Subj : Re: Community
To   : tenser
From : boraxman
Date : Sun Oct 02 2022 16:53:36

 te> Linux is not niche.  It is actually huge, and _mostly_ backed
 te> by very large corporations that depend on it.  Linux, in fact,
 te> has taken over the world; from Android phones and tablets to
 te> home routers, to every supercomputer on the top-500 list, it's
 te> literally everywhere.  Hell, I saw it booting on an informational
 te> monitor in the Frankfurt airport last month.  Schoolchildren
 te> are given chromebooks running Linux.
 te> 
 te> Some like to say the sort of stuff that you do above, but they're
 te> not the ones doing the work.  Most of those are at Intel, Amazon,
 te> Facebook, IBM, or Google.
 te> 

I've never seen a Linux desktop at work, and few people that I know who have a computer uses it.  TECHNICALLY, people using Android are using the Linux kernel, but that is so vastly different to what we consider to be a Linux desktop that the term "Linux user" has little meaning there.  Most of these people would be unaware they are using Linux.

 te>  bo> Google got BIG, and now it sucks as a search engine.  It ruined the W
 te> 
 te> Nope.

I think that it has.  SEO has changed the web.  We went from a World Wide Web to masses of generated half-content, much if which appears AI generated, purely to game the system to create ads.  It's harder to find good information than it used to be, and there is a preponderance of utter garbage sites that rank at the top of Google's search, because Google's model encouraged and rewarded the creation of garbage.

And don't get me started on Gmail...

 te> 
 te>  bo> Social media got BIG and ruined the social aspect of the Web.  Once
 te>  bo> things get big, they lose what they were, and become bad.  The
 te>  bo> popularity means nothing if it doesn't do good.
 te> 
 te> The web didn't have much of a social aspect before social media.
 te> I was there and saw it develop from a few weird hyperlink pages
 te> to what it is today.  People looked elsewhere for socialization
 te> before sixdegrees.com, friendster, and then blogs, myspace and
 te> facebook.  USENET and IRC were the two big ones.
 te> 

No, but that isn't really the point of the web.  We did have means to chat and e-mail and message, and there were forums and BBS (both this style and the web based BBS).  "Social Media" really mostly just made it easier, but poisoned the well by making the user the product.  I was on Facebook back in 2006 and what Social Media now has grown into something too large, something that has fundamentally shaped human behaviour, our expectations.  These platformarchs control our experience and mediate between people.  Some US Californian scumbag can now censor and manipulate billions of people world wide.  Ugh.

 te> Your argument is essentially that BBSes are special because
 te> they are not important enough for the crass commercialization
 te> of Facebook and Twitter, IG and Tiktok.  Ok.  But consider
 te> that they were orders of magnitude more popular 25 years ago;
 te> now they aren't.  Why is that?  First, because they didn't
 te> give people what they wanted, and second, because you had
 te> "big personalities" being jerks _because they could_.  At the
 te> time, there was no real competition, so people could appoint
 te> themselves lord high poobah of their calling region and if
 te> you didn't like it, tough: you were at their mercy.  The
 te> much more sophisticated and interesting Internet thankfully
 te> freed people from the torment of these petty tyrants, but
 te> what happened to them?  Well, gee, as it turns out: they
 te> stayed and now they see themselves as the protectors of the
 te> faith.
 te> 
 te> What bunkum.  No one wants to turn the little BBS paradise
 te> into Facebook; don't worry.  No one wants to exploit the
 te> population of BBS users.  But that doesn't mean that they
 te> want to kowtow to the gatekeepers, either.
 te> 

The were thousands of BBSs, that is vastly different to what we have today.  There wasn't a SINGLE BBS which controlled everything.  If you didn't like one BBS, or thought the Sysop was a knob, you could go to another.  Most people probably were members of more than one anyway (I was).

I'm not saying that BBS's will become facebook, only that there are some bad ideas which can sneak in when you want to popularise it, and those bad ideas should stay out.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/24 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: Agency BBS | Dunedin, New Zealand | agency.bbs.nz (21:1/101)

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