[HN Gopher] The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
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The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 98 points
Date : 2023-04-25 13:00 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (maggieappleton.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (maggieappleton.com)
| aaws11 wrote:
| The cozy web relies on "(human) protocol of everybody cutting-
| and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across
| live streams", hopefully one day changing "from cut-and-paste to
| a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable,
| searchable, interlinked clips"
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Privacy is something of an illusion - any 'private discussion' on
| a supposedly safe back-channel can easily get leaked to the wider
| web by any number of mechanisms, such as nation-state monitoring
| or a member of the privileged membership club leaving their keys
| lying around.
|
| In this context, it should be kept in mind that the desired
| outcome of a panoptic monitoring system controlled by an
| authoritarian power, be it socialist or capitalist in nature, is
| self-censorship by the target population and its retreat into
| hidey-holes (which the authorities still have access to) which
| either provide a false sense of security or limit the spread of
| objectionable ideas and knowledge. Going along with this program
| is unwise: give the authoritarian power structure an inch and
| it'll take a mile, and then you end up having to deal with the
| Gestapo/STASI system.
|
| Additionally, the psychological pressures imposed by such a
| system lead to widespread mental illness in human beings.
| Relevant xkcd:
|
| https://xkcd.com/137/
| lolinder wrote:
| I can't speak for everyone, but I landed here because the word
| "cozy" resonated with me right now--I'm in the mood for some
| good vibes. While it would be very HN for a thread about "the
| cozy web" to tangent into a high-stakes, hugh-strung discussion
| of authoritarianism... could we, for once, let a conversation
| about cozy things have its day?
| bookofjoe wrote:
| FunFact: "The Americans favour the spelling cozy, while the
| British prefer cosy."
| ryandrake wrote:
| People are fooled by marketing and sales pitches. Cloud
| services are on the Internet. A fact that everyone twists
| themselves into knots to try to ignore. No matter how many
| times a service's marketing materials say "private" and
| "secure" and "trust", at the end of the day, when you use that
| service, you are _sending data to the Internet_. Don't send
| anything to the internet you wouldn't want published one the
| New York Times or sent to your worst enemy.
|
| Look at cloud services in this light and of course you'll be
| more careful about what you post! You will also not be
| surprised at the fallout of data breaches. "Millions of social
| security numbers leaked!" Well of course: you sent yours to the
| internet when you signed up for that credit card. "My nude
| photos are getting passed around!" Of course they are: you sent
| them to iCloud (the internet). "My private DMs got anonymously
| sent to my ex-wife!" You sent them to the Internet.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I think there's a small but significant difference between
| putting things "in public" vs. "on the cozy web" in that
| (with not a lot of effort) the cozy web is practically _safe
| enough_ for most folk.
|
| We've reached a point now where the average person feels some
| anxiety about their future employer seeing an unsanitized
| public blog, but future employers aren't poking into a
| Discord and de-pseudonymizing usernames. Nor is _my_ worst
| enemy; he 's a meathead and lacks the savvy to do that, nor
| the competency to hire someone to do it for him (yeah, I said
| it, and you know what you did so don't act like it ain't
| true, _name redacted_!).
|
| We've gone past the generation that thought if we lived with
| our private lives in public everyone would realize that
| everyone is human and be chill about that and we've built the
| infrastructure to have public selves and pseudonymous selves
| that (for most people) won't get cracked because it's not
| worth the hassle. Sure, nation-states and criminal syndicates
| still have the resources and incentives to do that kind of
| cracking, but we can only hide from them by staying all the
| way off the Internet, and we've _definitely_ reached the
| point where that leaves one with a massively de-enriched
| lived experience.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > hopefully one day evolving "from cut-and-paste to a personal
| blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable,
| interlinked clips"
|
| No thanks. "Personal" and "Blockchain" don't belong in the same
| idea. I want to be able to delete my things. And I don't want to
| have to run (or pay to run) nodes to do...whatever it is that
| proof of stake needs to avoid a 51% attack on my "personal
| Blockchain".
|
| And before someone says it, no, I don't want anything I do stored
| immutably on Ethereum or any other chain. Keep crypto away from
| my social.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| I wonder if substituting blockchain with "standardized way of
| referencing a personal database" would solve most of your
| gripes.
|
| I do feel the annoyance of people trying to shoehorn "crypto"
| terminology into personal stuff, but I think there's probably a
| reasonable non-cryptobullshit way (like WebMentions, which are
| used on the author's site) to get what the author actually
| wants, which is a way for _me_ to control the data I want to
| make available to the wider internet, and to delete them and
| leave gaps when I chose to do so.
| gdulli wrote:
| You're commenting on one of the few sites on the internet that
| doesn't give you the freedom to delete your own content.
|
| It's the main reason I don't take my participation here very
| seriously and can only treat it as anonymous throwaway content.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Not entirely true: you can edit/delete your posts and
| comments for a while (I don't know the exact length of time)
| after you post them.
| gdulli wrote:
| Yes and you can technically also email an admin to request
| manual deletion of comments, but neither is that in the
| spirit of having the level of control over your own
| provided content that you'd expect anywhere else.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| fair enough
| bastawhiz wrote:
| And because of that, I mind my words. I don't reveal a ton
| about myself.
|
| A permanent record of every social interaction in my life is
| both a huge privacy risk (an advertiser's dream!) and
| completely unnecessary. I don't want to censor myself when
| talking with my closest friends because I'm worried about
| everything I say and have ever said becoming irrevocably part
| of the public record. I want to choose a technology where
| that isn't the default.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| One great thing about being old (75 in June) is that you
| don't care at all about privacy/public record/what's
| deletable or not...
| spicybright wrote:
| Not everyone is in a safe situation to not care what's
| public. Being LGBT can be unsafe in many parts of the
| world and can have serious consequences if made public,
| like losing housing or facing violence.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I understand. My comment was solely about the joy of
| being a geezer.
| [deleted]
| beebmam wrote:
| I might be old school but I still think about the web in terms of
| the OSI model.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Non-techies like me haven't a clue what "OSI" stands for.
| parker_mountain wrote:
| If you google "OSI model" you'll find tons of resources of
| varying levels of technical difficulty. Pick the one that
| suits you best!
| w23b07d28 wrote:
| The only thing that changes are the hammers to solve the same
| problems. Everyone wants to be a monopolist and squeeze in
| somewhere in between, combining several functions under one
| solution, which force more functions to handle there functions.
| They are simply something else, depending on how you want to
| sell it - maybe as a base for further things? Bypassing the
| above, everything works the same.
| Whiteshadow12 wrote:
| 10/10 to the creator of the site, it's such a lovely site. It
| feels so fast.
| w23b07d28 wrote:
| Gatsby.
| donatj wrote:
| From the Colophon in the footer, here it is on GitHub:
|
| https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/maggieappleton.com-V2
| red_trumpet wrote:
| That diagram doesn't make a lot of sense to me, hierarchy wise.
| At the top the diagram contains, "inhabited by [...] trolls", and
| at the bottom "the only way into 8chan".
|
| If the hierarchy is "public visibility", then I believe the dark
| net to be more visible than a private WhatsApp group.
| lolinder wrote:
| It's not intended to be a data graphic with clear X and Y axes,
| it's visual poetry. It's meant to communicate a feeling about
| the concepts far more so than it is to be a navigable map.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| But it /has/ a clear vertical axis and separate layers. Why
| make that artistic choice if it doesn't mean anything?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| What does it mean that the forest has surface trees, a
| shallow surface-dweller layer, and deeper decay and bedrock
| layers?
|
| Is there something meaningful (in terms of linear
| continuity) on the y-axis of a forest? Or are you looking
| for a continuous function to apply where the metaphor isn't
| asking for one?
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Each layer on the y-axis of a forest has logical and
| physical relationships to those above and below it.
| jprete wrote:
| "Visual poetry" is an excellent phrase.
| quadrifoliate wrote:
| > At the top the diagram contains, "inhabited by [...] trolls",
| and at the bottom "the only way into 8chan"
|
| Your comment seemed sensible to me, until I realized that it's
| likely because we are both old and think about trolls as being
| on 8chan.
|
| But if you look at pretty much any time since about 2015, the
| most notable trolls have been large public figures with an
| extremely wide reach, saying the same sort of things that get a
| rise out of people on 8chan and Reddit. To take the most recent
| example, Elon Musk's upending of Reddit can be seen at least
| partially as an instance of a large _public_ trolling. On a
| more distributed plane, phrases like "own the libs" are common
| enough in the public consciousness to be used by angry 45-year
| old commenters on Facebook who have never been to 4/8chan.
|
| _That_ is why trolls are at the top of the diagram, because it
| 's a diagram as of 2023 -- whereas you're thinking of trolling
| from 2013 or maybe even 2003.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Not to mention it has "trolls" at the top, but I'm pretty sure
| the whole idea of the cosy web started on 4chan.
| dahwolf wrote:
| The "Digital garden" part also makes very little sense. Notes
| on personal wikis. What? How is this part of the social web?
| lolinder wrote:
| She's got a whole article explaining what she means by
| "digital garden"--it's a _public_ personal wiki.
|
| https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
| mylasttour wrote:
| It really is an arbitrary diagram. Any regular user of any of
| these levels can confidently say all levels have "decomposed
| morals". All levels have videos of animal abuse, posts for teen
| prostitution, et cetera.
|
| And there really is nothing cozy about data-hoarding closed
| mega-corp software like Discord and Snapchat. As convenient as
| they are, 'cozy' is not the word.
|
| The writer likely just thinks "LinkedIn and Facebook == Bad!"
| and "My two Discord servers with my friends == Good!" and just
| made huge generalizations from there.
| rainonmoon wrote:
| The second paragraph quotes them as being "slum-like spaces"
| so I'm not sure where you derive cause for reducing the
| author's viewpoint to naive idealism like that. If anything
| this seems like a pretty conventional viewpoint these days,
| that the web has shifted from broadcasting to smaller peer-
| to-peer interactions. It doesn't seem particularly
| controversial.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Sometimes a decomposing carcass ends up resting on the forest
| floor instead of buried or scavenged.
|
| ... but not for long, and it's not the expected common-case
| continuously-observed scenario when one walks in the woods.
| The point is that such a thing is a transient, unstable
| configuration at one layer and the expected configuration at
| another layer.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| HN would seem to be part of the Cozy Web as long as dang keeps
| his hand in
| abathur wrote:
| dang does a great job, but I don't think it's enough to qualify
| (anymore).
|
| HN's indexed, registration is open, and its size/influence have
| grown enough that I regularly see people here trying to grind
| ideological axes. I've found myself retreating from it along
| with the others.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes. From time to time I pull back from an exchange here when
| it becomes clear my interlocutor would sooner die than
| concede they're wrong.
|
| As they say, "Not gonna die on that hill."
| ahelwer wrote:
| "Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a HN poster
| what they think we should do about the homeless in SF, Seattle,
| and Portland"
| CM30 wrote:
| A couple of thoughts here:
|
| 1. I wonder how much of this is also driven by 'cancel culture',
| invasive media coverage, etc? After seeing stuff like how Scott
| Alexander's life got upended a bit after the New York Times
| covered Slate Star Codex, I wouldn't be surprised if many niche
| communities decided that making their discussions and ideas
| publicly viewable wasn't worth it.
|
| Why open yourself up to real life consequences from a puritanical
| culture when you can limit discussions to those you know share
| similar views?
|
| 2. I also suspect the feeling that third parties were profiting
| from said information without really crediting the source may
| have had an impact too. I know a few communities that didn't
| share info until one of their own members had covered it on
| YouTube because they were sick of large channels and websites
| repackaging the info and getting credited as the 'source'.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Why open yourself up to real life consequences from a
| puritanical culture when you can limit discussions to those you
| know share similar views?
|
| Or with people who may have wildly different views from you,
| but whom you trust to disagree amicably and remain tolerant of
| those views.
|
| I started a private discussion board a few years ago for just
| this purpose: it became impossible to have a good-faith
| discussion of almost anything on the open web. Within the
| boundaries of a private community, you can have some
| expectation of safety that you can't have if the audience is
| the entire world, as it is on Twitter (or even HN). With that
| safety you can disagree more with less fear of consequences,
| which is how it should be (and was, before all this shit).
| hiidrew wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34243709 previous submission
| of a similar article from the same author. love her illustration!
| bullen wrote:
| Couldn't read this because Dark Reader did not manage to make it
| dark.
|
| Talk about dark and cozy.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Does this work?: https://archive.ph/MIkgN
| bullen wrote:
| Yes! Except the image...
| bookofjoe wrote:
| try this: https://www.swiss-miss.com/2023/04/the-cozy-
| web.html
|
| I'm determined to get you there
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(page generated 2023-04-25 23:02 UTC)