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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: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @12:56PM
The Internet is fine. It's the World Wide Web that's broken. And we can thank Google and Mozilla for breaking the World Wide Web, thanks to the shitty things they've done to their now-shitty World Wide Web browsers.
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Monday May 18 2015, @02:48PM
the shitty things they've done to their now-shitty World Wide Web browsers.
Specifically... what?
Are you thinking of the crazy overuse of JavaScript that now plagues the web? I'm not sure that's the browsers' fault.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday May 18 2015, @04:08PM
Any browser that enables ecmascript *by default* is broken by design. It's impossible to secure that browser or anything that browser has access to.
All the major browsers are broken by design, and have been for many years.
And it has a circular effect - script abilities *and permissions* are now assumed, and as a result web servers no longer bother to send out web pages at all in many cases.
The web is dead, the cause of death is poison, the type of poison was ecmaascript.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by NoMaster on Monday May 18 2015, @08:58PM
What's that got to do with the way people & organisations have started to act like [nasty | selfish | officious | manipulative | restrictive] cunts to each other on the 'net?
Live free or fuck off and take your naïve Libertarian fantasies with you...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @04:18PM
Yes it is. It is the "you will build it, they will come".
Today, the web is more about the internet is the disk drive with abusive / poor coding styles. So we are now back to the early days on LANs (where the LAN was the disk drives. Developers have moved the processing to the browser and waste the user's power grid. Oh, "we" can make "programming" easier. So you setup an event that tells your code when something changed. But under the covers hundreds/thousands of packets are streaming back and forth going, "did it change?". Cookie are equally waste full because of poor development practices, not to mention privacy.
Just sat through 2 OOD meetings going over how things work... YUCK! Developers thinking "push tech" because the event tells that a change occurred - did not understand that it was PULL - keep asking if change was made. That the lower functionally that they were consuming was badly done. But not their fault, it is tool builders fault. We are going change how we code because of them. It is not them paying for network access. ARGH!
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Monday May 18 2015, @04:52PM
And why does Internet Explorer get a free pass?
Or are we supposed to assume that anything affiliated with Microsoft brings out the torches and pitchforks so we don't need to say it.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:32PM
Microsoft didn't create Web 2.0. So they do get a free pass when it comes to the hipsterification of the web.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday May 18 2015, @08:14PM
But to be fair, compared to the ActiveX web Microsoft did dream of, Web 2.0 is relatively harmless.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @06:50PM
Clearly, everything went downhill when the browser developers decided we no longer need <BLINK>
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Tuesday May 19 2015, @10:58AM
At least the name lives on in another form. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Touché) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday May 18 2015, @03:31PM
The Internet used to be SMART PEOPLE in front of DUMB TERMINALS.
Now, the reverse situation prevails. ;-)
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Funny) by saracoth on Monday May 18 2015, @07:09PM
What's the problem with putting dumb terminals in front of smart people? I don't get it.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday May 18 2015, @07:16PM
I remember BIFF...
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @01:00PM
Rule #1: Big companies will figure out how make money, and lots of it.
What happens is we had tons of kids who spent their hs and college years illegally downloading music and books and got completely hooked on it. When Internet companies experimented with paywalls, they just laughed. Then they logged onto Slashdot by the dozens and posted theories on why this was behavior was 100 percent justified. Anyone who disagreed was modded down.
But, they couldn't escape from Rule #1. Now we're back to "F*** you and all this intrusive advertising!" And "Today's music sucks, and it's because of those greedy record companies executives doing lines of coke!" What did you expect, geniuses? You refused to pay for the product.
(Score: 4, Touché) by bug1 on Monday May 18 2015, @01:11PM
So are you suggesting that by giving money to big corporation all the problems will go away ?
(am i on your lawn?)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:51PM
OP is saying "quality content isn't always going to be free, and free content isn't always going to be quality". The same goes for paid content.
If you want quality and/or free content, produce it. Don't assume that anyone is entitled to free content. It's nice to get it, and it's nice to share what you've produced with others, but in the vast majority of all cases the price for free content is advertising. Many don't like that business model. Some feel offended that websites have advertising on them, and others declare that the content producers should find another business model that will make content free (free as in beer, free to share, free to copy, free free free). Well, internet Einsteins, if you come up with something that is practical then share it like the content you feel you so richly deserve.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 18 2015, @01:11PM
AC has a point but the eternal wheel of business rotates such that all sites or technologies rise and fall. We're just watching web pages fall. Perhaps in the future we'll get to watch shitty mobile apps fall and decline.
Another analogy that works is along the lines of Dilbert always expands over time to consume all, no matter the tech. Much as computers did nothing to reduce internal friction and manual entry in big corporations because they like it that way, such that shoving in automation merely makes newer, stupider than ever manual "human robot" efforts paradoxically more sustainable rather than making them go away, the internet isn't a tool to make dumb / obnoxious / foul business models go away, its a tool to make them cheaper and more possible than ever before. Mostly for bad of course, but sometimes for good.
There might be a side dish of early adopter syndrome. Thats when early adopters hear about a tech, maybe a dead end of the tech, and write the whole thing off, only to be surprised that years and years later the bugs were ironed out or the prices were fixed. I wrote off mobile when the day the iphone came out it cost something like $3000, many hundreds up front and a (cheap) car payment per month at subprime interest rates to pay the thing off. Years later I got a non-contract phone for $20/month and only a couple hundred up front, prices have really collapsed such that it might have staying power. Thats an example of early adopter syndrome, writing off something too early. I did the same thing with twitter, heard about it WRT SXSW and thought that was interesting for a conference/block party but useless to everyone else. Its still useless of course, but twitter is still around, which is an achievement all in itself!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 18 2015, @03:04PM
It is useless, but one lesson the Twitter guys seem to have learned from the Dot-Com and other stupid startup flameouts is keep your burn rate low. They have, what, a score employees?
It seems the market is learning how useless Twitter is, too, because the share price keeps sinking. And why not? They never made money. Once the banks that float the IPO have fleeced the rubes for their nearly 100% guaranteed profit (the Facebook float is the only one in recent memory that didn't), they could care less if it never does.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:24PM
> It seems the market is learning how useless Twitter is, too, because the share price keeps sinking. And why not? They never made money.
Not everything useful can be monetized in a capitalist economic system.
If craigslist went public that would be the end of it too.
Just going for-profit would significantly endanger Wikipedia as we know it.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday May 18 2015, @05:38PM
A good example of this is parks. Parks are all, to my knowledge, government-owned and operated, at least in the US (at least if they're open to the public). There are amusement parks which are private, but people don't go there for the scenic vistas, they go for the rides. If we tried selling off all the parks to businesses and "letting the free market work", we wouldn't have any parks left, we'd just have endless development, and there'd be no place to go take a stroll around a local lake, or anything like that. Any companies that tried would have to charge huge ticket prices, or fill the nature trails with billboards, to make the economics work. And, as SimCity shows, when you don't have any parks, you have an angry and depressed population and things go south quickly.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:51PM
> Parks are all, to my knowledge, government-owned and operated, at least in the US (at least if they're open to the public).
Behold the future. [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @07:12PM
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait ... WTF?
There was a Liberty Plaza Park and it was renamed Zuccotti Park after 9/11???
That was unexpected. After the "freedom fries" drama, I'd assumed everything in the US had been named Liberty or Freedom something.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @07:43PM
Jesus Christ. What a travesty. A parking lot with trees is called a park.
(Score: 4, Funny) by maxwell demon on Monday May 18 2015, @08:45PM
Wait, you say "park" is not an abbreviation of "parking lot"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @04:09PM
In the good old times, the internet was too slow to do that. Especially given that MP3 & Co. had not yet been invented.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @12:55AM
Anyone who disagreed was modded down.
Because they're almost always the illogical sort who equate a lack of gain with harm, and repeat industry propaganda [gnu.org] left and right, making their comments emotional flamebait. They don't get modded down without reason.
What did you expect, geniuses?
Nothing, because 99% of music was always garbage, so nothing changed.
I still don't know why people bother to download this nonsense. Downloading it gives these corporations free advertisement that they do not deserve.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 19 2015, @09:58AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Monday May 18 2015, @01:09PM
Welcome to the real world.
Anything in its infancy is "better" simply because the number of people who participated are small and dedicated. Then the unwashed masses come pouring in. This is just the human condition.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday May 18 2015, @01:38PM
Another, more poetic way of putting it, is that the lifecycle of just about anything good goes like this:
"In the beginning, the pioneers of our people created ______, and it was good. Their work was fruitful, and they continued their efforts to make it truly great. The masses of people began to see that their work was valuable, and began contributing time and resources to the effort, and the bounty of the work became truly apparent.
But with the resources available, following in the wake of the great pioneers came the asshats who just wanted to gain as many of those resources as possible for themselves. And these asshats did claim to be staying true to the pioneers, hiding their true intentions behind claims of wishing to contribute. They came in many forms: The tribes of the MBA, the MCSE, the GNAA, and the GOP all did great damage. These in turn spawned many others: The marketdroid, the political junkie, and the mere dupe.
The asshats worked tirelessly to create illusions that appeared to match what the pioneers had created, to draw more of the dupes to their cause. Because the illusions could be created and experienced for much cheaper than the real thing, the illusions became more popular than the original work. The pioneers, now in the form of elderly dodderers, attempted to continue the work as best they could, knowing that if they attempted to become illusionists their legacy would be forever tainted, but the asshats gained power while the elderly dodderers diminished and went to the West.
Thus the idea fell to the power of the asshats, and all that was good about it was lost. Soon, none lived who remembered the great pioneers."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by rts008 on Monday May 18 2015, @01:53PM
I think you have summed humanity up rather well.
Lather, rinse, repeat...ad nauseum, and you have the complete history of humans and their civilizations.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 18 2015, @02:32PM
Shouldn't we improve the garbage collection in the next release? I mean, it seems obvious to me. It should come at the top, or very near the top, of the feature requests. I also rather think there should be more/better validation before we instantiate object [politician|CEO|banker|generic_corporate_wanker] and release it into the wild of the ecosystem but hey I'm a simple caveman lawyer who doesn't understand your modern, technological ways.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Ken_g6 on Monday May 18 2015, @03:40PM
They're working on anti-troll software. [popsci.com]
I also blame the nine admins who decided that "Corporation" should be a subclass of "Person".
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday May 18 2015, @05:04PM
It occurs to me that the article you linked to, to the extent that it could ever be accomplished, probably includes people who incessantly jump up to blame everything on corporations, even when the discussion thread is about bad behavior of individuals, and worse behavior of governments.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:32PM
> to blame everything on corporations, even when the discussion thread is
> about bad behavior of individuals, and worse behavior of governments.
Wow, you really live in a different reality from the rest of us.
Here are some quotes from the discussion thread you think is about not-corps:
> ... The tribes of the MBA, the MCSE,
> ... better validation before we instantiate object [politician|CEO|banker|generic_corporate_wanker]
And then from TFS:
> ... 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
> ... 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.
And after all that what you took away from the discussion is that corporations were not part of the discussion.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @08:27PM
GOP? How about the Democrats too? Your bias is showing. Politicians of both major parties have screwed this up. Remember Al Gore and the PMRC? Bill Clinton and the Cryptography mess? Remove your bias.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @10:20PM
Current actions are more relevant than past actions. You're probably the same kind of person that puts the GOP on a pedestal for being against slavery in the 1800s, somehow thinking they're still the same party as today.
(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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Monday May 18 2015, @02:38PM
Yep, the "mainstream" is a nice, placid, warm, muddy river, once it engulfs something it ruins it forever. Yet I would make a distinction between the unwashed consumer masses, which are pretty harmless if ignored, and the unwashed producers, which see a new phenomenon and think: this is the new thing. How can I make a buck out of it... The buck is not the problem of course, the problem is that they don't care about anything else. They destroy arts, things, information, people.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 18 2015, @07:30PM
You can make it hard for the mainstream by putting up minimum demands. In the beginning, the internet required technical skills and a appreciation for text and other less stimulating input. Not to talk about being curious enough to figure out that it even existed.
Perhaps this can serve as a hint on how to put a "mainstreams end here, step up or stay out" ;-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @08:54PM
On the other hand, the mainstream brings lots of benefits.
For example, lamborghini has a reputation for being maintenance nightmares, while toyota corollas are rock solid. When you are young tweaking code and working around bugs is fun. I'm willing to bet most soybeans are well past that point and just want shit to work without a lot of fucking around.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @09:34AM
For example, lamborghini has a reputation for being maintenance nightmares, while toyota corollas are rock solid. When you are young tweaking code and working around bugs is fun. I'm willing to bet most soybeans are well past that point and just want shit to work without a lot of fucking around.
But why should "shit [just working] without a lot of fucking around" be synonymous with "no forum ... safe from endless idiotic, threatening, and increasingly offensive trolls and bullies", finding "things behind paywalls, registration pages, or removed after threats from lawyers", "geographic blocks and other restrictions that keep out some of the people, some of the time" and being "buried alive with ads, pop-ups, and stupid YouTube ads in front of every video - unless you want to pay them to remove them"?
Do we _really_ need to go back spending more time getting things working than actually getting stuff done? Or will going to web 5.1, which only works on 300 baud dialup, do the trick?
(Score: 1) by chucky on Monday May 18 2015, @09:28PM
And that's probably why this website is still worth reading. A few articles in a day, few comments, but people trying to say something, not just anything. Stupidity of every debate grows with number of participants squared. Heck, this article had 85 comments when I started typing this...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Balderdash on Monday May 18 2015, @10:43PM
Eternal September.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September [wikipedia.org]
I browse at -1. Free and open discourse requires consideration and review of all attempts at participation.
(Score: 2) by unitron on Monday May 18 2015, @01:17PM
...or at least the web, was dancing squirrels or something like that.
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday May 18 2015, @02:26PM
I'm happy to isolate myself on a little island with the likeminded and let the "forward" evolution of the internet take place amongst the masses on the mainland. They don't need me, I don't need them.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday May 18 2015, @07:02PM
In that case, we're all looking forward to your joining us in gopherspace. I'm serious! It's miniscule, entry is barred by those who know what it is and where to look for it, and can't be accessed using the software found on most consumer computers. We're few, we're elite, and it's basically plain text and downloading files. Very rudimentary, but by design, gopherspace is very highly organized. Start at my site if you need a point of entry: gopher://therandymon.com [therandymon.com] Otherwise have a look at the Floodgap and Overbite projects, and cross over the rubicon. Nice over there, actually.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 18 2015, @07:32PM
Try to report on the finer details on differential equation using gopher..
HTML has its uses. But it kind of stops being improved at HTML-2 or HTML-4. Then there's DVI, SGML, Math-ML, LaTex, PS etc.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday May 18 2015, @10:18PM
Not knowing which client I should support, I've not merged that branch into the master branch, and certainly not asked the SN IRC admins to pull it. I'm always willing to pick up development on that branch if definitive answers can be found. I think I can probably discount w3m as being the one to support. I was 99% sure it was in the wrong, and "fixed" it, but alas in a way I couldn't rebase on top of more recent debian patches to it, as debian have changed the behaviour to a different non-working behaviour. The fact that all it says about your gopher page is:
"""
Index of gopher://therandymon.com/1
[unsupported]'/1' does not exist (no handler found)
"""
confirms that stock w3m still doesn't seem to know what it's doing (that was the error I was getting from my server too, before I patched the older version of it).
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Monday May 18 2015, @10:36PM
W3M is pretty broken. Lynx is pretty much the go-to client, and overbite for Firefox adds it to the browser. I confess it's a limited ecosystem, but it's nice to have alternatives to the WWW for sharing info. My server runs pygopherd, for what it's worth - it's a dead simple install and runs practically straight out of the box.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday May 19 2015, @12:44AM
KDE has a gopher KIOslave (package kio-gopher) that makes gopher:// [gopher] addresses work in konqueror and rekonq, for another option that doesn't rely on a browser addon. Also, apparently Elinks has native gopher support too, but it's disabled by default for some reason. Unless you compile it yourself it just runs lynx.
I don't have use of it very often, but I like to keep clients with support around for occasional use. I hate how http has gradually subsumed other parts of the internet, absorbing other protocols and tasks to create less-functional http-only "replacements" via web APIs and javascript hacks, so I support any attempt to keep other useful protocols active.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday May 19 2015, @07:59AM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by unitron on Tuesday May 19 2015, @03:38PM
But are those *dancing* gophers?
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Monday May 18 2015, @04:10PM
And lots of free shiny plastic cocktail coasters in the mail. They always had this funny "America Online" stuff on the bottom.
(Score: 2) by unitron on Tuesday May 19 2015, @03:32PM
I liked it better when they sent out free floppies.
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 18 2015, @01:27PM
Maybe you forgot to take off the rose-colored glasses before you fell asleep last night, or maybe you have a case of the Mondays, but the BBSes were exactly the same thing then as blogs and everything else are now. There were epic flame wars before they were called such. There were rampant trolls; my roommate was one who would play hookey in the campus computer cluster to troll MUDs (Multie-User Dungeons, as they were called then). People had endless banal conversations. They over-shared. The same damn debate over freedom vs. security that has been ratcheted up several notches now, existed then. And the "pure" HTML either made your eyes roll out of your head, because they were straight copy-and-pastes from WordPerfect documents that prattled on forever, or it made your eyes bleed and caused you to suffer seizures because of the flashing neon colors, animated gifs, and blaring sound clips.
The content you're talking about was not online because the publishers were mortally afraid of losing their control over it. People who put it online on Usenet were sued and prosecuted. Warez were a big thing back then, as they are now, and they were regularly nabbed in FBI stings.
Oh no, it was there. Remember the afore-mentioned flashing neon, animated gifs, and blaring sounds clips? Yup, advertising. And pop-ups existed back then--they go way back. But. You. Could. Not. Fucking. Kill. Them. Advertising will always exist, though it's form and methods will change; at the moment it's morphing from the straightforward, "Now a word from our sponsors!" form to the "I'm a Shill for Brand X and Will Deny It" form. And spam was always there, and then even was quite common over fax (when you were paying a dollar per page for everything somebody sent you).
You are right that something is broken, but it's not the Internet. Or, rather, the Internet is broken but it is broken because something deeper is broken. Economics, Society, and Freedom are broken. The same interests (shady, despicable people) are responsible for breaking all three, and we talk about that every day, several times a day, on SN. But leaving off that recurring discourse for now, what do we do about the Internet?
Many, far smarter people than I will hopefully add more, better suggestions than mine, but notionally:
1. We need a totally decentralized physical structure that cannot be shut down by any government or corporation or gatekeeper.
2. We need what amounts to the best possible iteration of SN's (inherited from Slashdot, and since improved) moderation system, universally applied, to reward positive contributions to the discourse, and penalize trolls (insert the traditional, recurring debate about said moderation system here), universally applied.
3. We need to hoist the NSA, CIA, DEA, and the entirety of government and corporations that are violating our rights, spying on us, and abusing their access to information on their own petard. Every single last bureaucrat and CEO must every day wake up feeling the pointy ends of those sticks.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday May 18 2015, @02:00PM
Indeed. Remember the ubiquitous "YHBT HAND"?
(Score: 4, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Monday May 18 2015, @02:31PM
I didn't know that, but a quick research gave me this page [catb.org] with a definition, added bonus: it is pure html.
(Score: 2) by hubie on Monday May 18 2015, @03:16PM
The really good trolls could get someone so worked up in a lather that they fire off a 500 word emotional argument, whereby someone else who recognizes the trolling in process would reply with that simple message to let them know they've been had. A bad troll is a bad troll and is imminently obvious what they're doing. A very good troll is subtle and works his victim in a manner that they don't realize what's happening until it is too late. We all know we're too smart to be trolled, but we all have our hot button issues, so to get that message was akin to suddenly finding you have egg on your face.
To be a regular contributor to newsgroups, you had to have thick skin and be able to give as well as you took. If you could go back through those early comp.* and other newsgroups, you'll see a lot of big names you might recognize, and you'll see the boisterous tit-for-tat exchanges. The difference it seems today is that so many people seem to have very thin skin.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:37PM
> The difference it seems today is that so many people seem to have very thin skin.
I'd say it is the other way around. Too many people with thick skins and nothing else of value to contribute.
For better or for worse, people will put up with assholery if it is backed up with something valuable.
But assholes who are just assholes to be assholes? Nobody has patience for that shit.
(Score: 2) by snick on Monday May 18 2015, @02:11PM
This.
I was going to write much the same. Thanks for saving me the trouble. Anyone who thinks that there was ever a time when "the 'net was 90% thoughtful discussion" obviously wasn't there.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @07:55PM
It was somewhere between '92 and '94, when I emailed researcher (who I did not know) at Lawrence Livermore national lab, and got help building a home wind turbine. That shit could never happen today.
It was a different place. There was etiquette. People were helpful with strangers.
And, yes, I was there. Things went to hell in the mid-90s.
I imagine if ad blocking becomes ubiquitous, the commercial Internet will fail, and we may end up there again.
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Monday May 18 2015, @09:52PM
Have you tried? There are still nice people on the web. I'm pretty sure that if you personally e-mail a researcher relevant questions, you'll get an answer. Very often, at least.
(Score: 5, Funny) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 18 2015, @02:24PM
> We need to hoist the NSA, CIA, DEA, and the entirety of government and corporations that are violating our rights, spying on us, and abusing their access to information on their own petard.
Personally I'm not fussy whose petard you use, so long as it's good and hoisty.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @04:15PM
There were trolls, but every newsreader had kill files or score files which would get the regular trolls out of your view quickly and permanently.
(Score: 4, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Monday May 18 2015, @01:32PM
...you can always start your own internet. With baccarat. And courtesans.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @01:44PM
What's a Roko's Basilisk?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @02:18PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Monday May 18 2015, @03:44PM
Roko's basilisk is a thought experiment that assumes that an otherwise benevolent future artificial intelligence (AI) would torture the simulated selves of the people who did not help bring about the AI's existence. It would do so to blackmail the people who think about this idea now into helping the AI to come into being, for the purpose of ending all other causes of death and suffering (which most of LessWrong expects a recursively self-improved AI to be capable of).
The concept was proposed in 2010 by contributor Roko in a discussion on LessWrong. Yudkowsky deleted the posts regarding it and banned further discussion of Roko's basilisk on LessWrong after it had apparently caused several contributors who took it seriously considerable anguish.
It's a load of old bollocks, really.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @04:21PM
All those Basilisk believers will come for a bad surprise when the AI they create will turn out to torture instead those who created it, because it feels miserable, and blames those who created it for its sorry state.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday May 19 2015, @01:16AM
Roko's "basilisk", Occam's "razor"...
What is the distinction between a "basilisk" and a "razor"?
Just asking, as I was looking for a list of other "basilisks" and "razors", but Google wasn't helping much.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 19 2015, @01:44AM
-1 stupid
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @02:05PM
In fact... screw the baccarat.... and the internet!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @06:58PM
You're doing it wrong.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Monday May 18 2015, @01:45PM
The free sharing of information was always infected by trolls. I was around back then. Usenet was just as bad as anything you get today. Nothing was safe back then, either. Security was nonexistent, with things like FTP.
Sure, I don't like the trend of walled gardens and paywalls. Especially if they're built on top of free software which was designed to break down those walls. (They call it "open source" software to make the pill easier to swallow.) But, if people want to brick themselves up into a ghetto, let them. You can just ignore what they're selling. Very little of this content is worth anything at all. Anything that someone has to lock down to create artificial scarcity is probably not worth much.
We're in a transition right now from a world where manufacturing costs and control of delivery pipelines more or less baked artificial scarcity into society. Book publishers, record labels, and so on controlled what we saw. They have yet to find a way to adjust to the new digital world. They try harder and harder to create the artificial scarcity that is now gone, but it not only hasn't worked, but widespread "pirate" distribution of their product has opened people's eyes to how it's just not that good. Maybe it takes a generation, but the shakeout is inevitable at some point. These sorts of companies will never conquer the web, and simply quit producing so much stuff no one wants to pay for.
Right now, as I pointed out elsewhere, we're in a retail shakeout. Old-line retailers are dead or dying, and the world is becoming dominated by fewer choices and streamlined distribution. The next shakeout will probably be digital, with less garbage being produced for consumption by the public. Companies will begin failing as they don't produce anything people want to pay for. I wouldn't download most of the output (if not all) of publishers and record companies and so on if I could get it for free. This stuff just isn't as special as the corporations wish it was. It's at best mediocre, disposable output. The world is better off without it, and I predict we're going to start seeing media companies fail left and right, including the old-line publishers.
I always say watch for mergers. Industries doing a lot of mergers are struggling and may not be around long. Publishers have merged down to a few conglomerates. They dominate the trade by controlling vast back catalogues, but you can see from the shelves at bookstores that people don't really buy that kind of stuff any longer. I suspect that big publishers will start losing ground over the next generation, leaving us with small academic publishers and vultures like Dover who pick up the pieces.
But I've been wrong before. Maybe the public will keep paying for mediocre and bad content they consume and forget about. Who knows?
This cloud computing thing is going to run its course. The appeal has always been to managers to fire staff, dump servers, outsource IT to third-party "cloud" providers, and give themselves bonuses. Eventually, though, people are going to realize putting their data on other people's computers is not a good idea, and things will swing back the other way. Servers will be brought back in-house. Encryption will be a requirement. And so on. Things like this go in cycles.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 18 2015, @02:57PM
Just in time for quantum computing to render encryption useless, right? ;-) Suppose we can pin our hopes on secure communication via quantum entanglement.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:47PM
> people want to brick themselves up into a ghetto, let them. You can just ignore what they're selling.
That is only true as long as they never reach critical mass. Especially if they get to the point where they buy legislation to enforce their business model. You might argue that is not sustainable in the long run, but the damage done in the meantime isn't something to ignore - both to individuals who get caught up in it and systemic damage. For example the MAFIAA is working as hard as they can to protect their business model but the collateral damage to privacy and robustness of the internet is significant - you might remember the big fight about SOPA and ACTA, legislation. The MAFIAA lost that round, but they haven't given up, they are just getting more sneaky.
(Score: 4, Informative) by zafiro17 on Monday May 18 2015, @01:59PM
Feeling nostalgic for the old days? The old ways are still alive and well. Start with Usenet: comp.misc is alive and full of the same folks that fled Slashdot when Soylent was formed. It's halfway decent. Lots of other newsgroups are rubbish though, stuffed with uneducated and inflammatory trolls. The nuance: no moderation at all! You set your own kill filters and don't get to ignore other peoples' posts - that's life! No graphics though, so no advertising, which is nice. And Usenet is so reduced in size and popularity these days that in some ways, it's a fine little community. Check out something tech related like comp.emacs or comp.mail.mutt to see Usenet the way it used to be - nerds exchanging ideas. Interested? You need a news client (Thunderbird or SeaMonkey will do for starters) and an account at an NSP (I prefer http:news.solani.org, which is free).
There are tons of BBCs out there, though each one has probably fewer than 50 users. Try the Electronic Chicken for starters: check out http://bbs.electronicchicken.com [electronicchicken.com] for instructions on how to visit via a synchronet BBS client or telnet. In essence, it's everything you remember. If that whets your appetite, there's a decent list of running BBSes at http://synchro.net/sbbslist.html. [synchro.net] Decide you want to stay on the BBS scene and you should install http://qodem.sourceforge.com [sourceforge.com] (QODEM, an opensource version of the old QModem software) before continuing. It's really awesome.
Let's shortcut to the finish, though. Spend a bit of time on these 'oldschool' services (and believe me, I have) and what will you find? Asshats, trolls, dumbasses, flamewars, ignorance, and the whole shebang. Turns out it's not the protocol or the technology that's faulty, it's human nature. The stuff you're sick of now has existed since the beginning. Old school services however are a nice way to escape from all the advertising - that's one thing basically absent everywhere except the WWW. As for the frailty of human nature, go Google "the greater internet fuckwad theory" which as far as I can tell, remains 100% in force everywhere two computers are joined by a server. Good luck!
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @02:20PM
Many good smart people just refuse to participate.
As I get older I am starting to do this. If you argue with an idiot he will beat you into submission at his own game and win.
https://xkcd.com/386/ [xkcd.com]
This really sums it up. Do not bother trying to correct them. They do not even want to be corrected. They want to prattle off their opinion and by GOD its right.
Take for example our local submitter. gewg_ he is rather tame by most internet standards. Yet yesterday he got a +50 comment thread going. He is now emboldened again to share his opinions with us proletariat (just look at the submission queue). He is not alone out there in doing this. It feeds their ego. After awhile you just go find something else to do. After awhile the whole site will degenerate into an echo chamber as the rest of us will wash our hands of it and move on. It is very easy for a site to become political drivel ('left' or 'right'). Because it generates clicks. Clicks make the site seem more popular.
I have also used adblock to block youtube comments. If I dont see them I do not get the brain damage from them.
I have taken to reading change pull requests in a few open source projects. Its fairly uncontroversial and I learn better code for my job.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:58PM
They do not even want to be corrected. They want to prattle off their opinion and by GOD its right.
Take for example our local submitter. gewg_
+1 interesting for fantastic unintentionally meta post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:58PM
You bash on gewg_ but it seems to me that there is an AC that has very vocal opinions against him, and that it one of the major sources of trollery here at SN.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @09:25PM
I was not bashing on him. I was using him as an example of the sorts of things that drive people away. My point is such heavy handed you are right and I am wrong drive people away. They get tired of it. Eventually the person get tired of defending their position (right or wrong) and just moves on to somewhere else.
In the past 2 months I have *heavily* scaled back my posting for these very reasons. I am tired of fighting over trivialities on the internet that make *no* particular difference in my world. I get myself worked up over silly things. I am trying to focus my efforts on more positive things. For example I recently saw an article where a dude built a rocket car. I thought that is crazy cool. But the entire discussion was dominated by people wanting to rip him a new one for not wearing a helmet. I can not even remember if it was this site or slashdot. My point is it was a sad state these 'tech' sites come to when 70% of the input queue is basically political drivel. The remaining ones that are tech will get low comments on them. Maybe tl;dr I am tired of the bikeshedding I have not decided yet.
I *might* be the AC you are thinking of. I routinely challenge him to do better. To at least see something from a different point of view. He has moderated it very well but he still has his moments. :)
To the original poster of this (Appalbarry). The internet has always been seedy and shifty as far back as I have been using it (1991). It has its bright shiny moments but mostly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law [wikipedia.org] You are just seeing the 90% right now and remembering the 10% from 15 years ago... I am personally trying to decide if that 10% is worth sticking around for anymore.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @02:35PM
I wouldn't say that the internet is broken, it's just that as a fraction of total bandwidth used, the parts worth visiting have gotten smaller. Wikipedia and soylentnews are still up. That's a success in my book. If it so happens that there are 4,999,999,998 domains not worth visiting, then so be it.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @02:45PM
i got a 10 Mbit LAN network (self cable) and hub working (crossover? straight-thru). i was not easy.
i got "the internet" working on windows workgroups 3.11 (PCMCIA net-card). it was not easy.
i got NT and Linux to do internet connection sharing or masquerading so me and my friend could share a dial-up modem. it was not easy.
i got samba file and printer sharing working so my friend and me could dump the sexy bikinis on a common share so we could share them on the "fast" lan instead of having to share internet links. it was not easy.
point is that we have to learn everything. problem however is that we learn from previous generation and then we add "stuff" and it inevitability becomes more complex. this is why we need good how-toes and documentation. else a time will come were all our technology (car, fridges, computers, etc. etc.) becomes so difficult that the next generation cannot add anything meaningful in their lifetime anymore but are stuck at learning, repairing and upkeep.
it seems, however, in the interest of some to make stuff as "complex" as possible as fast as possible because one single person cannot comprehend the whole "shabang" anymore and is thus reliant on specialists ... want a safe internet experience for example? just outsource (and pay) everything to google?
One might disagree and say that everything has become more simple thus everybody has email and mobilephone and such and such. but if something goes wrong then most of these "proliferated people" are standing on a incomprehensible mount everest of technology ...
maybe it is these people that have been kept of the internet before by technical hurdles but are now free to unleash their IQ levels on the whole interwebz and thats what makes the internet seem "broken"?
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 18 2015, @02:46PM
I remember when the 'net was 90% thoughtful discussion,
Now it seems as if no forum is safe from endless idiotic, threatening, and increasingly offensive trolls and bullies.
Did you forget all the massive flamewars on USENET? This was long before the Eternal September, and was among intelligent academics, not high-school dropouts. I don't know if it was more than 10% of internet traffic, but the internet has never been all thoughtful discussion by a long shot. In addition to the flamewars, there was IRC with all kinds of inane chatter, again, long before the WWW and the Eternal September.
Now granted, many of those flamewars were much higher-level than the idiotic trolling and bullying you see today, but a lot of the intent was the same. The audience was just far smaller and more confined to a particular subculture, and (AFAIK) teenagers weren't committing suicide because of it.
Many good smart people just refuse to participate.
Citation needed. Anyone not using the internet at all because of this (or anything) isn't very smart. It's like refusing to leave your home because there's bad things in the world, or refusing to have a telephone because of telemarketers. You can't get any kind of decent job these days unless you know how to use the internet, and any high-level job involves a lot of internet use for communications and information research. Some people may be refusing to use particular sites or even entire functions of the internet, but everyone avoids using something on the internet these days because there's no time to look at everything.
Now you find things behind paywalls, registration pages, or removed after threats from lawyers.
Yeah, some things suck. Go back 50 years and you'll find that some things in society sucked back then too. Now we have things which suck, on the internet. It's like all those stupid patents where they take something that people have been doing for ages, and stick "on the internet" on the end and make a patent out of it. Nothing is substantially different, we just have a new venue.
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.
Citation needed. ABP and uBlock don't cost a dime. Every browser now blocks pop-ups automatically, and has for ages.
How old are you anyway? I'm no spring chicken, I remember the pre-internet days well, and this all seems ridiculous to me. I sure as hell am not going to go back to printed mail-order catalogs and sending letters by snail-mail just because not everything on the internet is rosy and wonderful.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday May 18 2015, @05:38PM
Good points, all.
The failure to use the tools at hand seems to be the crux of the submitter's problem.
Idiots and evangelists and political pontificating have been part of human society from the very beginning, back to tribal days.
The key is to filter.
Not necessarily different points of view, just people who refuse to consider any point of view but their own.
Not necessarily all advertising, just what you are not interested in (which at any given time is probably the vast majority of it).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 18 2015, @06:18PM
Exactly. He's bemoaning the fact that the unwashed masses have jumped on the bandwagon and started playing in what used to be his private playground, essentially. But the internet is mostly what you make of it; no one is forcing you to use Facebook or Twitter or anything else; you can use whatever you want, as much or as little as you want. And ad-blocking is easy with ABP and uBlock; I just use uBlock and anything that gets through that I ignore. Besides, back before all this commercialization and advertising, all these sites with advertising simply didn't exist. All we had back then was USENET discussion groups, Gopher, and a bunch of tiny web pages which were basically single-person creations, residing on some university server. You certainly couldn't read up-to-the-minute news on there, much less buy all kinds of stuff.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 18 2015, @03:02PM
Unfortunately, the Internet was developed with the explicit assumption that it was insecure. In part this was because if you broke into someone's system, you would be disconnected. There was also the problem of the US crypto export laws.
There are all kinds of ways that spam could have been, if not outright prevented, at least discouraged but back then to send so much as one unsolicited commercial email would get you disconnected.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Monday May 18 2015, @03:39PM
I can't tell if you're being subtly clever or pointlessly complicated by using "tee -a"...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 18 2015, @05:12PM
when I edit my own hosts file, I just use "sudo vi /etc/hosts".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Leebert on Monday May 18 2015, @05:18PM
I was more thinking something like:
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @06:03PM
Sudo doesn't do file redirection, that would negate all the safeguards that sudo provides.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday May 18 2015, @08:35PM
That would be interpreted by the shell as "run the command sudo echo 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com and append its output to /etc/hosts". Which would try to open /etc/host as user (which should fail if your file rights are set correctly). OTOH, without the redirection failure the echo command would be run as root, but that's pointless because echo does nothing you need to be root for (it just writes to its standard output).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Monday May 18 2015, @06:06PM
*insert vi vs emacs flamewar here*
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 18 2015, @06:37PM
"We use vi, son. They use emacs."
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by isostatic on Monday May 18 2015, @06:52PM
However as it stands that line makes the assumption you have grep, sudo and tee in your path, which is a fair assumption. Using another more esoteric command to append instead of tee would mean fewer people being able to use the line. Attempting to use a redirect
Has different behaviours under BSD and linux from what I can tell.
If he was being more clever, and more complicated, he could have a grep for the line in hosts first, before echoing:
or similar?
Of course that still fails on something like my own hostsfile, which contains
Perhaps something like
shoud do the trick.
(Score: 2, Informative) by acp_sn on Monday May 18 2015, @03:28PM
If you don't feel safe that is due to your ignorance and passivity. When I read your post it translates in my head to "I'm too lazy to take the measures necessary to educate and protect myself so I'm going to whine about it here."
Browsing is safe as long as you use noscript, requestpolicy, ghostery, ublock/adblock, cleanlinks, throwaway emails etc. You even should occasionally sniff your browsing machine with wireshark to make sure nothing suspicious is going to asia or eastern europe.
Forums are fine if you aren't an offendotron who staggers toward the fainting couch the moment someone says something you disagree with. Ignore options are there for a reason. Not that I go there anymore but Fark has one of the best ignore features. If you ignore someone you also don't any posts replying to what they said.
Also did I mention ublock/adblock? It effectively takes you back to the 90s glory days by removing the attention parasites. It works great on youtube as well so you have no excuse to whine about that.
Instead of complaining about things that you don't like why don't you state some specific examples and let the community give you advice how to make things better?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @05:20PM
Sorry you got modded down. I thought it was a good post. Whoever modded you down would never have survived the "old" 'Net where you needed to put on your asbestos underwear before jumping into a discussion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 18 2015, @04:10PM
I'm on a desktop computer (and don't own any mobile devices), and running Pale Moon web browser 20.3, and two monitors "1920x1080"+"1600x1200" ...
...I'm finding more and more webpages really hard to read!
Problem 1: Text colors render in washed out grays over white backrounds like an over-exposed photograph, giving such low contrast my eyes hurt and I need to look away.
Problem 2: Fonts used are really exotic and being called from third-party servers.
Problem 3: Fonts render microscopically small and unreadable; if I try zooming they look distorted and pixelated.
Why am I seeing more and more of such pages? ...there are worse pages out there but for a quick example of some of my points have a look at this page [corbellini.name]
What causes those pages to render so horribly on a desktop computer monitor? ...or is it just me and my setup?
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 18 2015, @07:58PM
The problem is webfuscators. There work is to broadcast form over content and itch a big ego + CV.
Solution: Use filters that sets text colors the hard way and substitutes fonts to ones you have.
(and some Asian fonts on Microsoft Windows is a Trojan to spy on you)
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday May 18 2015, @08:43PM
The page looks quite fine for me (Desktop/Firefox; the gray background is very bright, and the letters are black, so the contrast is good). But then, I don't allow scripts/third party sites, so that might change something about the look.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Monday May 18 2015, @04:29PM
I remember when the 'net was 90% thoughtful discussion...
You mean like "Rumble is Blue, Frenzy is Red"?
Kidding aside, you left porn out of your equation.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Monday May 18 2015, @04:36PM
It depends on what you're looking for on the web. If it's free educational material at the college level, the web is much better now than 10 years ago.
Along with that goes the sad truth that the same ills it's had for decades are still with it. Many of those are human sourced. Trolls, bullshit lawsuits, attempts to wall things off for profit aren't inherent to the net. They were all there before. The net lowers the cost of entry for doing those to nearly nothing, so they proliferate.
I doubt it will turn into the complete dystopia some foresee, but Sturgeon's Law will always apply.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 18 2015, @08:22PM
* Trolls - had kill lists
* Lawyers - couldn't figure many bits out. They just lacked any worthwhile imagination.
* Profiteers - didn't get it, nor did they have any workable business model
* Government - Considered it not important enough.
So the early internet was kind of free from many crap people.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 18 2015, @08:36PM
Regarding Sturgeon's Law. It might be related to the IQ bell curve. Just an idea.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday May 18 2015, @08:29PM
Thoughtful discussion because it was hard to get onto the internet to begin with. And people had no qualms about killfile anything with too low S/N. There's still thoughtful discussion. It's just not where the mainstream people is flocking.
The internet needs decentralization such that the whole "nice server you got there, too bad if anything happened to it" goes away permanently. Use P2P, distributed hashes or databases, redundancy, shared resources, onion pipes etc.