I go back on the 'net to the days of Mosaic, and earlier on Usenet and BBSs. I'm feeling pretty nostalgic, but also saddened. Between the crooks, the government, and fun loving pranksters it seems that there is no corner of the 'net that can be considered truly secure. I now routinely assume that nothing I do is safe.
I remember when the 'net was 90% thoughtful discussion, it was about web pages, pure HTML, and the content that they served up.
Now it seems as if no forum is safe from endless idiotic, threatening, and increasingly offensive trolls and bullies. Many good smart people just refuse to participate. In its early days the whole idea behind the 'net was the free sharing of information. Now you find things behind paywalls, registration pages, or removed after threats from lawyers.
Each week seems to bring another attempt by government or business to regulate the 'net, both what you can put on-line, and what you can look at. Add to that the many geographic blocks and other restrictions that keep out some of the people, some of the time. We rely on multiple layers of flash and java and other technology, each requiring some special software to make it work on your computer. Inevitably stuff breaks.
It was only a decade or so back that the very idea of marketing on the 'net was considered ridiculous. Now we're buried alive with ads, pop-ups, and stupid YouTube ads in front of every video - unless you want to pay them to remove them.
Increasingly using the 'net feels like more of a chore than a pleasure, and I can't see it improving. Is the Internet broken beyond repair?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @08:46AM
I'm not sure it requires "asshats". Look at a scientific field such as psychology, there was a vibrant research effort that was slowly building up a set of "laws" until the idea of p-values and testing a null (rather than a scientific) hypothesis. You can read publications covering 75 years now of people decrying this "new way", but it had no effect. Why? Because a significant p-value gives the illusion of having learnt something, and it is very easy to get when studying complicated systems like humans.
The practice started because many mathematicians didn't understand science and most scientists didn't understand math. By some evil alignment of the stars it got into the schooling and then people using the new method simply don't know any better. Neither did they have any time to figure out the problems. When they did get time, it was too late. Once you graduated and published using that method, you had a vested interest in not questioning it.
If you don't believe me that the way stats are used is often to generate illusory results, think about this. Who is studying the more complicated phenomenon, particle physicists or psychologists? Who has more difficulty controlling the experimental conditions (just due to the nature of the problem)? Who should be more wary of a false positive or otherwise misleading result? In all cases I'd say the psychologist.
But, what significance levels are used by each field? Partical physics: 5 sigma (ie p[less than]3x10^-7), Psychology: p[less than]0.05. The people studying the more complicated phenomenon, doing the more difficult to control experiments use a method of decided what counts as evidence that is 10^5 times weaker! And I don't mean to pick on psychology, that is just where this all started. Medicine now has this same problem.
Anyway, thank you for that post. It was apt.