[HN Gopher] The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the ne...
___________________________________________________________________
The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing?
(2004)
Author : kimi
Score : 130 points
Date : 2025-03-19 07:13 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fourmilab.ch)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fourmilab.ch)
| haunter wrote:
| Pretty dehumanizing especially calling the yet not internet users
| "naked apes"
|
| > I am one of those despicable people who believe that IQ not
| only exists but matters. From the origin of the Internet through
| the mid 1990s, I'd estimate the mean IQ of Internet users as
| about 115. Today it's probably somewhere around 100, the mean in
| Europe and North America. The difference you see in the Internet
| of today from that of ten years ago is what one standard
| deviation (15 points) drop in IQ looks like. But the mean IQ of
| the world is a tad less than 90 today, and it's expected to fall
| to about 86 by 2050. So, when the digital divide is conquered and
| all ten billion naked apes are wired up, you're looking at about
| another standard deviation's drop in the IQ of the Internet. Just
| imagine what that will be like.
| mpweiher wrote:
| "naked apes" are humans. Us. All of us. Not "not yet internet
| users".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
| pyrale wrote:
| Not exactly. Interpreted charitably, in the context, it could
| be replaced by "the unwashed masses".
|
| The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet was
| good only back when it was for a select few. I don't know how
| he reconciled that with his apparent distaste for gated
| communities.
| blitzar wrote:
| > The author seems to have harboured the idea that internet
| was good only back when it was for a select few.
|
| I mean ... not wrong.
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| But the decline is not because "stupid people" started
| using it. The reason is that _more_ people started using
| it, which made it of tremendous commercial interest and
| brought all of the dysfunctions of an unregulated free
| market.
| lynx97 wrote:
| Ethernal September is actually a thing, so he isn't _that_
| wrong. I get the aversion towards elitism... But those of
| us who used the Internet in the 90s still know what
| happened when the "masses" started to flood it.
| acheron wrote:
| The original Eternal September was about AOL users
| getting access to Usenet in 1993. And yet, "people on AOL
| in 1993" would easily be in, what, the top 5% in quality
| of Internet users today? Maybe higher?
|
| Hell, your "masses" flooding the Internet in the later
| 90s were still much better than the population now.
|
| And here's this guy writing about how bad things had
| gotten in 2004. Buckle up, buddy: you ain't seen nothing
| yet.
|
| Imagine what brave new world the future holds. Never
| assume things are so bad that they can't get worse.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Gated communities arbitrarily bar your entry. That is
| categorically different from having some minimum standard
| which anyone is welcome to make an attempt at.
| ricdl wrote:
| I guess he did end up abandoning the internet afterall
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| As shall we all one day
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| naked ape refers to all humans. you misread it. stop looking to
| be offended.
| haunter wrote:
| Sorry I was too low IQ to understand the reference, my bad
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It said "ten billion naked apes". Clearly talking about
| everyone (in a few years' time).
| wegfawefgawefg wrote:
| you naked ape. hahahaha
| someperson wrote:
| If everybody is connected to the internet, shouldn't the mean
| and median IQ be exactly 100?
| rorytbyrne wrote:
| He thinks the IQ of white people (North America and Europe)
| is 100. He's implying the rest of the world are lower IQ.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| The only thing he clearly stated is that he thinks the
| global average isn't 100. That could imply miscalibration
| depending on how you think the metric ought to work. He's
| also implied that he thinks the correlation between
| internet usage and high IQ is stronger the farther back you
| go.
|
| Both of those things seem like fairly reasonable hypothesis
| to me. You are the one inserting race into it.
| p3rls wrote:
| Who cares that the whole is getting dumber? I thought that was
| the entire idea behind the internet? I didn't create it either
| and my IQ isn't in the 150s-- it got dumber when it let me on,
| too.
|
| The problem with the internet today is that the top (i.e.
| google) is going along with the bottom, the so-called
| enshittification. They are promoting the types of people this
| article is complaining about into direct visibility with its
| monopoly powers on search and discovery.
|
| It's in my niche, of course too. People from India with no
| connection to the industry and just a wordpress are the #1
| query for almost every result for the past ten years. It's
| nuts. My niche is at the forefront of the enshittification, but
| soon this will be your niche too.
|
| Google basically kills off every consumer webapp like this to
| promote garbage wordpresses, content from the hindustantimes
| and other virtual detritus onto your browser. Look at r/SEO,
| are they focused on creating quality or scamming people? I'll
| give you a hint, research their mods' SEO websites. Yet Google
| cannot seem to get enough of it.
|
| I think it's far from determined that web4 will be web2 but
| with more third world-problems but it's not looking great for
| the people who are building consumer apps right now.
| pvg wrote:
| _calling the yet not internet users "naked apes"_
|
| It's almost certainly just a wanky way to say 'human', an
| allusion to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Naked_Ape
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Betteridge's law in full effect
| chungus wrote:
| For those not familiar, this post is by John Walker[0] one of the
| co-founders of Autodesk who made AutoCAD. He passed away last
| year[1]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39297185
| safety_sandals wrote:
| Wow, definitely familiar with his work, though haven't used
| AutoCAD for quite some time. Pretty sure my fingers still
| remember some of the text commands.
| pajko wrote:
| There was not even an AI back then, what would he say now?
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/chriswestfall/2024/12/18/the-da...
|
| https://phys.org/news/2025-01-ai-linked-eroding-critical-ski...
| kelseydh wrote:
| > But I fear the cure may be worse than the disease, so much so
| that I penned a 25,000 word screed sketching the transformation
| of the Internet from an open network of peers to a locked-down
| medium for delivering commercial content to passive consumers.
|
| This part he got right, though he was clueless to the power of
| social media. He also correctly predicted a rapid decline in the
| intelligence of content on the internet.
|
| However he was quite off the mark in predicting that hacking and
| spam would stop internet use.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Technically he's not wrong about spam, it's just that the
| classical view of spam is no longer applicable. When you think
| of the rise of AI-generated content and SEO-focused design, it
| is almost impossible to use the internet without being
| inundated by a deluge of low quality spam. Everywhere we go
| we're served ads for scam products, have to figure out if
| someone is an actual person or a bot and so forth.
|
| And the balkanization of the internet is, essentially, what
| we're seeing.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Do not use ad networks, none of them, they are the source of
| all this Internet scummery. The spam, the low quality ads for
| fraud products, and the ads themselves are virus delivery
| networks. If you really need advertising to support your
| product, do you really have a product? Or are ya just gossip,
| er "social media". Social media is just gossip, monetized,
| what was before recognized as the lowest form of
| communication now monetized and washed from that dirty name
| "gossip", now it's "media", "social media"... what fools mass
| culture is composed.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You also have to block the trackers that feed your
| behavioral data to the brokers that, in turn, fuels the
| invasive profiling the advertisers use to bid against.
| zyx321 wrote:
| Rather than "spam", the usual term I see for genAI content is
| "slop" (original meaning: a mixture of kitchen waste and
| leftovers that is barely good enough for the pigs)
| immibis wrote:
| Spam by any other name is just as annoying.
| markhahn wrote:
| that strikes me as odd. I don't see scam ads, ever (you mean
| like embedded in web pages?) I also don't see much spam
| anymore, mainly because gmail does a decent job of it. But I
| still run a few narrow email servers - spam is out there but
| a lot of it is avoidable though good configuration.
| wruza wrote:
| Well I sort of abandoned it now. I visit here and, occasionally,
| the articles posted here. Also a thin slice of very curated
| youtube content. And software documentation. And porn. That's it.
|
| Sometimes I accidentally "go out" by following a link with
| infinite scroll and wonder how people live in _all that_. It's
| not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet-
| and socio-wise.
|
| Where there's many people with different views and no established
| culture, there's chaos and insanity.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > Sometimes I accidentally "go out" by following a link with
| infinite scroll and wonder how people live in all that. It's
| not very far from idiocracy and other dystopias, both internet-
| and socio-wise.
|
| Most people are stupid, and having the internet available to
| the masses was a mistake. When accessing the internet required
| money and knowledge, it was by definition a community of above-
| average people. At the time it seemed like the internet was
| enabling the worst part of humanity, but those were actually
| the good times. Actually, not all people have internet access
| yet, so buckle up, it's going to get even worse.
|
| > You are an elitist
|
| Correct.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I think it's not abandoning the internet, it's abandoning the
| web, which is arguably the worst and best thing about the
| internet.
|
| Like you, most people want to take the narrow bits of the
| internet that are useful to them and ignore the rest. Meanwhile
| the web is trying to make you do the opposite, drawing you in
| and wasting your time.
|
| Over time this will mean leaving the web entirely for new and
| better interfaces that block out the toxic sludge and return
| control to the user.
| derefr wrote:
| > Meanwhile the web is trying to make you do the opposite,
| drawing you in and wasting your time.
|
| What a bizarre thing to say. It's true, in some sense, but
| it's still bizarre.
|
| Maybe I'm committing a No True Scotsman fallacy, but to me
| "the web" is, at its core, the thing made of _web pages_ --
| pieces of human-authored content that very intentionally and
| manually hyperlink to one another. And these "web pages"
| themselves are almost always static files -- though they
| could _maybe_ be served by a wiki or CMS backend.
|
| But HTML5 web _apps_ that deliver walled-garden social
| networking experiences? Not "the web", per se. Loosely
| affiliated with "the web" at best.
|
| My rubric for what constitutes "the web":
|
| * Does each piece of content have a _readable, human-
| friendly_ permanent URL, that can 1. be search-engine-indexed
| and 2. through which the public can access the content,
| without signing up for the service, or _being nagged_ to sign
| up for the service? (Remember that? That 's the web!)
|
| * If you click on hyperlinks in the content, does the page
| just send you directly to the link destination -- implying
| that the author of the content is the ultimate arbiter of
| _where they want their links to go_? (Oh, that 's definitely
| the web!) Or does the page do tracking things? "Warning,
| you're leaving the platform" things? Embed-unfurling things?
| "Trying as hard as it can to make you forget there's an
| outside world" things? (Definitely not the web!)
|
| * Does accessing content at its permalink URL deliver server-
| rendered HTML _containing the content_ -- such that anyone
| with an HTML-parsing library could write an "alternative
| User Agent" to render that content? (That's the web I know
| and love!) Or is the page a template/skeleton that gets
| populated with the content via an XHR? (Not the web at all!)
|
| * Are there tags in the preloaded HTML with appropriate
| fragment identifiers, allowing people to hyperlink to
| _specific relevant parts_ of the content? (That 's
| _extremely_ "the web.")
|
| Under this definition of "the web", there's no real ability
| for "the web" to do anything like "drawing you in and wasting
| your time." The worst it can do is to offer you endless
| opportunities to explore and educate yourself on trivial
| topics.
|
| But of course, under this definition of "the web", there's
| only so much "web" -- and most of it was created before the
| year 2005! (Other than the online arms of traditional-
| journalism news websites -- many of which carry on putting
| out real new "web" pages every day.)
|
| If you disagree with my definition of "the web" -- well, I
| still think the concept is valuable, so maybe keep the
| concept but choose your own name for it. (Maybe "the
| intentional web"? "The artisanal web"?)
|
| But I would argue that this _is_ , explicitly, what "the
| World Wide Web" originally meant, to anyone who lived through
| the birth and growth of it. That any other, more expansive
| definition of the term, has been driven by a process of co-
| option by the very cathedrals to which "the web" functioned
| as bazaar. That we shouldn't respect this co-option; that we
| should continue to use "the web" as a reference to that core
| of good stuff, while considering all the rest of the stuff as
| "not the web, just using web technologies."
|
| (This distinction used to be easy, because all that
| platform-y not-the-web stuff used to be built using
| Java/ActiveX applets, or Flash, or Silverlight. Now it's all
| HTML5... but does that matter? It's still, _on a semantic
| level_ , not "the web.")
| INTPenis wrote:
| Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners.
|
| What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media
| where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do or
| say is actually tied to your person. Americans won't understand
| this but many European countries are already primed for it.
|
| If you want to go slumming you're free to do so, but I want a
| stable and safe social media as an alternative.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your
| person_
|
| So, Facebook? "Real-name systems" are all, unequivocally, bad.
| 42lux wrote:
| The nice thing is you don't have to participate if you don't
| want to.
| balamatom wrote:
| Yeah, just like you don't have to own a smartphone if you
| don't want to.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| I know quite some people who do by conscious decision not
| own a smartphone considering these are surveillance bugs
| with an inbuilt phone function, for which you even have
| to pay.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And their lives are made unnecessarily difficult.
| 42lux wrote:
| Wat den eenen sin Uhl, is den annern sin Nachtigall.
| markhahn wrote:
| not to be persnickety, but you don't have to pay for
| cellular service. the trackability you're criticizing is
| not inherent to the smartphone concept.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Not strictly accurate if a) they create shadow profiles b)
| it's almost impossible to permanently delete an account c)
| the site puts a login wall on every single page forcing you
| to have an account to access _anything_
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| You left out d) required for some important task.
| alex1138 wrote:
| Yeah like connecting with people you'd like to reach
| (which Facebook doesn't do a terribly good job of
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6090712) but people
| here seem to think email/calling is the only acceptable
| form of social media (but what if you don't _have_
| someone 's contact info? well, that gets justified as
| "nobody needs to connect with long lost contacts")
| 42lux wrote:
| If you're not banned, why not simply create an account
| and message them properly? If following the platform's
| basic guidelines feels like too much effort, perhaps the
| communication wasn't that important to begin with. The
| barrier to entry is quite low (for a human) and you don't
| even need to connect the account in anyway to your other
| online personas. The biggest benefit would also be that
| YOU can be found when people want to connect with you...
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| "Banned", "too much effort", these are straw men.
|
| Real name systems (for routine discourse) are bad. Walled
| gardens are bad. I should not need to forsake my privacy
| unless I wish to or alternatively a material need exists.
|
| Don't need to connect the account? What sort of joke is
| that? They require you to use your government recognized
| name.
| 42lux wrote:
| There are no straw mans here the only thing that shows is
| your entitlement. Maybe read it again because it looks
| like you either took everything out of context or didn't
| comprehend it.
|
| Your last sentence also just doesn't make any sense. Why
| would you worry about platform x if ,,they" ,,know"
| everything anyways. I was talking about your anonymous
| online personas.
|
| Complaining about potential guidelines on one platform
| when numerous unrestricted spaces exist online seems
| rather narrow minded, especially given the abundance of
| alternatives available. Just use it as a modern telephone
| book. You have total agency over yourself and if or how
| you use it.
| balamatom wrote:
| >You have total agency over yourself and if or how you
| use it.
|
| Nir Eyal would like a word
|
| >If following the platform's basic guidelines feels like
| too much effort,
|
| That's the straw elephant in the room
|
| >perhaps the communication wasn't that important to begin
| with.
|
| And this is the particularly dehumanizing part
|
| >entitlement
|
| Is that what entitlement is? Preferring to avoid using
| the services of an unethical vendor if possible? Or is
| the entitlement in the "being able to afford to
| avoid..."?
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| True, "banned" was likely a non sequitur as opposed to a
| straw man. Many of your other remarks are as well.
|
| If multiple services require you to use the same
| identifier then those accounts are trivial for anyone to
| find and link.
|
| The existence of alternative services with different
| terms does not address the issues raised in this thread.
| Neither does it change the fact that I think the
| existence of real name policies makes society worse. Of
| course I'm going to complain about that.
|
| > Just use it as a modern telephone book.
|
| Other people upload information about me into said book.
| There are various things that I can't do _unless I use
| said book_ and those have nothing to do with looking up
| contact information.
|
| It would be bad enough if the only issue were that the
| provider of the telephone book could every contact
| lookup. Unfortunately that is but the tip of the
| metaphorical iceberg.
| markhahn wrote:
| isn't this "telephone book" just what the databroker
| industry does (and has been, and will continue to do)?
| I'm not even sure there's any bright line distinguishing
| databrokers from the ad-personalization industry, or
| credit reporting, etc.
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| Sure, I guess? So is someone going to argue something
| along the lines of privately owned real name walled
| garden social media being no worse than intentionally
| sharing all of your personal correspondence and various
| other metadata with a data broker? I'd be inclined to
| agree with such an argument but to what end?
| immibis wrote:
| Hang on, so if I got this right, paraphrasing:
|
| You: "You don't have to use Facebook if you don't want
| to"
|
| Them: "Sometimes it's required for some important task"
|
| You: "Why not simply sign up for Facebook and use it?"
| 42lux wrote:
| We were talking about a potential new non profit platform
| not facebook. (Well, I was until one child comment had to
| bring up fucking Facebook again.) That was the whole
| point of the discussion and now everyone and their mom
| ignores it because you all seem to love condescending
| rage comments. Eh... not worth the keystrokes.
| nodoll wrote:
| >What we need is a government sponsored regulated social
| media..
|
| There is no need for social media, a ten thousand idiots does
| not make one smart man.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| What does it make when those same "idiots" are voters?
| bsenftner wrote:
| The United States of Fascism
| 7bit wrote:
| Boom!
| burningChrome wrote:
| Social media when it started was originally more about
| creating communities of people with similar tastes and
| interests. In the early days for me, it contributed a lot to
| my journey as a newly minted developer. I'm not sure I
| would've learned as much or so fast without it. The amount of
| stuff I discovered and learned just from being on Twitter and
| other platforms was simply incredible.
|
| Obviously that's not what it is any more and would agree you
| could argue that its not really needed any more - but it
| started out well, not sure when or where it went completely
| off the tracks.
| msy wrote:
| Agreed. Europe won't be sovereign until it fully controls its
| social media, having American billionaires (or the Chinese
| state) able to manipulate the narrative at will is unviable.
| Look at the recent situation in Romania with Calin Georgescu or
| Musk's pro-AFD meddling. It makes the pearl-clutching in the UK
| about the ownership of the Telegraph look hilariously quaint.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| In the UK, if you hold opinions that are the same as the state,
| then expressing yourself using your name is safe.
|
| If you don't, then you risk having a police officer show up at
| your door.
|
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cev9nxnygzpo
| DrScientist wrote:
| Actually you've got that wrong - the government/establishment
| agrees with Pearson, it was a member of the public that
| complained about her characterising pro-Palestinian
| protestors with a hate slur.
|
| Back to the issue of overweaning government power - if you
| think the above is fixed by some sort of pseudo-anonymity
| online which is heavily tilted towards governments ( they
| know who people are, it's just you that doesn't ) - then I
| think you are sadly mistaken.
|
| Ultimately the sunlight of transparency is much better than
| the murky darkness of anonymity - as comfortable as the
| blanket of anonymity is ( and yep I'm using that pseudo-
| anonymity right now ).
| 7bit wrote:
| All the Chinese activists are truly happy about all the
| transparency about their person and their beliefs. I can
| hear them rejoicing in their cells.
| DrScientist wrote:
| You are looking at the problem the wrong way.
|
| If you have a democracy then the laws of the land should
| be those that are agreed by general consent - give or
| take - and as such applying those laws to people in a way
| that means they are accountable for their actions isn't a
| problem - in fact it's the long standing bedrock of
| civilisation.
|
| The problem in China isn't that they can catch people
| breaking their laws, it's a problem with how those laws
| are set in the first place.
|
| So the real issue is stopping a move towards
| authoritarianism which is a whole larger conversation.
|
| So in the issue above - about the journalist - the
| question should be about whether the particular hate
| speech law is correct, rather than worrying about if they
| appear to breach it whether they can be caught.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| The problem is that it is very easy to slide quickly into
| authoritarianism, as we're seeing in the US. I don't see
| how "transparency" is served by knowing who someone is or
| associating them with every piece of speech they've ever
| uttered. The only use of a system like that is to police
| thoughtcrime.
| 7bit wrote:
| No, YOU are looking at it naively.
|
| In the past 100 years the following countries have
| slipped from democracies to authoritarian states:
| Germany, Italy, Spain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
| Argentina, Chile, Russia, Turkey, Nicaragua.
|
| Some of them recovered, others never did. Look at Turkey
| for example. If you think you are safe, you aren't.
| okeuro49 wrote:
| The UK justice secretary goes to pro-Palestinian protests.
|
| I doubt she wants this state of affairs to change.
|
| On the other hand, if your house gets burgled, you get a
| crime reference number and told to take it up with your
| insurance company.
| DrScientist wrote:
| > The UK justice secretary goes to pro-Palestinian
| protests.
|
| So? Justice secretary has nothing to do with the police -
| justice is the courts.
|
| Home secretary is ultimately in charge of the policing
| policy and in the UK they have no day to day influence
| over polices actions - the police are quite
| decentralised. Are you from the UK?
|
| And in terms of the wider government they are supporting
| Israel's assault in Gaza directly with intelligence and
| weapon systems and are silent on the daily atrocities -
| that's hardly pro-palestinian.
| ImHereToVote wrote:
| The Yookay is cooked.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Democracy must not have to kill itself to prove that it
| exists.
| markhahn wrote:
| very peculiar incident. it's a stretch to construe this as
| "opinions not same as state" though.
|
| I can see on the one side that police should only ever
| investigate crimes, not non-crimes. and that "a member of the
| public" is possibly committing a crime if they make false
| allegations.
|
| on the other hand, we definitely need someone "official" who
| will investigate allegations, as a public-safety matter. for
| instance, if someone suddenly starts combing (hah) beauty-
| supply places for certain chemicals, it should attact some
| form of scrutiny.
| Bancakes wrote:
| First we need social media infrastructure that isn't made for
| quick dopamine hits.
| balamatom wrote:
| Who's "we" - the AI robots, or the loners?
| Mrdarknezz wrote:
| No that is a pretty terrible idea
| fc417fc802 wrote:
| > so that anything you do or say is actually tied to your
| person
|
| I don't need to link letters to a government issued ID to use
| the postal service. Why should government provided social media
| or email or whatever be any different?
| MiiMe19 wrote:
| I agree with your point, but you do need to use your address
| to use the postal service...
| latexr wrote:
| We _definitely_ do not "need" that. We already had enough years
| of real name social media before LLMs to know that real names
| do not stop people from being publicly abusive and that social
| media is bad for us.
|
| What you're advocating for is making a bad system worse. Your
| suggestion won't solve any problem and will introduce new ones,
| like making manipulation and censorship easier. You're
| advocating for an authoritarian's wet dream (and a treasure
| trove for data miners). Right now, including in Europe, that's
| the last thing we need.
|
| I vote a hard no on your proposal. I'm opposed to it like I am
| to Chat Control.
|
| Signed,
|
| A European
| indigo945 wrote:
| _> Your suggestion won't solve any problem and will introduce
| new ones, like making manipulation and censorship easier._
|
| This is absolutely untrue for manipulation. Currently,
| private (both American and Chinese) social media platforms
| have become mouthpieces of authoritarian propaganda and
| misinformation. Russian bot farms cooperate with American
| billionaires to push destabilizing extremist propaganda and
| suppress moderate voices.
|
| And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open the
| floodgates for government censorship. But that is not the
| proposal here: the proposal is to provide an alternative,
| which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact, the
| opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of an LLM
| trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and Dugins of
| this world. If that's not what you want, you're free to go
| back to TikTok, X or Facebook.
|
| We are in agreement on "chat control" and similar anti-
| encryption political schemes, but the social media question
| pertains to public, not private, communications.
|
| Signed,
|
| Colin Emonds (of Cologne, Germany)
|
| A European
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open
| the floodgates for government censorship.
|
| It wouldn't only update the floodgates, it's rather the
| idea behind these proposals. :-)
| latexr wrote:
| > Currently, private (both American and Chinese) social
| media platforms have become mouthpieces of authoritarian
| propaganda and misinformation.
|
| Which is an orthogonal issue. Private social media doing it
| does not mean government-owned social media wouldn't. In
| fact, it is precisely because authoritarians already can
| see it working that they would salivate at the though.
|
| > And I agree that outlawing all non-ID media would open
| the floodgates for government censorship. But that is not
| the proposal here
|
| You're agreeing with and rebutting things I haven't said. I
| don't think the proposal was to outlaw other forms of
| social media. I still think the proposal is bad on its own.
|
| > which guarantees that the opinion you read is, in fact,
| the opinion of a real (European) person, not the output of
| an LLM trained on the hateful ramblings of the Yarvins and
| Dugins of this world.
|
| _It guarantees no such thing._ There's nothing stopping
| that real person from asking an LLM and posting the reply
| directly. That already happens today. Heck, people
| _confidently_ post screenshots of LLM conversations as if
| they were fact even when they're provably wrong.
|
| > If that's not what you want, you're free to go back to
| TikTok, X or Facebook.
|
| I personally don't use any of those, and neither would I
| defend them. Again, my argument is those are already bad
| and OP's proposal is just as bad and then adds worse things
| on top.
| markhahn wrote:
| I guess I have two questions:
|
| - do you think it is so hard to track people by their other
| behavior? that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
|
| - isn't harrassment by realnamed actors a failure of the
| (out-of-band) legal system?
| latexr wrote:
| 1. Define "so hard". It is definitely hard _er_ to identify
| someone by having to trawl through all their posts and
| infer behaviours than simply clicking a button which gives
| you access to their legal ID, full name, marriage status,
| parents names, home address, bank account number, phone
| number, and so forth. Security and privacy aren't binaries,
| but spectrums: each wall you put up is a new opportunity
| for an adversary to give up.
|
| 2. Maybe I don't understand the question, but I don't see
| how that's relevant or true. Social media is routinely used
| as evidence in court.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewarnold/2018/12/30/heres-
| h...
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna25738225
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >that is, do pseudonyms actually work?
|
| If pseudonyms didn't work, no one would be proposing the
| policy that he proposes. And nearly _everyone_ seems to
| propose it or some variation of it.
| Ukv wrote:
| Are sites that currently try to enforce real name usage, like
| Facebook, noticeably better for it than mostly-pseudonymous
| sites like HN/Reddit?
|
| It doesn't really fix people being gullible (so will spread
| spam/scams or fall for phishing) or angry about some polarizing
| topic. Conceivably it could encourage civility, but if anything
| I feel I've seen arguments turn ugly far more often due to the
| personal nature.
| Lanolderen wrote:
| Facebook is pretty dogshit at it.
|
| I have 2 fake accounts, one is named, in translation, Secret
| Dontknow, the other got hacked at some point and after
| recovering it it had a nice fake attractive asian woman
| persona on it. I just changed the location and ran with it.
| Both have yet to face any issues and they are at least 10 y/o
| accounts. I don't use them all that often but still.. Secret
| Dontknow is pretty obvious..
| borgdefenser wrote:
| I think using your last name, counter intuitively makes
| discussion less civil.
|
| In a form like this, if someone is insulted, it is just the
| idea and words that have been insulted.
|
| When using your last name, it is the real person's identity
| that has been insulted. Then it goes both ways in a feedback
| loop involving two real people's real identity without the
| constraint that face to face confrontation would impose.
|
| The only way to make that worse then would be to have ML
| algorithms running on top trying to nudge people to but heads
| for engagement.
|
| Maybe we could design a system that is worse that in order to
| join you have tell someone using both real names that their
| newborn baby is ugly and instead of collecting a list of
| friends you collect a list of enemies. Short of that though
| we seemed to have really done a great job figuring out the
| worst possible form of communication.
| markhahn wrote:
| I don't follow your logic - surely communicating from
| behind a mask encourages rudeness, no? Your comments seem
| to focus only on the recipient's authenticity or
| maskedness.
|
| Are you assuming that the author's own identity will always
| be masked or throwaway like a sockpuppet? That seems very
| much like a design choice of the forum.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| All the use of real names on social media accomplishes is a
| chilling effect on speech. Especially if your opinions differ
| from those of your employer or customers. Or if people who
| disagree with you are engaging in harassment campaigns or
| domestic terrorism against their political opponents.
|
| This can apply to either side. Whether you're a Trump voter
| in San Francisco or an LGBTQIA+ person in a rural "Bible
| Belt" community. Doxxing is one of the most serious rules
| violations on the internet because exposing somebody's real
| world identity endangers the personal safety of the victim. A
| real names only policy effectively forces everybody to self-
| dox or be silenced.
| markhahn wrote:
| yes, realnames depends on out-of-band harrassment being
| illegal and suppressed.
|
| but it also means responsibility, which acts in the
| opposite direction.
|
| a realnames policy doesn't preclude also offering
| pseudonyms for sensitive cases.
|
| to me, it seems like the real issue is sockpuppetry -
| basically a Sybil attack on
| authenticity/reputation/responsibility.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| This is not something I want.
|
| I want social media to disappear.
|
| The main issue with social media are the recommendation
| algorithms, and I don't want the government or private
| companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want
| anyone except myself to be in control of them.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > The main issue with social media are the recommendation
| algorithms, and I don't want the government or private
| companies to be in control of them. In fact, I don't want
| anyone except myself to be in control of them.
|
| Quit being friend in real life with people who have a social
| media account on one of the "big" platforms (yes, I do know
| quite some people who do this!).
| pacifika wrote:
| Yes it would make for a good law that whenever a
| recommendation algorithm is used the user must be able to
| fully control how the results are filtered and ordered
| including disabling it, and the service must remember the
| preference.
| erikerikson wrote:
| Then why are you on here?
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| If a tree falls in a forest and I'm not around to hear it,
| does it still make a sound?
| phatfish wrote:
| Isn't https://news.ycombinator.com/newest every new
| submission chronologically? That should tick off the main
| compliant about algorithms.
| erikerikson wrote:
| I was responding to:
|
| > I want social media to disappear
|
| I often read people trashing on social media who are
| doing so on this site which is very much social media. I
| don't use other social media sites and appreciate that
| this one is different than the normal ones. It's still
| social media as I understand it.
|
| Assuming I'm not wrong about this being social media...
| If they want social media to disappear, why are they
| creating more of it by participating here?
|
| I mostly keep my mouth shut, but the embedded
| contradictions sometimes make me comment to scratch my
| itch.
|
| Well it is true that newest gives chronological listing.
| Most of us visit the front page which does not. Instead,
| it uses the algorithm of user vote aggregation.
| amiga386 wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgtsBm0IQ1Q
|
| "That is when we present our solution. Mandatory digital
| identity verification for all humans, at all times."
|
| (This video is a pitch-perfect parody of MGS2 but also
| prescient commentary on modern trends)
| RGamma wrote:
| Some cryptographic trust anchor and a web of trust yes,
| government sponsored no.
| executesorder66 wrote:
| As a non-American this is a horrendous idea. People need to
| accept that assholes and misinformation exist. And you will
| encounter it in real life and on the internet. You can't expect
| a nanny state to protect you from every slight discomfort you
| experience. Learn how to deal with it.
| 7bit wrote:
| > What we need is a government sponsored regulated social media
| where we identify ourselves with eID, so that anything you do
| or say is actually tied to your person.
|
| Speak for yourself, please, would you?
|
| I (a Europeean) don't need this. I dont want to have everything
| I write archived forever and linked to my identity, so when an
| extremist political Party gains Power I'm fucked because I have
| expressed opinions that dont align with their world View.
|
| No thanks. I feel whenever people express thoughts like yours,
| you completely ignore all the damage this may cause to
| individuals and democracy alike.
| markhahn wrote:
| Understood - but is it actually realistic to expect
| pseudonyms to protect expression (in the face of bigdata
| correlation), or to expect the "right to be forgotten" to
| actually work?
| borgdefenser wrote:
| This is actually the complete opposite of what I want.
|
| I would love to go back to people not using their real name and
| an internet that is wild, free and maybe even a little bit
| dangerous.
| blueflow wrote:
| Back to the classic imageboards? They still exist.
| betaby wrote:
| Yes. Mostly hosted in the USA.
|
| Problem is that regional forums in Europe died because of
| the regulations.
| mvc wrote:
| Why do you care where a forum with no regulations is
| hosted?
| gnarlynarwhal42 wrote:
| he mentioned regional forums, so I assume a large part of
| what is missing is a common culture/language instead of
| whatever conglomeration comes out of the US.
|
| the EU regulations made it harder/less attractive to host
| a small local forum and I think that was his point
| immibis wrote:
| Which regulations specifically? GDPR?
|
| It may just be because people in Europe interact in real
| life more and don't need an online forum.
| sailfast wrote:
| Yup. That's my plan. Forget all these companies and AI.
| Just let me talk to people and hear what they think is
| cool.
| INTPenis wrote:
| This has always and will always exist.
|
| But we also need a place where we can make sure everyone is a
| real person, and where everyone stands for what they say
| online.
| betaby wrote:
| > This has always and will always exist.
|
| In many countries internet forums are technically banned by
| regulations. HN posted that many user forums in UK were
| simply deleted because of the excessively heavy burden of
| the law.
| sailfast wrote:
| Oof. TIL. That's very disappointing.
| neutrinobro wrote:
| You are free to use facebook.
| jll29 wrote:
| You probably meant "You were free before you used
| facebook."
| cbsks wrote:
| Why not start now, Mr. INTPenis?
| INTPenis wrote:
| Did you just assume my gender?
| cbsks wrote:
| My deepest apologies.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| I really don't want to use my folkeregister ID to connect to a
| social media site. I present as feminine but I am not out to
| everyone in my family and I really don't want to forced to dox
| myself ahead of time.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| Big "I" Internet will further splinter into more "dark" and un-
| indexed niches along with walled gardens. Basically, the pre-
| web internet days (1980s).
|
| I await the new AOL or whatever.
| MiiMe19 wrote:
| please tell me this is bait. I refuse to believe there are
| genuinely people with this opinion.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Oh god no. That's dangerous and _unnecessary._
|
| When you get down to it, what's our real _minimum requirement_
| for curbing scams and spams?
|
| We do _not_ need to know someone 's legal identity, in fact we
| don't even need to know if they're a person rather than a
| person-with-a-program, we just need to know that they have a
| person-sized footprint of "skin in the game", as opposed to
| sockpuppets in a botnet.
| Terr_ wrote:
| To spitball an annoying but way-less-Orwellian response...
| Imagine your local City Hall has a physical vending-machine.
| This machine allows you to pay $2 to a charity of your choice
| in exchange for a kind of special anonymous token that can be
| used to prove that the $2 donation happened.
|
| Then when you sign up to a site like HN, the administrator
| has a policy: "New accounts must supply proof from the last
| year which hasn't already been used on this site before."
|
| There's a _lot_ of technical detail we could go into about
| how to maximize user privacy (so that you can 't be tracked
| across sites) and prevent a site from "stealing" and reusing
| things that were shared with it... but the key point is that
| 99% of sites do not need identity-information to accomplish
| their moderation goals or personalized block-lists. Such a
| system could actually be cheaper and more equitable than one
| based on permanent government IDs.
| throwaway545673 wrote:
| > Yes the internet will become a slum of AI robots and loners
|
| That has already happend. Though the algorithm(s) trained the
| lonely humans to do it. Happening right here, right now.
| dash2 wrote:
| > When I'm feeling down I call it "Internet Gated Communities",
| when in an optimistic mood, "The Faculty Club". This may lead to
| what many observers refer to as "the Balkanisation of the
| Internet"--a fragmentation of the "goes everywhere, reaches
| everybody" vision of the global nervous system into disconnected
| communities. This may not be such a bad thing.
|
| This happened. In the Philippines, for example, almost all online
| interaction takes place on Facebook. FB isn't a gated community,
| but it allows people to set up their own gated communities by the
| services it layers on top of raw http and html. Another word is
| "walled gardens", and again, walled gardens are popular because
| unwalled gardens become slums.
|
| The point is, libertarians, open standards advocates and "old
| web" nostalgists need to recognize why these services are
| popular, if they are going to have a chance of protecting the
| openness they care about.
| valeg wrote:
| see also: Pandora's Vox: On Community in Cyberspace -
| https://folksonomy.co/?permalink=2299
| disqard wrote:
| Seconding this recommendation!
|
| An excerpt from Carmen Hermosillo (humdog):
|
| "It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some island of
| the blessed where people are free to indulge and express their
| individuality," she wrote. "This is not true. I have seen many
| people spill out their emotions - their guts - online and I did
| so myself until I began to see that I had commodified myself."
| aucisson_masque wrote:
| Abandoning is not the answer.
|
| I see the effect with my father, he never got much into it in the
| first place and now he is completely lost when he need to order
| stuff. So many scammy website featuring first in Google result
| thanks to seo optimisation or just advertisement.
|
| Then he is completely oblivious to the fact that people can make
| deepfake video and believed one to be true when it was shown to
| him on someone else phone.
|
| As much garbage there can be on the internet, you have to force
| yourself to keep up with it and overall technology otherwise
| you're just left behind at the mercy of those who adapted.
| donatj wrote:
| Some may even be oblivious to the fact that the article is from
| 2004 ;)
|
| Deepfakes weren't even a fever dream yet.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| Spam exploded in 2003[1] to the modern experience of it.
| Before that, spam was somewhat infrequent, even without
| countermeasures.
|
| I recall in the 2001 time period being so annoyed by each
| individual spam note that I would respond to the appropriate
| "abuse@" email. By 2004, it was a torrent and totally
| impractical, and I don't think it was because of my own notes
| to administrators.
|
| [1] https://www.emailtray.com/blog/email-spam-
| trends-2001-2012/
| blitzar wrote:
| When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, there were two big
| selling points for me - storage and spam.
| Diederich wrote:
| ...and search. That was amazing.
| bbaron63 wrote:
| I remember the first spam I ever received. It was in 1998
| on my first day working at AOL. It promised an advanced
| degree from a prestigious, unaccredited institution. The
| spammers were somewhat honest back then.
| slmkbh wrote:
| My brain swapped the second zero to a two... But I did think
| the 1990 reference a little odd..
| bsenftner wrote:
| Actually, as the patent author of what are now called deep
| fakes, 2004 was when I got formal in my research to create
| the tech, with full knowledge of what it has become, and a
| mission to prevent the Orwellian uses active today.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Back then, we called it "Photoshop"
| blueflow wrote:
| Or what? The Internet is not required to have a peaceful life.
| zoobab wrote:
| "Abandoning is not the answer."
|
| Why not? Simpler life like back in the 80s.
| kuhzaam wrote:
| Even the 90s and early 2000s! The internet used to be way
| more endearing back then, with way more individually operated
| websites, blogs, etc.
| jimmydddd wrote:
| Re: Left behind My elderly parents can't even go out to eat
| dinner in the town they've lived in for 60 years because they
| don't have the phone app to pay the parking meters in town. So
| they have to drive out of town to a restaurant with a parking
| lot.
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's a shame. We've mostly been switched to some app-
| powered thing in my town as well, but they included some
| kiosk things as well.
|
| IMO, the apps are quite nice actually and I enjoy not having
| to ever run out to a meter anyway, but _requiring_ a phone
| should not be considered meeting accessibility requirements.
| ddejohn wrote:
| And then throw QR code menus into the mix. I'm 35 and I have
| to zoom so far in to be able to read the menu, which then
| also involves having to scroll horizontally to fully read
| most menu items, which makes it easy to lose your place, etc.
|
| Being elderly, the frustration must be unbearable.
| SirFatty wrote:
| Not to mention that at this point, QR codes are vector for
| phishing. People aren't nearly careful enough scanning
| those things.
|
| https://www.designnews.com/automotive-
| engineering/scammers-t...
| bongodongobob wrote:
| Society changes. Smartphones are 20 years old at this point
| and no longer require you to drop $1k+ up front for one.
| Should smart phones be required for everything? No. But
| progress is gonna progress. Who even carries coins with them
| these days?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Requiring a smartphone isn't progress. Offering the
| _option_ to use a smartphone is progress.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Honestly, I wonder if this is something that could be legally
| challenged under the ADA. Exclusions due to your age aren't
| legal and not owning a smart phone is very much an age thing.
| yazantapuz wrote:
| If for internet we think of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the
| like...then YES.
| api wrote:
| The Internet is BGP, IP, and the like.
|
| Systems that run _on_ the Internet come and go: the open web, the
| siloed web, social media, private overlay networks, etc. All of
| those still exist but there 's definitely been a progression of
| the ages in which these things have been dominant and then faded
| into the background. I'm sure this will keep happening.
|
| I don't think the Internet is going anywhere.
| NickC25 wrote:
| I haven't abandoned it at all, but I do try to regulate my
| internet time.
|
| I use it to read articles, trade equities, play chess,
| communicate with colleagues, and do market research for my
| company. Of course, I engage with a few communities, particularly
| HN and a few private Slack / Discord groups that align with my
| company.
|
| I also try to get out a lot, touch grass, read physical books,
| and exercise. I try to avoid bringing my phone with me to places
| where I won't need it, such as to the gym or to the running
| track.
|
| The crux is that we've completely surrendered ourselves to social
| media.
| safety_sandals wrote:
| I already did. I don't use the Internet anymore.
| avgDev wrote:
| Hello stranger, nice to see you on the interwebz.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I'm curious about how you posted here, then...
| scottLobster wrote:
| My dad used to be a Professor at a major State university,
| and he talked about how one of his older colleagues, who was
| a professor of Electrical Engineering, had his secretary
| (yes, he had a secretary) print out his emails for him every
| morning and put them in his physical inbox. He'd read them,
| type up his responses, print them out, and have her
| transcribe and send the responses later in the day.
|
| Just sad really.
| piotrpdev wrote:
| I'm confused, did he type them up on a computer that was
| not connected to the internet/school network but _was_
| physically connected to a printer close by? Why didn 't he
| and the secretary copy emails from/to some form of portable
| storage?
| rchaud wrote:
| > "As a venture capitalist who invests in high tech, I have to
| worry that the web will be perceived as an increasingly corrupt
| police state overlying a maze of dark alleys and unsafe practices
| outside the rule of law."
|
| I wonder how much of VC thinking skewed this way, encouraging
| Facebook and others to try and become AOL-like walled gardens,
| and eventually lobbying governments to make exceptions for them.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| Back in the day, the internet was an escape from the TV.
|
| It allowed access to information, alternative views (real ones
| not insane made up ones), no ads, and an escape from having to
| hear a dominant narrative.
|
| Now the internet has become the new TV. A lot of younger people I
| see are shunning it.
|
| That makes my old hacker heart smile.
| MarcelOlsz wrote:
| There is a notable vibe shift from when I showed a date my plex
| setup 5 years ago to now. Awhile back it was ick-inducing, now
| it's cool again to own your data / not pay for crap.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Ideally it will look from the outside like people are
| abandoning the internet when really what they're abandoning
| is the web (that's the sick part anyhow) and moving the rest
| of their digital lives into a vpn-mediated sub-internet made
| of the participation of people that each user knows via face-
| to-face interactions.
| donatj wrote:
| When normies started asking me how to set up their own Plex,
| I knew something had shifted.
| kouru225 wrote:
| Anecdotal, but I've met like 3 or 4 new plex people in the
| last year. They're all just starting out.
| Carrok wrote:
| You should encourage them to move to Jellyfin. It's better,
| and actually free.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > real ones not insane made up ones
|
| There were plenty of insane views :). Let us never forget the
| timecube [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
| bitwize wrote:
| There was never any doubt that not enough people would take
| TimeCube guy seriously enough to tip major U.S. elections.
| That is EMPHATICALLY NOT THE CASE for the racists, fascists,
| pedophiles, and other scum that formed the core of the 4chan
| edgelord set.
| longbrass wrote:
| TimeCube guy's shtick was continuously improved upon and is
| now a TT meme about manipulating time by a "Global
| Entrepreneur & Bestselling Author Ranked #1 Speaker in the
| World."
|
| So really we are all fools for not taking it seriously
| enough to self-help promote this into a side hustle.
| ge96 wrote:
| Wonder if anybody collected on those bounties
| YesBox wrote:
| There were definitely insane views.
|
| When I was a young teenager in the early-mid 00s, I surfed to
| an article explaining how the moon landing was faked, with
| photographic evidence and plausible logic (like the "last of
| dust on the lander"), blah etc.
|
| There was a brief moment when I thought what I was reading was
| real, because it was the first time I came across something
| fabricated communicated as fact.
| imoreno wrote:
| You don't need to abandon "the Internet". Maybe we could improve
| on the TCP/IP stack or the ISP model but it's hardly a priority.
| What we need is to abandon the web and start a divergent
| platform.
|
| It's not your average Chrome-with-no-adblock user that's ruining
| the web. It's the "slumlords" if you will. For those slumlords
| it's all about the money and they've already invested into
| building a slum on the web. They already have all the users on
| that platform. They're happy to milk them. They don't care about
| capturing profit from techies - if they did, we would see
| companies do a much better job of providing hacker-friendly
| services. If the hackers all move to some other platform where
| they don't have ads, trackers or JS bloat the slumlords will
| ignore it like they ignored the internet in the 80s and 90s. Only
| if there is potential to bring the non-technical users in droves
| on that platform will they care, but those users already have the
| current Web, so why would they bother?
|
| Unfortunately so far it seems like everybody wants to try their
| own take on the "next" platform. Experimentation and diversity of
| opinion is great and all, but ultimately we can't leave the slum
| until everyone agrees on one place to go instead. Best I can
| think of is Gemini that has some traction, but in its current
| form I doubt it will succeed - the creators put too much of their
| idiosyncrasies into it.
| 6510 wrote:
| A group of humans (with all kinds represented) blurs out all
| refined qualities almost by definition.
|
| Eventually some of them (of more similar thought) will leave for
| greener pastures. Perhaps naively so as it involves a lot of work
| or perhaps working on something together brings people together.
| If these few heretics succeed others will follow until the new
| place truly becomes as wonderful as imagined. More and more will
| follow, even people who don't want to be there will show up until
| eventually everything blurs out again and the process continues.
|
| Besides the new place where interesting people gather there is
| the old place left behind where the interesting is undesired or
| made illegal. Meanwhile they also want to bring back the old
| days.
|
| There are countless examples of this process from IRC and the USA
| to TV and Facebook. The Moon and Mars colony will also start out
| stupid then turn into something wonderful... for a while :)
|
| This will be the only thing I write on the internet today eventho
| I shouldn't bother. The point use to be to get some useful
| intelligent response to refine or correct my perspective.
|
| Solving world hunger costs only 35 billion per year. It's a great
| bench mark. If the internet is the sum of human knowledge we must
| be short of something else. Apparently we can type text into
| inputareas ad infinitum without accomplishing even this simple,
| cheap and easy goal. What a bunch of losers we are :)
| jmholla wrote:
| @dang, it's small, but there's a spelling error in the title.
| Intenet -> Internet
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-03-19 23:01 UTC)