared with it... but the key point is that 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one based on permanent government IDs.
What you’re advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your suggestion won’t solve any problem and will introduce new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier. You’re advocating for an authoritarian’s wet dream (and a treasure trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that’s the last thing we need.
I vote a hard no on your proposal. I’m opposed to it like I am to Chat Control.
Signed,
A European
- do you think it is so hard to track people by their other behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
- isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the (out-of-band) legal system?
2. Maybe I don’t understand the question, but I don’t see how that’s relevant or true. Social media is routinely used as evidence in court.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/12/30/heres-h...
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25738225
If pseudonyms didn't work, no one would be proposing the policy that he proposes. And nearly everyone seems to propose it or some variation of it.
This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and suppress moderate voices.
And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative, which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-encryption political schemes, but the social media question pertains to public, not private, communications.
Signed,
Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)
A European
Which is an orthogonal issue. Private social media doing it does not mean government-owned social media wouldn’t. In fact, it is precisely because authoritarians already can see it working that they would salivate at the though.
> And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the proposal here
You’re agreeing with and rebutting things I haven’t said. I don’t think the proposal was to outlaw other forms of social media. I still think the proposal is bad on its own.
> which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of this world.
It guarantees no such thing. There’s nothing stopping that real person from asking an LLM and posting the reply directly. That already happens today. Heck, people confidently post screenshots of LLM conversations as if they were fact even when they’re provably wrong.
> If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
I personally don’t use any of those, and neither would I defend them. Again, my argument is those are already bad and OP’s proposal is just as bad and then adds worse things on top.
The point is that it prevents multi-accounting and deliberate astroturfing campaigns. If people personally decide to just trust ChatGPT screenshots as gospel and assume LLM outout as their opinion, that's their own prerogative.
It wouldn't only update the floodgates, it's rather the idea behind these proposals. :-)
I await the new AOL or whatever.
That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.
If it is the case, I will leave to greener pastures.