SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 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.