I for one, miss the old, grimey internet. Reddit is/was so good because of the possibility that you might find something disturbing while using it. Just about everyone is represented on there. YouTube was also much better when the sketchiness was easier to accidentally run into.
One of the reasons I find myself continuing to use the fediverse is because in many ways it reminds me of the old internet. There are parts of it that are rowdy and salacious like old Reddit and 4chan, but if just want a shared space to nerd out with like-minded people about hobbies and shared interests, you can have the early-2000's hobby forum experience as well.
And it's all very brand-unfriendly - there's relatively few celebrities, no advertising space to sell, no algorithm to optimize for, and nothing preventing a possible promotional post from a corporate account from appearing next to something NSFW in someone's timeline if that's who the user is following.
This. I want a brand-unfriendly internet, though of course putting it that way again puts the commercial aspect and the internet's relation to it front and center. I want an internet that isn't built commercially, not with monetization in mind. There are still places - AO3 is completely unsuited to any commercial association, and it is still the fanfiction center of the internet. Places like literotica survived the ages.
Of course, when regulatory moral panics take hold of it, they never say out loud that what they really protect and defend is commercial use...
For the most early-Reddit-like experience, I would recommend Lemmy.
I was kinda interested in checking it out for a while but suffered from a bit of choice paralysis not knowing where to start, but since most of them are federated, you see content from a bunch of instances at once, so that removes a bit of the risk.
I ended up creating an account on lemmy.world which is (afaik) the largest instance by user count. Beehaw is (afaik) the second largest, and it has more of a "safety"/highly moderated approach - which is one of the reasons I wanted to distance myself from Reddit, so I crossed that one off my list.
This map was posted on HN if you want to examine the relative sizes of the instances and see the lay of the land: https://lemmymap.feddit.de/
Personally I prefer using kbin, that's another option. Kbin and lemmy both can communicate so it doesn't matter which you use. feddit.de and kbin.social are kbin instances.
go to instances.social, pick a relatively small one and sign up for an account. now you're on mastodon and have a fediverse account. this account can interact with everything fediverse, from mastodon to pleroma to pixelfed to peertube. decentralized to the max. (don't join mastodon.social)
>Reddit is/was so good because of the possibility that you might find something disturbing while using it.
Why do you consider that good? There are plenty of places on the internet where you can find disturbing content, why does it have to something you can just stumble upon?
> Why do you consider that good? There are plenty of places on the internet where you can find disturbing content, why does it have to something you can just stumble upon?
Because what's disturbing to me is not disturbing to someone else.
Because, just like when I walk in a city, I run into interesting and surprising and occasionally things that test my sensibilities.
This is good because nobody can decide on my behalf what I should find disturbing or not.
>Because, just like when I walk in a city, I run into interesting and surprising and occasionally things that test my sensibilities.
Using your simile: cities aren't lawless wastelands just because some people like living in chaos, and neither should the internet be (in my opinion). Cities have places where more extreme content can be found for those that want it but is kept away from the general public. Why shouldn't the internet be the same?
No one is arguing over what disturbs you. Many people are rightfully arguing that vulnerable populations should not be needlessly exposed to content that is widely considered to be disturbing. Have you heard of tor? There’s tons of disturbing in every flavor imaginable with seedy purveyors ready to create whatever content you desire, if you can afford it. Let’s keep that off the clear net and amongst the criminals, for the good of, oh geez, everyone? I encourage you to get your kicks there so that regular people on regular internet can go about their business without seeing CSAM/gore/violent crimes/etc.
Communities that harbor disturbing content *will not* scale because the majority of people are not interested in these things so the stakeholders of these venues rightfully police their domains to make them as inviting as possible to as many people as possible. I’m not sure what you’re actually arguing for here. Do you actually want to happen upon beheading videos or CSAM while you read this site or something?
No one is advocating for looking at CSAM (well, except you). In fact there wasn’t even the suggestion of that.
They have a right to enjoy the content they choose, as long as is it law-abiding. Regardless of if that upsets your sensibilities or not. Frankly, aside from trying to pull the age old “think of the children” routine, do you even have a point? You are arguing that harboring (legal) disturbing content is tantamount to CSAM and should be censored because it “will not scale”, meaning you are focusing on a for-profit lens. Despite the fact that the conversation topic, the Fediverse, is not for-profit.
Why does someone enjoying their time in a legal way bother you to the point of indirectly accusing them of viewing CSAM?
>No one is advocating for looking at CSAM (well, except you). In fact there wasn’t even the suggestion of that.
You’re being awfully charitable with such a contrived interpretation of the comment above mine. Fact is they didn’t say what bad stuff they think should be allowed in prominent online spaces frequented by children and vulnerable populations, legal or otherwise. Having read enough about the salacious corners of the clear net, it’s rather safe to assume CSAM is among the bad stuff this person was vaguely referencing. It would be helpful if they provided an enumerated list of the crap they enjoy seeing but that would also require them to expose themselves. Do you see the contradiction and need to read between the lines here?Every platform, even moderated one’s, faces this problem: Twitter, Facebook, instagram, Reddit, all of them. I’m not encouraging people to seek this stuff out, and your accusation that I am stands in stark contrast to the charity you gave the person above. Concerning. Regardless, if that’s their thing I hope they walk right into a honeypot.
>You are arguing that harboring (legal) disturbing content is tantamount to CSAM and should be censored because it “will not scale”, meaning you are focusing on a for-profit lens. Despite the fact that the conversation topic, the Fediverse, is not for-profit.
Bad faith argument and patent misinterpretation. Reddit, the front page of the internet, is mentioned in the context above and largely what I’m arguing in regards to. To be explicit, Reddit is not a federated platform and is for profit, and it’s reasonable to speculate on the intentions of the platforms leadership, especially when they state explicitly that they want more money. I’m not interested in arguing about what grimy stuff nobodies get up to on the fedoverse. It’s probably a lot like 4chan or the sites that spring up when abusive groups get hit by a ban wave on larger platforms: gab, truth social. The fefiverse will likely remain fringe for the foreseeable future for this very reason and isn’t an interesting discussion due to the limited audience. grimy people drive valuable/helpful users away necessitating the removal of said bad actors. Also, I’m not interested in the profitability of platforms. I’m interested in the health of the communities and grimy content pushes normal people away reducing the health of the community. I don’t care that the person above wants to look at grimy stuff, I care when the same people want to see their perverse interests made mainstream which is exactly what many people are arguing for, with concerningly vague terminology, in this thread. Gross.
ETA
Interesting you didn’t speak to beheading videos…
Why are you spending so much money to buy and post billboards around my house specifically? That’s not a viable return on investment. Let alone a sensible argument.
If that's really how you want to spend your money, what the billboard owner wants on their signs, and legal content thensure why couldn't you do that?
We can't be censoring anything we find offensive, or even worse anything we think might offend someone else. Trying to draw a line for what is legally banned content is enough of a gray area, there's absolutely no way to draw a line when the metric is what may offend someone.
Because it's a relatively safe level of risk compared to, say, 4chan's /b/. People love to dabble in risk in safe ways. I'd argue that's what many genres of fiction are explicitly for, e.g. horror, violent games, etc.
But it's only that way because Reddit placed limits which goes against the "let the internet be grimy" hot-take. Back in the day there were subreddits that would rival the depravity of /b/.
I don't use Reddit outside a few niche communities that unfortunately have a presence there, but disturbing content (as in genuinely disturbing, not merely porn and dead people) broadens one's horizons.
Here are some disturbing things I've run across that I'm glad to have seen:
Putin's essay "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians": en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 (it should be obvious from the literal kremlin.ru ___domain and the fact it's by Putin, but you want to read this one critically)
/r/deathgainers, a community of fetishists literally eating themselves to death and being egged on by other fetishists (no URL because it probably got wiped out in the drama and because it is actual porn; see also pro-anorexia communities, which for some reason tend to be banned while deathgainers are allowed)
The disturbing parts of the internet are more worthwhile than the Skinner boxes and can encourage more personal growth. Certainly if you're only a little concerned about the amount you drink, watching The Wethouse will change that; if you're sitting there in July of 2021 and not too worried about whether Russia will start a land war in Europe, reading Putin's essay and its echoes of blood-and-soil will change that too; if you eat too little or too much, seeing the fatal effects can be a wake-up call.
Many moderation policies would block some or all of those, though The Wethouse and Blindsight might escape. I'm glad to have seen all of them. I'm not sure whether I would have, if I had to explicitly go to the designated deviant zone and wade through thousands of gigs of porn to find them.
I think the more disturbing part is the implications of consciousness being a kind of globally maladaptive local optimum. And it’s neat how the aliens are basically GPT-99.
That the protagonist had half his brain amputated is pretty squick too.
> Putin's essay "On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians": en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 (it should be obvious from the literal kremlin.ru ___domain and the fact it's by Putin, but you want to read this one critically)
Reading this, I find myself wondering who was the last American president who might have written an analysis on this level. Carter maybe? He was always underrated. Nixon probably too. Perhaps Obama could have, but by the time he was president it was already unthinkable for a US president to do such a thing.
It is agood thing that US presidents don't write ahistorical self serving bs like this. Not that they would be saints, but not being Putin is a good thing.
Obama was the head of the Harvard Law Review before getting active in politics, and almost certainly was a decent writer.
You're also assuming that Putin actually wrote this himself. I don't think it's impossible -- he was in the KGB and FSB, analysis could be something he's trained heavily in -- but if I had to bet money it's not his writing, just his byline.
Furthermore, even it it was his work it missed the mark pretty hard, and a lot of dudes are dying due to terrible assumptions made about Ukraine and it's military.
While I agree with the sentiment of the article I can do without link traps that take me to a chainsaw execution gif under the guise of wedding bloopers.
It happens with Youtube sometimes, but you have to search for the exact name of the creator you heard somewhere else. Or you find very "pure creators" when you search how to fix your toilet.
Watching YouTubers come up with weird euphemisms to avoid saying "COVID" (to avoid the risk of automatic demonetisation) drove home how much self censorship there must be around content creation in general. I've also seen a few joke about whether they're allowed to swear or not yet since apparently the algorithm cares if they swear in the first 15 seconds, lest an easily damaged listener finds them by mistake.
The thing is, the phrase has an origin in a parody of censorship. In one episode of Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man teams up with Deadpool. Deadpool, being fourth-wall-savvy and well aware that he is in an animated kids' show, talks rather frankly about his plans to "un-alive" the criminal they are pursuing. To which Spider-Man responds "Un-alive... you mean KILL him?!"
Mr. Pool was applying standards and practices to his own speech that were common on 80s and 90s animated programs, in which characters obviously wielding rifles would assiduously avoid talking about killing or death. And now people are using his neologism to avoid being punished on a video platform ostensibly for adults primarily.
Assuming you're talking about gun silencers/suppressors, the US has a very confusing history with them in general.
The way in which they made it into Congress's list of heavily regulated weapons is an interesting story of inept politicians at work. I've also never understood why suppressors would be seen as anything other than a good thing, if we wanted to regulate them it'd make more sense to require them for carry guns rather than make them hard to get.
Shooting an unsuppressed handgun without hearing protection is really bad for your hearing, and carrying a surpressed pistols also much trickier if we're concerned with how many guns are legally carried in public.
You know the abundance of Hollywood bullshit on AI going to kill us all? The same thing happened long ago with silencers as they forget about hearing damage from firearms because it isn't seen in movies but worry about "the dangers" of firearms being suppressed to non-hearing damaging levels by equating it with the classic "mouse-fart" level of volume.
Hollywood has a lot to answer for in its damage to epistemology.
As far as I understand it these restrictions on suppressors predate any meaningful impact of Hollywood action films. Suppressors were included in restrictions from the prohibition era largely targeting the fear of the use of automatic weapons by organized crime (the mob).
Feds pictured everyone in the mafia carrying military-grade Thompsons (Tommy guns) despite the fact that they were horribly expensive, produced in small quantities, and didn't sell well. There are actually congressional record of the hearings for the weapons law that make clear no justification was given for including suppressors, it just wasn't pressed by anyone involved.
That screenshot of early Twitter reminded me of the naivety of the early social platforms. We used to just tweet or post any random thing that came into our heads, without worrying about it. No concerns over "how many likes will it get?" or "will I get dogpiled for saying this?". It was nice. Obviously doomed, but nice. I miss that naivety.
One of the things that Twitter used to do well was have a balance of pseudonymity and real identities, and allow multiple identities per person; the latter of those particularly reflects how humans actually work, with separate personae for separate contexts.
Other than ownership, I think that the worst thing for Thread is that carries over Facebook's real identity obsession.
Why though? Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this ___domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse.
Not to mention the fact that one person's grimy is another's milquetoast, so what do you do about that? Moderation is the organic balance that resulted from years of trial and error.
I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore). Every road in the world does not need to be the Autobahn.
What would really be saying something is if people stopped using platforms they don't like. But that's like taking a drug user away from his dealer--they both need each other in a perverse, symbiotic relationship. It's not that hard to leave platforms anyways, teens have already mostly stopped using FB.
The most uncharitable bone in my body thinks that people who don't migrate off Twitter etc. like being the "cool" guy who doesn't like that stuff and having others around to read that. But I suppose that's just my opinion.
To me, it seems very inorganic outside of specific platform niches that allow for self moderation of subsets of the network (Reddit somewhat, IRC, discord, Mastadon, etc.). A single globally shared moderation policy with local deviances to accommodate local customs and laws does not seem “organic” as much as forced.
Compare this to the real world.
If I go to my local business networking group, there is one set of moderation policies that is strictly enforced.
If I go to my local pub, there is a very different set of moderation policies that is loosely enforced.
If I went to my business networking group and behaved as if I was under the moderation policies of my local pub the contrast in behavior would be stark.
Church has one set, school another, the local swingers club another, the gentleman’s club another, etc.
Compare this to many social media platforms where it seems like the moderation policies attempt to moderate a baseline of behavior consistently across all communities regardless of whether they are pubs, business groups, or otherwise.
I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.
You're absolutely right. I think the problem is that connecting everyone to everyone is a mistake. As John Oliver (I think, I can't find the source of the original quote now), puts it, "Facebook is the Walmart of social media." Yes, everyone and your mom is on there... but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother. That is frankly, terrifying.
Building on your analogy, it'd be like if in the real world your local pub mates and your business friends met. These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.
>I suspect (maybe hope?) we are going to start seeing organic social start happening as groups start trying to increasingly assert their own identities and moderation policies that are incompatible with a global standard.
I think this is exactly what you're seeing. Of all the different social media models, personally, it's reddit and discord that won out for me, along with a smattering of more niche like Hacker News and the discussions page on Github.
You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.
>but that means every post is going to be seen by your mother
This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.
>These are two different communities that most certainly cannot be welded into a single forum.
But sites like Facebook are not just a single forum. Each group can be it's own community. People can keep two discussions separate.
>You can't and shouldn't build a community that satisfies everybody.
I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible. Though at that scale it is more of a meta community compared to smaller subcommunities that are made which are more comfortable for humans to interact with.
I don't think it's impossible to find a set of rules that a billion people would be willing to agree to.
> I don't think this is impossible. It is hard to scale a community to billions of people, but large social media sites are an existence proof that it is possible.
Large social media sites are a pale shadow of an actual community. These sites love to throw that word around to get you to sign up, then act like properly moderating their sites to actually feel like a community is impossible.
> This is solved by people just make another profile to keep it separate. It is okay not to add your mother on your hobby account.
Note that Facebook and many other social media sites go out of their way to prevent the same person having two accounts. It is against their terms of service, and they do try to enforce it in various ways.
Okay? Facebook lets you create multiple profiles using the same account.
In your example the problem was that someone's mom was reading all of their posts and not that they wanted to use different login information for each profile.
For one thing, I wasn't aware of the Profiles feature (and couldn't figure out how pt create another one even after reading it exists, though I'm sure I just wasn't careful enough reading the settings in-app).
Still, the comment above used both profile and account to refer to the same thing ("create a new profile", "your hobby account") so I'm not even sure which they were suggesting.
I doubt you could even get English and American communities to agree let alone Chinese and Swedes. A lot of what we see is steered by extremely Americanised morality and laws. As a Dane it feels off and I'm sure for people from China, India, and other places very different than here it must feel even more so.
A "baseline" where, as mentioned above, misogynistic, racist behaviour isn't allowed sounds easy. But is it though? You take what Nazis and racists have said for ages and put "Russian" instead of their victim of choice and suddenly most Americans will agree that's fine behaviour "because Ukraine".
How about age limits, alcohol, sex? Hell, even Americans couldn't agree on a baseline in those.
I don't know if you're American but as I said I'm not and the internet has teached me how to behave as one online to not be caught in strange Americanised moderation rules. That's not agreement but enforcement that's caused this and if asked I would vote No to those rules.
I’m not sure those places are as different as you say, at least in terms of a baseline for acceptable behaviour that is common to all. Overtly, individualised racist or mysogybist abuse isn’t really acceptable in any of those places, and social media companies have t even managed to enforce that as a standard across much of their networks.
> I miss the old internet as well, but I know the internet is not just for the weirdos and nerds (anymore).
This is what I found bizarre about Jack Dorsey pining for the old days of the internet (usenet, irc) and the lack of discovery, and blaming centralization for it. There are still decentralized places that exist, and anyone is free to set up their own host, and they would get mountains more traffic than was even possible in the 90s or early 2000s. The problem is that that isn't good enough anymore. It has to make a mark on the internet or something. Not satisfied with 10,000 people viewing your page or your post, gotta be 10M+.
The other thing is that "old internet" was largely about the type of people on it. Mostly university students, most of those engineers, most of those male and from the same socioeconomic background. Fast forward to now when everybody is online, and the callout culture and seeming animosity towards viewpoints favored by early internet people is because opposing viewpoints exist.
Because what a lot of people think of as the deep, dark, grimy internet is how people talk in real life. The phenomena of the internet being a clean place where you don't say slurs only happened as a result of advertising on social media platforms. The argument about what way should we let the internet "be" is completely orthogonal to the matter, no one is suggesting people to go out of their way to be dirty, just let people have conversations the way they do outside the internet.
this is interesting to me. more than ever people are socializing on the internet, and not just in sequestered areas like discord servers. there still are ostensibly "public" places like twitter. to me this is similar to in real life as you describe it. and in real life i don't use slurs. none of my friends do either. in fact, i'd wager if you ever used a slur against against the wrong person in real life you'd quickly regret it. it's just very, very interesting to me to see a comment like this which supposes everyone is just as eager as you are to use slurs in any context.
> Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this ___domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse.
Today will feel early too in 100 years.
It might not be what you meant but this comment comes across on its own as a bit of sour grapes.
It’s less about a hegemony, and more about what was a shared experience for an actually small group of people. They weren’t pioneers or visionaries, just curious explorers. The web having that small of a user base probably won’t happen again. It’s moot a bad thing either because look at how we can ask connect now.
Still, the first time trying cable/adsl, or wifi when there was none, or mobile data that was so slow it left lots of time to dream was a seminal moment that this group didn’t see coming or pick, but it is theirs.
Maybe they were 10-20 years early and today you are in a better position.
There’s a lot of firsts still to be experienced together on this journey.
Similar to how we’re all soaking in LLMs together.
When something like the web was underground, counter cukture and mainstream it’s a different formation period. Tech wasn’t cool and certainly didn’t impress many. Still it was chosen. The promises to be around a keyboard were limited and it took going to great lengths for many. It’s really good it’s not as hard anymore.
Todays web is much better and more accessible. It’s mushy what we access that we will learn to pay attention to and become more discerning about as our digital palette evolves.
As an observation, Facebook was the first thing the broadest group of people did on a computer or the web. It really lived off mainstream technology adoption. This might be Fb’s greatest contribution to society. Still, if we don't like where a platform is going, the next curve of connecting awaits for you to make something you and others want.
Stopping people from using a platform they don’t like might be harder than just building the next thing.
The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.
I think what you're hearing is people mourning a loss of something they had and valued.
I think feeling that loss, and expressing it, is valid.
> Todays web is much better and more accessible.
Whether or not it's better depends on what you found valuable about it. It is worse for some, and better for others. Disclaimer: it's much, much worse for me. But I acknowledge that it's better for others. Such is life.
> The internet will get more personal. And that’s good.
Whether that's good or not depends on what you mean by "get more personal". If what you mean is "more personalized", then I think that's the opposite of good.
But, again, that's just me and I'm mourning that the web is most of the way toward becoming a thing that no longer meets my needs or desires. That it meets the needs and desires of others is fine, and I don't want to deny others from being able to derive value from it. But, nonetheless, the loss to me, personally, is real and I don't see why I shouldn't be able to talk about that.
Reddit is heavily moderated. The likes of Gab get banned from app stores and hosting providers; KiwiFarms shows that even if you self-host (at a level beyond most regular people's ability and resources), if you offend the wrong people then you'll be cut off the internet.
Kiwi farms was a haven for degenerate anti social wanna be mass murderer. No sane business wants that association. No one is silencing these people, they are being lawfully discriminated against (refused service) for their reprehensible behavior. That’s freedom of association in action. The laws prohibiting the government from acting against someone for their words do not apply to the individual. In other words, tolerance only extends insofar as the infringers intolerance can be tolerated without relinquishing inalienable rights.
Off topic, but kiwi farms is a weird hill to plant a flag in on this topic.
> No one is silencing these people, they are being lawfully discriminated against (refused service) for their reprehensible behavior.
They're not just being refused service by hosting companies or the like, ISPs are not routing to them. That's new, and that's what I think is worth "planting a flag" about; it's not a newspaper refusing to print your articles, it's the post office refusing to ship your newspaper. If that's not being silenced then I don't know what is.
Additionally, for a time the SSL Certificate Authority in Greece was threatening to remove their https:// certificate for “unspecified violations of some clause.”
They are still on TOR, and currently they are back up on sneed.today (not sure why the old ___domain didn't come back yet?). The site seems to be hosted (I guess?) by TerraHost, a Norwegian company which is owned by the american company Epik, and which refuses censorship. I assume the people wanting to take kiwifarms down will have to go to the upstream providers of Terrahost, since they won't bend the knee.
The fact that they're using Terrahost as a provider isn't new, but the difference here, I guess, is that now they are using an IP owned by TerraHost rather their Null IP/ASN connecting to TerraHost and then to upstream providers such as GTT, and so on...
Not sure what difference this makes, and I'm too much of a noob to understand what is going on exactly, so I might be talking bullshit here. But it seems to be working. Be that as it may, NGOs and institutions who defend the free internet should be opposing the censorship of kiwifarms, but they aren't because everybody knows that most of these institutions have an ideological bias...
>institutions who defend the free internet should be opposing the censorship of kiwifarms
This argument is unsupported by your comment. What value does kf create? Far as I can tell it only destroys value with their trail of suicides and bigoted behavior.
Distinction without a material difference. This is only slightly to mail delivery services refusing delivery to homes with aggressive animals. In this case it’s telecom operators not enabling violent criminals that could create liability if left unaddressed.
> Kiwi farms was a haven for degenerate anti social wanna be mass murderer.
No it wasn’t. Both in life and in death William Atchison was made fun of by the members of multiple communities, gaining the posthumous nickname “Couch Cuck”. A “haven” for murderers would not obsessively archive information relating to murderers, such as social medias (which consistently delete the information to avoid being associated), prior convictions, etc with the intent to study and publicly shame them. One can argue of the efficacy of this, but it is no different than what MSM does. In fact, KiwiFarms can be attributed to the destruction of a CP/animal torture ring and multiple arrests, due to their archival efforts and Internet sleuthing.
Additionally, on the topic of “reprehensible behavior”, companies like CloudFlare happily accept money from animal abuse websites. And under every metric KiwiFarms is legal under US law. So while companies are legally allowed to disassociate for almost any reason, we have to ask why illegal websites remain while legal ones are disassociated. And considering CloudFlare initially sided with KiwiFarms, it truly is not as clear cut as “they found the content disagreeable”.
On topic to your off topic, I was definitely not expecting KiwiFarms to mentioned either.
I don’t think you are aware of the depth of depravity users of kf engaged in, regularly. I said wanna be murderers, you know, the weird kids with poor social skills that probably have shit home lives and get bullied/ostracized harshly. When they find community on these boards they also find recruiters for all sorts of awful communities from neo nazis to pedophiles to whatever.
>A “haven” for murderers would not obsessively archive information relating to murderers, such as social medias (which consistently delete the information to avoid being associated), prior convictions, etc with the intent to study and publicly shame them.
This is not logical. Many murderers study infamous murder cases to learn how to be better murderers. For some it may merely be a morbid curiosity, for others, it’s research. You cannot discern the intentions from the comments, but rather the outcomes, which speaks voluminously; if you’d bother to look for the reports on this.
>KiwiFarms can be attributed to the destruction of a CP/animal torture ring and multiple arrests, due to their archival efforts and Internet sleuthing.
And 4chan got a terrorist training camp bombed. And Reddit got an innocent killed during the hunt for the Boston bomber. These are not examples of uniformly good character, even the worst criminals have soft spots. Nazis made some wondrous technology, should we forgive their attempted genocides and eugenics?
Re cloud flare, I support shaming them for this support of bad actors and hurting their bottom line but that is off topic goal post moving.
> I don’t think you are aware of the depth of depravity users of kf engaged in, regularly.
Alright, can you prove they funnel others into such depraved communities?
> This is not logical.
By your own “logic” anyone who studies crime is practicing to be a mass murderer, which is objectively not true. If they were truly some murderous training ground, why is their so little as a result?
> Nazis made some wondrous technology, should we forgive their attempted genocides and eugenics?
Well the USA, Europe, and many others certainly did when harvesting their best minds. However that is besides the point, as KiwiFarms has done nothing comparable. They say mean things and archive actions taken by others in public. Making fun of others is seen as rude, however it is not illegal. If it was false and caused damages it could be slander/libel, however that has yet to be the case to my knowledge.
> I support shaming them for this support of bad actors
The problem is that there is inconsistency here. You and many others do not campaign CloudFlare to remove illegal websites, or even websites in a similar vein to KF, yet you urge them to remove a single legal (albeit unsavory) gossip forum? If this stance was uniform I could understand it better. As it stands it simply comes off as intellectually dishonest.
The KiwiFarms issue is less what was said online in a club like forum context and more what was done in the real world by members and coordinated from KiwiFarms.
As far as I can see that was a smear campaign if not an outright false flag. The specific post that was mentioned as grounds for cutting it off was removed by moderators in less than 15 minutes, and was posted by an account that hadn't posted anything else.
But once you reach 109 times it rolls back to being coincidental right?
Those qui know, know.
In any case, lets not be deemed offensive for harboring thoughts of rebellion against the overlords lest we be yeested from the platform for attempting to pique the curiosity of those not entirely lobotomized by the oppression machine yet. Such fallacious behaviours shall be left without scrutiny while we all dance together under a rainbow of landmines, minimum wage and proxy wars funded by alphabet companies ever-seeking to exercise greater and greater control of the human mind at scale.
Yes, let's strive not to offend others, for that way we will surely make the most progress, ignoring all prior knowledge and our very evolutionary mechanisms so we don't make lines on a page that induce rage in the untrained mind.
Those that can't hold a thought without judgment, can't think critically, yet they are the ones we decide to put in charge of our social narrative?
Can you give an example of a mainstream view that is banned? I’m genuinely curious. I wonder if we will have different definitions of mainstream? It seems like a global audience of 5,000 might be mainstream and warrant a home according to some of the accounts here, whereas I would argue that this is still incredibly niche and these people might not expect to find anywhere in real life that would tolerate their speech either.
More and more of the digital world, from the internet to what applications our devices allow us to install, is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it.
And as the digital world increasingly invades and influences our realities and experiences the importance of not only serving the common denominator gets more important, not less.
> is about filing off the edges and rounding all corners to make the world safer for the common denominator and i don't have to like it.
In my opinion it is about making the online world safer for advertisers. The advertisers are the real customers of the internet - users are just the product.
The evolution of the internet is being increasingly driven by profit seeking and most common way people try to monetize the internet is through advertising. That is primarily what drives censorship and moderation - a need to protect the advertiser's brands.
The old internet that so many people are pining for in this thread comes from a time before big ad-tech. All the old schools forums, newsgroups etc didn't care about making a buck - heck most of them probably ran at a loss. All of that was eaten by social media, there was a transition away from internet communities, to for profit businesses instead.
Strangely enough, the more you regulate the internet, the more you empower the advertisers and the more users become just the product.
If you are a parent weary of an internet riddled with porn, traffickers, drugs, or other dangerous things. I believe it is on the parent to filter whats acceptable content for their kid to watch and not the website administrators to moderate whats acceptable. Its baffling to me that people see it the other way around. The latter is certainly easier and the parent can come up with all sorts of excuse why they cant find the time to do that given how hard life is and how it gets in the way, but at the end of the day. Who knows what's best for you or your family than yourself?
I’m absolutely sick of this trite argument being wheeled out by non parents. Try having a teenager and (in a practical way) regulating what they can see on the internet.
These comments seem to imply that parents watch over their children by the minute regulating their media diet. This is not only impossible, it would be really weird.
IRL we outsource some roles of the parent to the community. I send children out into parts of the real world confident that they won’t have shown magazines of animal torture or have abuse screamed at them because they are female or gay. The internet is an important part of our cultural space and it’s not ok for children not to be able to use it.
My main point of the parent must play an ACTIVE role. No one said be a helicopter parent or do not outsource. The fact you knee jerk to thinking this and immediately reaching for the downvote button is really weird.
I know plenty of parents who give a smart phone with complete control to the teen on what app or content they can see, and are shocked to find out to where on the internet they find their kid. Parents need to take some accountability for what their kids do. Shocking right?
So how do you protect your kid on the internet if popular social media sites don't flag or moderate away pornography or animal torture or the like? The only possible option I see is to become a helicopter parent.
I should note on the other hand that I don't understand why pornography is such a proeminent issue in these discussions. As a teenager, I definitely consumed porn (as I suspect the vast majority have) and no damage has come to me.
>>> I should note on the other hand that I don't understand why pornography is such a proeminent issue in these discussions. As a teenager, I definitely consumed porn (as I suspect the vast majority have) and no damage has come to me.
There are reddit groups above 1 million members who feel porn has interrupted their life and incubated as an addiction because of early and excessive teenage use. The field is not studied well but there are certainly many many others that feel different than what you wrote, me included.
>>> The only possible option I see is to become a helicopter parent.
I dunno I think the main issue is you see this as a black and white issue. No good discussion can come when you always see the different side as the most extreme option.
I don't think the author has the slight idea what does the word 'feudalism' mean. If anything the current Internet where users build themselves on big corporations' domains and get their data sucked for profit is much more akin of feudalism than the internet of old.
Nobody seems to know what feudalism is these days with all of the idiots being taken at face value. Feudalism is about a system of allegiances and obligations that supported personal power. The Wagner Group attempted coup is far more feudalist than any of the first world problems in tech.
It turns out force-feeding the general public enraging hyperbole and scary conspiracy theories sells the optimal amount of advertising, and doing anything else with a tech company is a dereliction of fiduciary duty.
Once upon a time I thought the Internet was going to be the antidote to cable news! I was so naive.
The Old Internet was mostly populated by English-speakers who could afford Internet access and had the attention span to work through the process of getting online. The ratio of legit hackers to Septemberites was a lot higher. Corporations had only the vaguest impression of how to exploit Internet users for profit. Foreign nation-states didn't yet have gigabit pipelines pumping out propaganda and misinformation. Cyberspace hadn't been industrialized yet.
Most of the junk you had to clear out of your forum beyond the usual dick pill spam was Serdar Argic[0] bot posts, Time Cube[1] style schizoposting, or trolling from the likes of GNAA[2]. You didn't really even know what they were on about, most of the time. You never felt like you were censoring a legitimate opinion, deleting stuff like that, and anyways, nobody complained. We were there to talk about Star Wars Episode I, make "all your base" jokes, or try to get our Linux drivers working because Bill Gates was the devil.
If you got banned from a popular website, it didn't affect your life outside the Internet at all. (Nowadays, if you die on the Internet, you die in real life.)
Google had no trouble keeping spam blogs out of the page 1 results, but gave you some interesting links if you looked up "santorum". Half the Internet seemed to think 9/11 was an inside job, and there were some frothy arguments about it, but believing either way usually didn't affect the rest of your identity.
It was a wonderful and crazy place, but it was the product of a particular time. And even though I'm angry that the Internet is now just bland junk posted inside digital gated communities, I doubt lightning is going to strike twice. Look to the future, not to the past.
Pick one. Weev is basically your standard Neo Nazi openly calling for the genocide of non whites. That “hilarious” trolling was a recruitment drive to enlist more people to that cause. That’s like saying Nazi Germany was a whimsical and silly place. You don’t give a shit because you’re not the butt of the joke.
"eternal september" refers to when the internet became accessible to "normies," thus supplanting the old internet vibe (mainly hackers, engineers, etc) in favor of being useable by the general public.
Someone who went online for the first time in September, when college starts and students get a turnkey way to do that, as opposed to gaining the interest and working through the process themselves.
What I miss about the old internet is that it wasn't primarily commercial. Now that it's mostly commercial in nature, it has become a much less useful and interesting space.
Also, it's become uglier. "Uglier" in that antiseptic, overly clean sense that you see in physical commercial spaces like shopping malls.
I'm all in on the grime, but I feel like this is one of the main reasons people are averse to the current crypto landscape: People generally prefer to live in shopping malls than the wild west.
>I feel like this is one of the main reasons people are averse to the current crypto landscape: People generally prefer to live in shopping malls than the wild west.
Somehow I think crypto having zero legitimate use case has more to do with it.
Really it sounds like the author is advocating for a new type of internet- one that requires sufficiently advanced technical knowledge to interact with, similar to back in the day.
Twitter was a more equitable place when it was brand safe for pharmaceutical companies, and when people could publicly debase themselves and denounce their acquaintences without fear of mockery for aligning to absurd official narratives.
The reasoning appears to be something along the lines of, if you aren't getting your news and commentary from former spies and retired secret policemen, how can you be sure you are not being brainwashed? If you can't believe what our elected representatives tell you in their own words from their own twitter accounts, what else is there to believe? The preponderance of evidence and every recent study shows that your experiences of privilege and problematic beliefs have always been the root cause of human suffering, and unless you awaken to the new reality that you are individually insignificant and your very existence is a burden on the majority of the rest of humanity - and to the existence of the planet itself - not only you are among the Left Behind, but we will make sure your friends, employers, and acquaintences are made afraid to even know your name.
The irony of how these Huxlian "trust and safety teams," suppressed content is that they did it to persuade us that the rest of their nonsense was real. The Internet as a coherent thing hasn't existed since about 2018, it's just another paradigmatic hegemon, which, too, shall pass. It's more probable we weren't all meant to know each other or see each other, because it implies a zero sum power struggle in a false captivity, which trivializes and ignores the infinite vastness of the planet and life on it. Maybe the path to enlightenment really does involve taking more pictures of your butt, however, I think I'm ready to go all in on betting against that.
Social media is dead. The only thing left to do is figure out how to get rid of the smell.
Elon killing the Blue Check was extremely funny, mostly because it went from an indicator of notability to an indicator that a person is going to talk about crypto scams or the Jewish Question.
I too found the total 180° on who was complaining about 'bluechecks' quite amusing, especially when complete sentences match up.
I may just be experiencing frequency bias though, as I've long been amused/annoyed by words and phrases quickly coming to mean radically different things.
Censorship on the platforms changed from moderation to a kind of gaslighting (as per the twitter files), cloud services consolidated their control over email as a medium, the web is almost fully intermediated by google, akamai, and cloudflare.
There is no "internet," it's just some propaganda outlets attached to the surveillance devices you have to keep in your home to participate in the economy. It is no longer a popular elsewhere, 2018 marked the inflection point or epoch of the internet becoming just another homogenized organ of the leviathan, not to connect people, but to atomize them, imo. It is a walled garden that is completely surveiled.
I'd speculate that the majority of people who use the internet now are young enough to have almost never lived without it, and it forms the substrate of their ontology, instead of being just a thing that is separate from real life.
They have no sense of it being an objective fantasy realm.
I honestly can’t tell whether you think Twitter now, under Elon, is now less or more moderated than before, whether you are on the left or right of current political thought (or somewhere else entirely), or whether you consider unmoderated communication to be a good or bad thing (but I’m pretty sure it’s one of those).
I honestly can’t tell you why almost any of that is pertinent to the conversation at hand.
Why does it matter whether he has shackled himself to one side of a political binary, or cares for the happenings of a singular website and its owner?
As for moderation, I believe they were lamenting the corporatization of the Internet and how it has become a hotbed for controlling the populace, rather than connecting the populace. Which would presumably fall under a preference for unmoderated communication.
The US left took those Trump-Russia files as gospel, even though it turned out that the whole thing was most probably a set-up.
As such, the same US left now saying that one shouldn't take those Twitter files seriously is quite disingenuous, if anything, the Twitter files seem more real than any of that Trump-Russia fiasco.
The Trump Russia files were exposed as a 'work in progress' investigation from a former spy that wasn't supposed to be leaked yet. Stuff he was still researching. If you think the "US left" took them as "gospel", you may be consuming too much propaganda. Nobody thinks the Twitter files were fake, they just didn't reveal anything as damning as claimed. Is it surprising that the president's team asked them to remove (illegal) stolen pictures of his son's dick? Seems expected and reasonable.
There should be some kind of Litmus test to see how a platform is moderated. You could use it to find where in the political spectrum the moderation team is to see if the platform suits you.
I propose, for example, "equating abortion to murder", "misgendering someone", "calling someone the f-word", "saying that f-words are molesters", etc.
Most of the big platforms (such as Twitter or Meta) are just in the middle. Twitter before Musk moved one point to the left, making misgenderisation a bannable offence, but I think Musk undid that. As a data point I have had comments flagged for doing the first one here, so you can tell where this community stands.
I have absolutely no faith in changes made by Musk, but I have to say I still remember the days when the platforms, instead of silencing everybody by default, trusted you to make a judicious use of the block button, like a grown-up would.
It all started back in late 2016 (guess why), I'd say that by 2018-2019 the momentum was already strong enough for the general population to also get hold of it.
It all culminated in the summer or 2020 (for the Anglo- and Anglo-influenced world, at least), but, hopefully, I'd say that right now we're in the middle of a vibe shift. Evidence number one is the launch of Threads itself, which feels like the launch of a dead carcass out in the sea.
All this to say that the OP is correct, social media is dead.
That large numbers of people threaten to murder retail workers for having a rainbow in their store suggests there's a bit more to it than "the internet".
Who decides what's nothing or what isn't? Shall the bully be the arbiter of what is pain or what counts? Can people just say anything and if you don't like it its your problem?
