The internet was a mistake.

Post Reply New Topic

Excellent point!

Yes. We are using the Internet to denounce the Internet.

But yes, it often feels like the Net was a mistake - an abomination foisted on humanity -like the A bomb.

Nothing but a MIS information super highway.

But every new technology is a double edged sword. And the Net is still a wild frontier being explored and settled.

Well said.

I see that with music as well, where any genre that gets popular effectively 'slums' with the masses and turns to autotuned crap. Nerds and early adopters tend to use things to learn and grow, the masses use it for social climbing / dominance.

It's not the internet, it's the people on it and the people trying to control it for money or power.

The best example I've found of a self-regulating forum on the internet was one aimed at technical discussions of (mostly) computers, protocols, and so on. There was nothing preventing anyone from posting to it... except that if you didn't do it in a very specific way, which was not listed anywhere, your posts never propagated and no-one else ever saw them. And this, too, was never mentioned anywhere.

If you wanted your posts seen, you had to know enough about the underlying messaging protocols to realize that most standard interfaces didn't let you muck around with the guts of the metadata, find a program which did allow it (usually as a very esoteric and barely-documented option), get hold of that, use it to dissect existing messages and find the hidden metadata that enabled propagation, copy that into the metadata of your own messages, and set your interface up to do that automatically.

No spam, no brigading, no mods necessary. Just a purely technical hurdle that anyone could pass if they had the kind of knowledge that the forum liked to see in its participants (and was all available publicly, if you went looking). And while, in theory, you could get as*holes who had the knowledge or were prepared to put in that kind of effort to break into the discussions, they were extremely rare and tended to be ignored - there were user-filtering options also available.

Elegant, set-and-forget, and it worked amazingly well to keep discussions on-topic and relevant for years, if not decades.

These days, unfortunately, most platforms are owned by private interests who want to attract the maximum number of easily-fleeced users to an advertising/propaganda platform.

^
Thats stupid.

An "incestuous" use of the web as a site for technical experts of the web itself -can use that "automatic self policing" gimmick of forcing the users to build their own vehicles to drive on road. No other types of sites on the web can do that.

There is a certain website community I know of that caters to folks on the autism spectrum. Some are AI experts, but most are not, including me. So the community couldnt exist if did that kind of thing. You have to have human mods for a site like that , and for most sites. Not just because the creators of the site are power grubers.

Which is why it wouldn't be done that ultra-specific way for the wide varieties of sites and forums out there. A more appropriate and customized set of filters would be applied. Time could be a factor, or lack of identifiable bot postings, or average and most recent time since last post, or quality of posts via some variant of a general user approval system, checked on the back end to make sure it's not just coming from mathmatically small-hulled vectorspaces with odd characteristics (ie bot farms).

These are all options. The mentioned process worked specifically because it was customized for that one particular group, and was a very good fit given the limitations at the time.

What does everyone think of that page that I linked to?

Its too much work for me to figure out what that page is about for me to even understand it. Much less react to it.

Unless THATS the very point. In which case it sucks. I guess. Lol!

Pop quiz: what event occurred back in mid-August 2014 that broke the Internet in two? Here's a hint: it was a terrible thing that continues to get worse as time goes on.

Kim Kardashian’s naked butt.

Wrong controversy. Actually, it's about an overrated Japanese hobby that not even the Japanese take too seriously.

Sudoku?

I'm pretty sure sudoku fans can't button mash their way to victory.

Do not keep us guessing; TELL us which of the many events in 2014 allegedly "broke" the Internet?

Which still seems to be running, by the way.

^ I fear that mentioning the exact name of the event is against the rules; several other websites have banned people who used that word, and I doubt this forum is any different in that regard. Let me give you a hint: try filling in the blanks like you're playing Wheel of Fortune.

---ER--TE

Not playing games.

Enjoy your thread.