The Internet Slum: is abandoning the Internet the next big thing? (2004)

It's like a Bizarro World Dr. Bronner's label.

He claimed no one else understood his theory (stating that only he alone was smart enough), so it wasn't really possible to disprove it.

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.

That idea is kind of the problem with social media now. People found a way to justify its importance to pretend it's worth investing their emotions in. But just imagine how, say, satanic rituals looked to religious people back when that was a thing to worry about, or really anything where lots of other people disagree with your cultural beliefs. You can always imagine how it might be a disaster if you don't start a culture war to kill those "bad" beliefs. It happened again with covid where people turned on each other for their beliefs because other people disagreeing with you might have some bad consequence. Never mind that almost nobody critically evaluates their own beliefs and just assumes they're on the moral high ground because that's where they happened to land in life. People even found a way to justify fighting flat-earthers because anybody who believes such nonsense must be the same type of people who believe other non-mainstream things and those other things could be dangerous to society. At the end of the day though, it's just basic human bigotry which always has some sort of justification.

You even mentioned pedophiles as scum without recognizing that pedophilia is a condition that people have beyond their control and is separate from child abuse which is an activity people do and is within their control. Back in the day, that was also how people justified homophobia. There was a famous case in my country of a kindergarten teacher who was wrongly convicted and went to prison for something like 20 years because of essentially the popular belief that gay + satanic = child molester. My father was that type of person. He thought gays were generally bad people - they obviously weren't following Christian teachings so they must have no morals and would be just the sort of people who might want to infect others with AIDS. Today, if you voted for Trump you must be just the sort of person who wants to lynch black people because you're obviously generally bad and have no moral compass.

Wow, that's funny I've heard a few of my friends lately talk about Plex servers and stuff. I'm just like, uhm Plex was like 10 yrs ago!

But would be interesting to see how Plexs numbers have grown lately.

You should encourage them to move to Jellyfin. It's better, and actually free.

That's true, but conspiracy theorists are not typically out on some philanthropic mission. It's a hobby -- they are doing it because conspiracy theories are fun. That's why they aren't actually interested in things where there is real, tangible evidence. They want to find hidden clues and feel like they are in the know.

Of course, there is a very fine line between that and actually realizing something that the world doesn't see, but that's part of what makes it fun.

Being recommended low viewership channels is a positive.

Having everything be polished, scripted and ad friendly is tremendously boring. My complaint over the last few years with YouTube was that I missed the wackos. They were the thing that made the web interesting to begin with.

Remember the tongue map?

Hindsight is 20/20.

This 1000x.

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...

I'm happy that died around me. QR code menus suck.

You need to download-install an app , enter your info, your vehicle info, your credit card, the location where you’re parking, the time (which is non-refundable/ transferible if you pay too much) to park. Sometimes all this BS takes longer than the time you wish to park, I rather risk getting a ticket or just go somewhere else. All this because cities just lease the operation to 3rd parties.

Requiring a smartphone isn't progress. Offering the option to use a smartphone is progress.

I carry coins and preferentially use cash. I'm a male in my 40s and took seriously The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I've narrowed what I use my now-6yo phone for. I know most of my neighbors, and I value mutual aid, participatory democracy, and "public luxury, private sufficiency". Surveillance capitalism sucks- it's unhealthy, and it extracts wealth to people whose intrinsic value is each no better than anyone else's.

My county forcing Microsoft 2FA as the only option for the government entity I work for, in which I'm the youngest by far and we don't accept having to buy a phone just to use an account, reeks of capitalism.

For what it's worth, I always carry cash, including coins. I pay the smallest purchases (like a sandwich) with coins.

When Gmail launched on April 1, 2004, there were two big selling points for me - storage and spam.

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.

What a twist that my regret is not that I have spent so much time of my youth on the internet but that I have not spent more time on the internet when it was still good.

Autoplay midis, blink tags, FFFF00 yellow text on an FFFFFF white background, terribly low quality jpegs.

...man, I miss it.

Yeah, looks like the subreddit has been taken over completely. You can see that the original founder of the subreddit had resigned shortly before... and his farewell-post has been deleted by the new mods. The other mods all seem to be inactive, and going through one of their histories, I found them talking about being harassed and bullied a relatively few comments before ceasing /r/gifted comments

I brought this up in modmail with them, to see if any of the uncorrupted mods would respond, under their names. The responses denied my claims and mocked me, before banning me, but notably, all of the responses were under the group-mod username: so either none of the old mods were willing to respond under their usernames, or it wasn't the new mods responding. (Hint: it was almost certainly the latter.)

I reported it to the Reddit admins, but have heard nothing back. I don't expect too much because if the worst the new mods are doing is spamming affiliate links, that's relatively tame and far down the priority list.

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.

Spam by any other name is just as annoying.

> If Facebook was worse than the web for users, they'd flock to the web.

People go to these platforms for a reason, my point is that the reason isn't because they are walled off. It seems like you are arguing that the chief (if inadvertent) benefit to users of a walled garden is that users don't have to deal with undesirable behavior because access to the platform is restricted by a login wall. This isn't how I would understand a service being "walled off" - Hacker News is not a walled garden even though I need an account to access some of its features. The important distinction is that most (all?) of the content on Hacker News can be accessed without an account. Facebook, Pinterest, and Quora are examples of services going the other way - they lock down content, not for the benefit of the users, but for the benefit of themselves. They save on not having to serve the content to unregistered users, keep the content on their platform, and encourage unregistered users to sign up.

The chief benefit of the open web was always permissive read access, not permissive write access.

But a lot of times the "benefit" is simply that people they know are there. Which is the problem with all these open platforms like Mastodon. People can get the argument that it is better in theory to use an open platform. But nobody wants to use a social platform alone.

I can only hope to one day be rich and successful enough that this could be my life.

This must still be somewhat common. I recall e-mails from administration at my previous French lab had in their signature something to the effect of "Think of the environment, do not print this e-mail".

I actually had an example of something similar before my eyes. My advisor's advisor's advisor (...), emeritus, occupied the office next to mine and printed his Fortran code to work on at home. He debugged on paper, then typed it down the next day in the office. His whole career had been at the crossroads of math and computer science, his main contribution algorithms and software, and he did not have a computer at home (says he). This software debugged by hand (and typed with the index fingers) is still used in commercial software!

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?

Your dad's colleague's professor was just like Donald Knuth!

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html