Access to massive troves of academic writing, research and studies are far more valuable. Most of an education is available online now, and that’s truly incredible.
Edit: This is not meant to be a complete list, just one example of something incredibly valuable which eclipses online communities. IMO obviously.
Of course it's subjective. Not all people have as much to gain from this additional access. There are people close to me that I'm pretty sure would've hung themselves by now without internet communities.
Though for humanity as a whole, obviously access to information is the biggest deal. But why stop at education? People today have more awareness than ever about everything. In some cases, including things that average civilians would never have gotten to see, like government leaks, or videos of executions.
And neither of those things are always positive obviously. Not all educational materials are good, not all communities have a positive effect, and sometimes there's just too much information to find the signal in the noise.
So I think it's fair to argue either really. And, truth be told, it's possible we couldn't have had one without the other, given how much individual people have contributed to the internet knowledge stores.
I remember when people were generally more tolerant of people who were different. If you were weird you kept the majority of your unpopular beliefs or behaviorsr to yourself and hung out with people with different interests.
Today, people seem to only want to hang out with people who are like themselves, who completely accept them. If someone has a different opinion or a different interest, they’re a predator trying to eat your herd.
Or they were burned as witches, or outcast, or were hermits? I truly don’t know. Maybe those traits were simply crushed out of most people, or those people suffered and died? Maybe they ended up like Newton... brilliant, successful, but nutty as a squirrel?
I guess you could have just read a lot of books. I don't know if libraries are being closed down in the US, but that's happening a lot now in the UK for cost saving reasons/due to lack of demand.
With a computer & internet access, it's easier to stay isolated. Though I guess TV and radio, even newspapers and writing for pen pals also provides the same substitute sort of-interaction without actually having to interact.
For all the negatives (assuming we say 'all these people should just go out and socialize' - unfairly), I think online communities make a huge difference to those who are physically disabled, need to stay home to care for someone all the time, or are stuck in the arse end of nowhere.
There's still a certain sense of egalitarianism in internet forums. One commenter's opinion is (by default) worth the same as another's.
That said, in most open comment sections in modern times the actual 'community' part is underdeveloped. Everyone is so loud, there's always someone positively thrilled to play devil's advocate with maximal cynicism, always someone there to interpret a comment unfairly, precious little sympathy for the views of others.
I was just offering one of many examples of something online which is more valuable than online communities. I’m sorry that my comment seems to have been taken as, “here’s the one thing I value online.”
I don't see how this is different from pre-Internet where you could have gotten an education from your local library. This fact is even referenced in the popular American film: Good Will Hunting, where a janitor at MIT solves an unsolved mathematical problem and reveals that he learned every academic thing he knows with a library card.
In my opinion the best thing about the Internet is it enables everyone to reach anyone, anywhere and share anything. It's a great levelling force, or it potentially could be. It's rather worrisome that in recent years the same kind of top-heavy power structures out in the real world seem to have taken control on the Internet too. It would be a pity were it to become just a glitzed up version of our world.
To reach its potential the most important single technology remains decentralisation. The average netizen should be able to serve and control his own data, even if he/she didn't create much of it in the first place.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where all real functionality moves to the Cloud and all our devices just become I/O thin clients. Saying that the average user won't care is frankly self-fulfilling and defeatist. How would they care if they are not provided alternatives to centralised services that are usable and compelling?
The Internet is part of the real world. Whatever you dislike about the real world, you will probably eventually dislike about the Internet. And to save what you like about the Internet, you have to go into the real world and fight for it. Thomas Anderson has to leave the Matrix and go into the real world to save all the people who think they are living normal lives in the Matrix.
It's interesting to observe that, just like in the real world, the benefit of security is something that doesn't distribute well and ends up being provided by centralized sources.
its funny to think that if in the future once everything have been decentralized where all your data, your purchase history, medical records are spread out over the internet, it is inevitable that centralization and privacy will all be the rage and people would pay premium for it.
If medical records were spread out, they would be spread out in encrypted form. Nobody would be able to read them except for the right people, which would actually be a step up from today's poor situation.
Keep that comment in mind. In 10 years, when the inevitable big breach occurs releasing millions of medical records, i hope you will be strong enough to go back to it and and think hard about your next moves.
I'm not sure I follow. How does a data breach relate to his comment? In fact, it might be quite a lot better if the security mindset was "literally anyone could have access to the raw bits". Strong encryption might not be so often regarded as gravy.
I understand your point now. You're talking about spreading medical records between hundreds of third parties with terrible security practices, and I'm talking about an ideal decentralized system with lots of clever cryptography a la the blockchain.
perhaps you must be thinking of using blockchain just to store the hash of the files so you can check against it using private key, in that case as a one way hash it “maybe” be fine. but then again that wont be a fully decentralized system.
i was thinking of a full on decentralized future where every file and data (encrypted / hashed address) are sitting exposed on the blockchain ala ipfs, etc. where only thing preventing it being decrypted is just a key.
not sure how far we are away from quantum computing but it might make what is considered standard encryption process obsolete. it wasnt even that long ago where cracking md5, sha1 became a piece of cake.
Per your second paragraph, even in the real world people have little to no control over what data of theirs is shared between third parties (eg gossip).
There's a baseline ability to control how much information third parties have in the first place - some people keep to themselves, some people tell anybody everything about themselves. People who care about it can, for the most part, at least know what other people know about them.
In any case gossip is lossy and low-bandwidth, and people understand those limitations when operating on information from that channel. The same cannot be said for, say, comprehensive real-time browser history.
A quick note is that megacorps get some credibility from having high production value. This video isn't as polished, and (unjustly) doesn't look as legit.
It doesn't actually allow this though right because it doesn't remove the things that kept this from happening before the Internet: language, differing customs, differing lived experiences, etc.
It doesn't allow anyone to reach anyone. You have very little chance of reaching people who spend time in non-English online communities (assuming you only know English). Those people have very little ability to reach you.
Furthermore, everyone is able to reach everyone, technically, but there is still a cost to doing so which everyone cannot bear.
It takes time (and for many, lost wages) to join multiple social networks and forums and write on all of them or to start a blog or to report news. And there is a certain class of people in the world who have that time and a certain class which don't.
The internet has always been a glitzed up version of our world, just with a lot more anonymity (which, many would argue has been a tragedy).
I think overall the connectedness is actually a bad thing, because it didn't come with education in critical thought and temperment. We're losing the battle of enlightenment to echo chambers of hatred and fear.
Having the option to live in an echo chamber also means we have the option to pick the wise and rational sources from which to listen to. Whereas before when TV and the local community supposedly was the source of diversity of thought, did you also have to put up with a lot of irrational bullshit that is inherent in socially propagated truth. I'm glad I'm not forced to live in that world anymore. For people who live in the outskirts, or who don't have access to a university culture to get their rational (isolated, echo chamber-y) conversation from, the internet is a godsend. Saying that you wish that echo chambers wasn't an option anymore also means that you wish people didn't have the option to experiment with a community whose values don't align with the norms of their local enviourment.
> Having the option to live in an echo chamber also means we have the option to pick the wise and rational sources from which to listen to. Whereas before when TV and the local community supposedly was the source of diversity of thought, did you also have to put up with a lot of irrational bullshit that is inherent in socially propagated truth.
I definitely have to deal with more socially propagated bullshit now than at any time in my history. Perhaps ironically, much more of it seems to be coming out of academia and journalism than ever before. For example, I can't think of a time when fields as patently ludicrous as "critical theory" have been taken as seriously as now. I can only speculate as to the cause.
I agree with this. "Echo chambers" (i.e., communities with the kind of people and content I like to interact with) are great as long as you know when you're in one.
It also didn't come with any way to upend the traditional barriers to connectedness: language, differing cultures, differing lived experiences, etc. So it shouldn't be surprising that that connectedness didn't actually fundamentally change much about the real world.
I would say the best thing about the internet is that it's not just one thing. It's multifaceted. It's a lot of things to a lot of people.
For instance, I personally don't do any social networking at all. But I immensely benefit from sites like wikipedia, or by other contents that I would have otherwise never read about.
So, I don't think you can say there's one thing that is the best about the internet. It's so many things. And that's great.
I wonder if part of the decline of small online communities is the sheer numbers of people using the Internet today (versus the 90's). I'll sometimes connect to an IRC channel about a niche programming topic, and see 1000 users. Likewise, I think it would be hard to make a personal connection to others in a large community like Hacker News where, outside of a handful of prolific posters, each discussion may be filled with different usernames than the last.
I guess this is sort of a "small town" vs. "big city" effect. I suppose the "small towns" of the Internet may still be out there somewhere, but under some conditions that keep them from growing into "big cities".
I think a big part of Eternal September was a culture mismatch where newcomers didn't understand the norms and expectations of Internet culture, more than just the sheer numbers of new users. Now that Internet culture and mainstream culture have converged, this aspect probably isn't that big of a deal.
It's a huge deal, we've just accepted it as normal. If I were to create something online today, where users were allowed to comment, I'd be an idiot if I didn't predict it would get abused by spammers and trolls as quick as you could say "4chan". Anonymity was previously believed to be a barrier to that, but comments on local news sites and Youtube comments continually prove otherwise.
While our systems have become more centralized (Twitter/Reddit/Facebook) compared to connecting to your ISP's Usenet server, there's no real digital-social-etiquette training system for new users given by those centralized authorities because we've simply accepted the ramificiations to Eternal September.
If I try to make a new Reddit account to post a bunch of hate speech, Reddit itself does little to dissuade me from doing so. There's a huge amount of effort to dissuade bots from creating accounts, but other than drop a link to "reddiquette" during account creation, what does Reddit do to teach me social norms during account creation? Better yet, what could they do before letting me roam wild, hurtling death threats and hate speech until the post-per-second rate limiter kicks in?
The idea of giving an hour long lecture, followed by an hour long interview and training session, for every single person that wants an account on a site the size of Reddit, before granting them an account, is ludicrous on the face of it simply due to the sheer number of new users.
Moreover, Internet culture is not a single monolithic thing. /r/AskHistorians has wildly different standards of acceptability from /r/Nintento,and those are wildly different from /b/ or Facebook.
This is true. Ancient USENET was once fantastic before SPAM and trolls invaded. The stores of free non-fiction books and journal articles in PDF is also a giant treasure few could have imagined a few decades ago.
There's a nameclash here: internet of the 90s which the OP pines for, and the current internet which is weaponized and truly has all the problems the OP calls exaggerations.
It's fine to pine for the 90s internet when nobody knew about your subculture much less tried to monetize it through advertising. But to actually get the spirit of obscure 90s internet on the current weaponized internet is a hard problem. The danger is that you implement some kind of nostalgic 90s interface and simply hope that nobody on the internet hates your subculture sufficiently to destroy it. After all, that's exactly what you did in the 90s and it seemed to work.
The problem is that now a) a plethora of attackers know exactly how brittle and easily gamed these services are, and b) all your users know it, too. And that includes knowledge about how certain types of speech can attract the ire of people with bot armies, exploits, etc. So your userbase either self-censors in order to keep under the increasingly automated radar, or it doesn't and raises the likelihood of attacks.
And that's assuming nobody ddos'd you to oblivion in the first place.
Anyhow, I think it's correct to characterize online communities as dangerous and unhealthy places, because at present their brittle designs make them hazardous to use. Until programmers actually solve some of the deep problems of designing a social networking for use over a weaponized internet (in the same way that git has largely solved that problem wrt source code management), I don't see any reason to change that characterization.
People with nowhere else to turn and no money to physically move to a safer location will certainly still use these messaging services. But the best of a series of bad options is still a bad option.
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41 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadEdit: This is not meant to be a complete list, just one example of something incredibly valuable which eclipses online communities. IMO obviously.
Though for humanity as a whole, obviously access to information is the biggest deal. But why stop at education? People today have more awareness than ever about everything. In some cases, including things that average civilians would never have gotten to see, like government leaks, or videos of executions.
And neither of those things are always positive obviously. Not all educational materials are good, not all communities have a positive effect, and sometimes there's just too much information to find the signal in the noise.
So I think it's fair to argue either really. And, truth be told, it's possible we couldn't have had one without the other, given how much individual people have contributed to the internet knowledge stores.
I wonder how this worked in the past. Were people less "weird" that the people they knew IRL were enough?
Today, people seem to only want to hang out with people who are like themselves, who completely accept them. If someone has a different opinion or a different interest, they’re a predator trying to eat your herd.
With a computer & internet access, it's easier to stay isolated. Though I guess TV and radio, even newspapers and writing for pen pals also provides the same substitute sort of-interaction without actually having to interact.
For all the negatives (assuming we say 'all these people should just go out and socialize' - unfairly), I think online communities make a huge difference to those who are physically disabled, need to stay home to care for someone all the time, or are stuck in the arse end of nowhere.
There's still a certain sense of egalitarianism in internet forums. One commenter's opinion is (by default) worth the same as another's.
That said, in most open comment sections in modern times the actual 'community' part is underdeveloped. Everyone is so loud, there's always someone positively thrilled to play devil's advocate with maximal cynicism, always someone there to interpret a comment unfairly, precious little sympathy for the views of others.
To reach its potential the most important single technology remains decentralisation. The average netizen should be able to serve and control his own data, even if he/she didn't create much of it in the first place.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where all real functionality moves to the Cloud and all our devices just become I/O thin clients. Saying that the average user won't care is frankly self-fulfilling and defeatist. How would they care if they are not provided alternatives to centralised services that are usable and compelling?
i was thinking of a full on decentralized future where every file and data (encrypted / hashed address) are sitting exposed on the blockchain ala ipfs, etc. where only thing preventing it being decrypted is just a key.
not sure how far we are away from quantum computing but it might make what is considered standard encryption process obsolete. it wasnt even that long ago where cracking md5, sha1 became a piece of cake.
In any case gossip is lossy and low-bandwidth, and people understand those limitations when operating on information from that channel. The same cannot be said for, say, comprehensive real-time browser history.
Please take a look at this and I would love to hear feedback: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI
It doesn't allow anyone to reach anyone. You have very little chance of reaching people who spend time in non-English online communities (assuming you only know English). Those people have very little ability to reach you.
Furthermore, everyone is able to reach everyone, technically, but there is still a cost to doing so which everyone cannot bear.
It takes time (and for many, lost wages) to join multiple social networks and forums and write on all of them or to start a blog or to report news. And there is a certain class of people in the world who have that time and a certain class which don't.
The internet has always been a glitzed up version of our world, just with a lot more anonymity (which, many would argue has been a tragedy).
I definitely have to deal with more socially propagated bullshit now than at any time in my history. Perhaps ironically, much more of it seems to be coming out of academia and journalism than ever before. For example, I can't think of a time when fields as patently ludicrous as "critical theory" have been taken as seriously as now. I can only speculate as to the cause.
There is no 'battle for enlightenment', just people having access to way more stuff than ever before, and that is a big big win.
For instance, I personally don't do any social networking at all. But I immensely benefit from sites like wikipedia, or by other contents that I would have otherwise never read about.
So, I don't think you can say there's one thing that is the best about the internet. It's so many things. And that's great.
I guess this is sort of a "small town" vs. "big city" effect. I suppose the "small towns" of the Internet may still be out there somewhere, but under some conditions that keep them from growing into "big cities".
It's a huge deal, we've just accepted it as normal. If I were to create something online today, where users were allowed to comment, I'd be an idiot if I didn't predict it would get abused by spammers and trolls as quick as you could say "4chan". Anonymity was previously believed to be a barrier to that, but comments on local news sites and Youtube comments continually prove otherwise.
While our systems have become more centralized (Twitter/Reddit/Facebook) compared to connecting to your ISP's Usenet server, there's no real digital-social-etiquette training system for new users given by those centralized authorities because we've simply accepted the ramificiations to Eternal September.
If I try to make a new Reddit account to post a bunch of hate speech, Reddit itself does little to dissuade me from doing so. There's a huge amount of effort to dissuade bots from creating accounts, but other than drop a link to "reddiquette" during account creation, what does Reddit do to teach me social norms during account creation? Better yet, what could they do before letting me roam wild, hurtling death threats and hate speech until the post-per-second rate limiter kicks in?
Laughably little, that's what. Thats Eternal September's penalty.
The idea of giving an hour long lecture, followed by an hour long interview and training session, for every single person that wants an account on a site the size of Reddit, before granting them an account, is ludicrous on the face of it simply due to the sheer number of new users.
Moreover, Internet culture is not a single monolithic thing. /r/AskHistorians has wildly different standards of acceptability from /r/Nintento,and those are wildly different from /b/ or Facebook.
It's fine to pine for the 90s internet when nobody knew about your subculture much less tried to monetize it through advertising. But to actually get the spirit of obscure 90s internet on the current weaponized internet is a hard problem. The danger is that you implement some kind of nostalgic 90s interface and simply hope that nobody on the internet hates your subculture sufficiently to destroy it. After all, that's exactly what you did in the 90s and it seemed to work.
The problem is that now a) a plethora of attackers know exactly how brittle and easily gamed these services are, and b) all your users know it, too. And that includes knowledge about how certain types of speech can attract the ire of people with bot armies, exploits, etc. So your userbase either self-censors in order to keep under the increasingly automated radar, or it doesn't and raises the likelihood of attacks.
And that's assuming nobody ddos'd you to oblivion in the first place.
Anyhow, I think it's correct to characterize online communities as dangerous and unhealthy places, because at present their brittle designs make them hazardous to use. Until programmers actually solve some of the deep problems of designing a social networking for use over a weaponized internet (in the same way that git has largely solved that problem wrt source code management), I don't see any reason to change that characterization.
People with nowhere else to turn and no money to physically move to a safer location will certainly still use these messaging services. But the best of a series of bad options is still a bad option.