Social media, on the other hand, fuck no. But the internet in general absolutely.
Knowledge sharing and research are amazingly easy now. Things that would have taken going to a library and possibly ordering 2 or 3 hard to find books, maybe several long distance phone calls, all to get 30 year old info, are now replaced by digitized records and some dude’s website.
Access to scientific research is shockingly easy now. You’re seconds away from reading up to the minute research on anything.
International standards also help. I can use my credit card anywhere on earth. Translate speech and text in real time. Email anyone anywhere. I can learn when the common scams are in a place before I go there. It helps make connecting with people possible anywhere.
I read they made search less good because they had 95% of the market already so now you have to spend more time with the ad-links before actually getting what you want. It was in some leaked document from 2018 IIRC.
Myspace was fine… Facebook fucked humanity up without consent. Facebook killed the idea of the Internet being a cyber world of freedom. Before Facebook the Internet was handles, usernames and the idea that it was all NOT real. After Facebook everything became assumed to be reality. Like it flipped a switch to the Internet becoming viewed as reality.
Facebook actually did start off that way if you’ll recall, and you don’t have to use your real name on FB still. I was sad when my friend’s dog’s profile got deleted for very obviously being a dog. I hated FB from the start, and it was around 2010ish is when they started to get too serious about themselves.
The real question is whether the benefit of better access to scientific research offsets the detriment of social media. Unfortunately, I think social media use is much, much more widespread, and is thus having a significantly stronger detrimental effect than scientific research access and every other benefit combined.
It’s really only just a few platforms that are more toxic than average. “Social media” includes things like WhatsApp and Signal, which are functionally similar enough to email threads that they don’t compare to Twitter where everything is public-facing.
Fair, I used the term as a catch-all that ends up inadvertently catching less-harmful sites as well. However, while there are only a few toxic sites, they’re the most popular, and even when they fade into obscurity, they’re replaced by other new toxic sites. They’re designed to draw people in, so it doesn’t really matter how few there are, they’re always among the most popular websites on the internet.
I mean, try as we might to blame Zuck or whatever like this is a new problem, it’s also a standard with humans that we do love our own toxic self-reinforcing mess sometimes when we get in a groove with it. The Taliban literally fought and won two wars to uphold their brand of misogyny, ignorance, and general illiteracy. Nazis. The Confederacy and all their vestigial holdover racism. The Communist Revolution in China where they just executed academics because math and physics did not support the CCP.
The barriers previously were just access to a wider group of people with one’s own brand of mess, and the point of the internet in general was to lower the friction of communication. For any many bronies out there living in Bumblefuck, AL that have finally found their people, there’s just as many old forums like Something Awful that still exist that are cursed corners of the internet, and have been since the 90s. They’re just the internet version of that shithole bar in your town where it’s all methheads and bikers and generally terrible people.
You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the Facts of Life. The Facts of Life.
Oh, yeah, I don’t necessarily think that every toxic site was specifically designed to be toxic, most were just designed in a way that people are drawn to. But when enough people flock to a place, it becomes toxic eventually. That just happens to coincide with the fact that when someone becomes wealthy from their website taking off, they often become corrupted by the attention and become the big figureheads we hate. They were probably assholes before, but now they’re rich entitled assholes, which is much worse.
In the end the biggest issue with the internet is that too many people becoming easily connected to one another must also include toxic people easily connecting with one another, spreading the toxicity until it’s inescapable in the community. I think we could slowly overcome the issues associated with connectivity on our own in time, and we were for a while, but the internet opened the floodgates and gave us too much connection before we were able to handle it.
My own mom went from a staunch democrat to believing Trump was literally the second coming of Jesus Christ sent to deal with actual honest-to-goodness Lizard People running the government, all because some small community of 100-odd people she found on the internet said so, and that many people can’t be wrong.
OOOhh - which community? Not going after your mom, I just love a good conspiracy community. Most forums seem pretty insular, so it’s always nice to get a lead on a new one.
The one she talked about all the time was called the Minnesota Assembly. I think it’s an offshoot of the whole sovereign citizen thing. I believe they used a telegram group chat as their main way of communicating. She died a little over a year ago, after they convinced her to treat her breast cancer with the herbal teas they sold instead of going to a doctor, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the group anymore.
Oh shit, sorry man. My parents are wrapped up in the same kind of stuff, like drinking bleach as a cure for everything. My apologies to bring that up in that way.
On the whole, I would argue it has been.
Social media, on the other hand, fuck no. But the internet in general absolutely.
Knowledge sharing and research are amazingly easy now. Things that would have taken going to a library and possibly ordering 2 or 3 hard to find books, maybe several long distance phone calls, all to get 30 year old info, are now replaced by digitized records and some dude’s website.
Access to scientific research is shockingly easy now. You’re seconds away from reading up to the minute research on anything.
International standards also help. I can use my credit card anywhere on earth. Translate speech and text in real time. Email anyone anywhere. I can learn when the common scams are in a place before I go there. It helps make connecting with people possible anywhere.
People complain that “google has turned to shit”. But the best part of their search offering, scholar.google.com, is still as amazing as ever.
Google hasn’t remembered it exists yet. Don’t remind them.
Google search is total shit because spammers figured out how to SEO their way into results.
I read they made search less good because they had 95% of the market already so now you have to spend more time with the ad-links before actually getting what you want. It was in some leaked document from 2018 IIRC.
Everyone in business is fucking insane.
Myspace was fine… Facebook fucked humanity up without consent. Facebook killed the idea of the Internet being a cyber world of freedom. Before Facebook the Internet was handles, usernames and the idea that it was all NOT real. After Facebook everything became assumed to be reality. Like it flipped a switch to the Internet becoming viewed as reality.
Facebook actually did start off that way if you’ll recall, and you don’t have to use your real name on FB still. I was sad when my friend’s dog’s profile got deleted for very obviously being a dog. I hated FB from the start, and it was around 2010ish is when they started to get too serious about themselves.
a/s/l?
No.
People rarely go on the internet to find data; they go on the internet to find data that tells them they are already right.
No.
Search engines exist and tell people how to spell things, simple math, and get them to things like recipes and wiki pages.
Top Google search right now in the US is emmy winners. That’s a search for information, not conformation bias.
People also can’t seek confirmation bias of they don’t know where to start.
Why confidently start of a comment with “No” and gamble with absolute when that’s a net losing tactic over the long run?
The real question is whether the benefit of better access to scientific research offsets the detriment of social media. Unfortunately, I think social media use is much, much more widespread, and is thus having a significantly stronger detrimental effect than scientific research access and every other benefit combined.
It’s really only just a few platforms that are more toxic than average. “Social media” includes things like WhatsApp and Signal, which are functionally similar enough to email threads that they don’t compare to Twitter where everything is public-facing.
Fair, I used the term as a catch-all that ends up inadvertently catching less-harmful sites as well. However, while there are only a few toxic sites, they’re the most popular, and even when they fade into obscurity, they’re replaced by other new toxic sites. They’re designed to draw people in, so it doesn’t really matter how few there are, they’re always among the most popular websites on the internet.
I mean, try as we might to blame Zuck or whatever like this is a new problem, it’s also a standard with humans that we do love our own toxic self-reinforcing mess sometimes when we get in a groove with it. The Taliban literally fought and won two wars to uphold their brand of misogyny, ignorance, and general illiteracy. Nazis. The Confederacy and all their vestigial holdover racism. The Communist Revolution in China where they just executed academics because math and physics did not support the CCP.
The barriers previously were just access to a wider group of people with one’s own brand of mess, and the point of the internet in general was to lower the friction of communication. For any many bronies out there living in Bumblefuck, AL that have finally found their people, there’s just as many old forums like Something Awful that still exist that are cursed corners of the internet, and have been since the 90s. They’re just the internet version of that shithole bar in your town where it’s all methheads and bikers and generally terrible people.
You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the Facts of Life. The Facts of Life.
Oh, yeah, I don’t necessarily think that every toxic site was specifically designed to be toxic, most were just designed in a way that people are drawn to. But when enough people flock to a place, it becomes toxic eventually. That just happens to coincide with the fact that when someone becomes wealthy from their website taking off, they often become corrupted by the attention and become the big figureheads we hate. They were probably assholes before, but now they’re rich entitled assholes, which is much worse.
In the end the biggest issue with the internet is that too many people becoming easily connected to one another must also include toxic people easily connecting with one another, spreading the toxicity until it’s inescapable in the community. I think we could slowly overcome the issues associated with connectivity on our own in time, and we were for a while, but the internet opened the floodgates and gave us too much connection before we were able to handle it.
My own mom went from a staunch democrat to believing Trump was literally the second coming of Jesus Christ sent to deal with actual honest-to-goodness Lizard People running the government, all because some small community of 100-odd people she found on the internet said so, and that many people can’t be wrong.
OOOhh - which community? Not going after your mom, I just love a good conspiracy community. Most forums seem pretty insular, so it’s always nice to get a lead on a new one.
The one she talked about all the time was called the Minnesota Assembly. I think it’s an offshoot of the whole sovereign citizen thing. I believe they used a telegram group chat as their main way of communicating. She died a little over a year ago, after they convinced her to treat her breast cancer with the herbal teas they sold instead of going to a doctor, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the group anymore.
Oh shit, sorry man. My parents are wrapped up in the same kind of stuff, like drinking bleach as a cure for everything. My apologies to bring that up in that way.