
Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to - doctorshady
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/13/new-government-data-shows-a-staggering-number-of-americans-have-stopped-basic-online-activities/
======
ori_b
I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less
anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online,
but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having
related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them
they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are
something I'd rather not have popping up in my strongly Jewish grandmother's
news feed.

I'd imagine most people have things like this, from innocuous things that
might just get them teased at the office, like an obsessive interest in
historical reenactment, to embarrassing things like health problems, to even
mildly illegal things like enjoying weed.

Paradoxically, at the same time, the internet is getting more private. Because
everything is tied to a real world id, and people don't want to expose
everything about themselves online, things are moving to private forums.
Things like closed facebook groups for friends, instant messaging, etc.
Personal websites that someone put up and made open to the world out of their
own interest are getting harder and harder to find. Blogs seem to have killed
them, and now even the blogs are dying.

And it really is getting harder to be anonymous, as far as I can tell. Most
major email providers _really_ want some sort of information that ties your
identity down, like a phone number. Same with a bunch of larger social
networks. Forums seem to be dying slowly, and even there, often an email tied
to a real phone number is needed.

~~~
sverige
It's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized
WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without
surveillance cameras. Hell, I do that sometimes and I'm not even doing
anything criminal.

~~~
ori_b
That's kind of missing the point. For casual communities, it's easier to just
not post.

I don't _care_ enough about posting that awesome recipe for brussel sprouts
with bacon lardons to go through the effort of setting up a custom domain so I
can sign up for an anonymized facebook account so that I don't have to worry
if it will show up in my family member's news feeds. I barely care enough to
tweak facebook settings to keep it hidden. I also don't necessarily want to
share who I am, where I work, what my other hobbies are, and so on to the
world, which means that in the absence of a good anonymous forum implies that
I'd prefer to keep my posts restricted to a more private audience, so I don't
necessarily feel like posting with my facebook account.

As the weakly anonymous communities are dying or shrinking, the separation of
"who I am" and "what I do" makes it more difficult to share the interesting
things I know publicly without exposing my real world identity.

Since I don't care much, the post doesn't happen, and I move on with my day.
And the internet is a little bit poorer for it. I suspect that lots of little
dyanmics and frictions like this are what's killing the 'old way Americans
used the internet'.

It's theoretically possible to fight this. But for almost all casual content,
the friction is just not worth overcoming.

~~~
Supi-lee
Basically the internet is selecting for the people who are the opposite of
you. Their voices, ideas and influence is being amplified. Unfortunate.

------
Olscore
Was just saying the other day how it sucks seeing the web change. It's like
when musicians complain about the music industry being over produced and too
commercialized. I remember back in the 90's how excited I was just by making
links underline or change color (before CSS.) Thought it was the coolest thing
ever. The web used to be a place to find people who shared the same interests
and I feel that is no longer the case. Everything is hyper focused on metrics;
likes, re-blogs, shares, comments, etc. It's pointless.

~~~
chx
There are still pockets of resistance, specific forums that do not go away.
The traffic have dwindled on some but still, there's enough. Others are
thriving.

~~~
api
Same is true with music. There's a whole world of amazing music out there that
never gets a second of radio play or mainstream exposure. Occasionally it
shows up in movie and TV scores but that's as close as it gets.

Same goes for art, literature, etc. The great and ground breaking stuff is out
there but you have to look for it.

There is and probably always will be a pop "matrix" and a "Zion" known to
those who stray.

~~~
sreenadh
Honestly, even I was just thinking today the amount of garbage that has become
radio today. Everyone just keep playing the same list of crappy songs by few
artist, that I do not even understand why they are famous. Many times, when I
switch the channel to escape a crappy song, the next one is also playing it.
Once the same nikki manaj song was playing in 4 channels, that was scary.

I viewed radio as a medium to find new good songs and listen my favorite ones.

~~~
maccard
> Once the same nikki manaj song was playing in 4 channels, that was scary

I thought this too, until I realised that the 4 channels were actually
broadcasting the same airing, albeit slightly out of sync.

------
jpeg_hero
>Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now
stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social
networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites,
according to a new government survey released Friday.

Ha! I was asked to put in my email address before I could read the article. I
almost didn't read it, but I put in a fake address and they let me through the
gate.

~~~
CaptSpify
usually just turning off JS fixes this

~~~
wallacoloo
[Firefox's] Reader Mode also fixes this, though it does get confused and
includes the "enter your email" text as if that were a part of the article, in
this case.

------
ams6110
They've stopped because websites designed like the washingtonpost.com have
made it insufferably annoying. Most of web used to be actually interesting and
useful, now it's just a constant game to compete for marketing profiles and ad
views.

------
pessimizer
It helps that the web is now terrible. It used to be that when I typed in some
band, movie, show, book, or piece of ephemera into Altavista, 50 sites would
come up with 50 different voices commenting on it from 15 different
directions. Now, 50 sites still come up, but they're all using the exact same
anonymously-written copy.

Sometimes you get lucky and you can use Wikipedia to index into the Wayback
Machine, and see a broken bit of the old web, hopefully with an unbroken link
into another bit.

~~~
csydas
I think it's less that the web is terrible and more that the centralization of
content to a few singular systems has made it very easy for junk content to be
gamed to the top. There still is a grand amount of content out there but it
does take significantly more digging to get to it.

Blogs for example are still striving very strongly, it's just that a lot of
the content that you seem to desire (as I do as well) is buried past the first
four pages of SEO items and various aggregation websites. It's like digging
through strata of earth; for example finding good cooking blogs means you have
dig through layers of Yummly, Cooks.com, Foodnetwork.com, and About.com search
results. Then you have to drill through the various food labels such as
Pillsbury or Kemps. Then you have to go through the chinese cloned sites that
just scrape content and repost it along with thousands of ads. Finally, when
you're down around the 20th results page, actual blogs start to pop up.

And exclusions in searches just aren't good enough. Every time you think
you've excluded out the unwanted aggregate sites and food producer sites, you
have thousands of auto-generated Chinese sites to prune through, or brands
you've never heard of.

There is still great content out there after looking for it - the main methods
of discovering this content has just been gamed and polluted. While Google,
DDG, et. al. have taken steps to ensure that when you search for some content
you get the most desirable result in a special pocket on the page, that's not
the same as discovery.

~~~
pessimizer
One surprisingly simple way to break through all the SEO is through
[https://millionshort.com/](https://millionshort.com/) which simply trashes
the first million (or 100k, 10k, 1k, or 100) results.

~~~
csydas
This is a very nice website. Thank you!

------
nsxwolf
I will sometimes stop myself from googling something I'm curious about. I
imagine a situation where I become falsely accused of a crime and the search
I'm about to make coincidentally incriminates me and is discovered with a
subpoena.

~~~
Godel_unicode
You're being paranoid, that will never happen. Full stop.

I realize this attitude is unpopular around here, and tin-foil hat one-
upsmanship is the name of the game, but seriously. Relax. You're over thinking
it.

~~~
pessimizer
It has happened before, and will happen again. People will be rounded up en
masse from lists generated by state intelligence organizations, interrogated,
shot, and dumped into mass graves. It may not happen in the US any time soon,
but what if you live in Saudi Arabia and the US shares your Google searches
with them? How about Singapore? The West Bank? Indonesia? South Korea?

You offer no argument but your own comfortable middle-class security. Relax,
you can probably get a job writing the software that makes the list. They'll
never use it anyway, and shouldn't we keep an eye on those people?

~~~
Godel_unicode
That's a pretty manipulative pair of false comparisons, don't you think? To
take them in order:

1 - search history of one person has strikingly little to do with mass
"rounding up", that's almost always an ethnic/demographic thing

2 - OP isn't in any of those places. Context is important in these
discussions, there are lots of things which are safe to do in the United
States which are not safe in some of those places; should we stop speaking our
minds as well? That's dangerous in all those places.

------
soared
The article's premise implies that the trend is increasing - more people are
worried about security online. But this isn't justified anywhere; there are no
historical numbers.

I would find it more believable that people do more activities online now that
actually require security, and aren't convinced it exists. This is a totally
different problem than they think they are less secure than they were before.
I doubt people find ecommerce and email less secure now than 10 years ago.

------
Mendenhall
When net started tons of people used to say how dumb of an idea it was to use
credit cards on it and post information about themselves etc.

Was interesting to watch that opinion change and now change back.

~~~
fao_
I think: Those who predicted the danger, safely avoided it and warned people.
Everyone figured these people were just naysayers and went ahead. Now they
have experienced (perhaps second- or third-hand) the danger, they know that
it's there.

The only thing is, it's a little too late now to backtrack entirely.

------
fighting
The internet really should come with a warning, anything you say or do can and
will be tracked and stored and used against you in a court of law (or
guantanamo)

~~~
dredmorbius
This used to be the case, particularly when submitting forms on non-HTTPS
sites. Well, not the court-of-law and Gitmo bits, but that the information
could be intercepted. Old Netscape browsers and such.

Not so much these days.

------
tempodox
The economic consequences of the chilling effect will have to be severe before
they impress either lawmakers or internet companies. For the latter, there is
too much riding on the monetisation strategies. And the race for the smartest
exploitation of personal information is the new Wild West (or Gold Rush, if
you will), only this time not confined by a limited amount of square mileage.

------
stevewilhelm
> 26 percent of internet-using American households [self-reported in US Census
> survey] avoided buying goods or services

The retail giant [Amazon] tallied $23 billion more in U.S. e-commerce sales in
2015 than 2014, the report found. [1]

The difference between reported behavior and actual behavior can be very
large.

[1] [http://s831.us/229QeKz](http://s831.us/229QeKz)

~~~
pessimizer
I've purchased many things from Amazon, and I'm a member of Amazon Prime. I've
purchased more items on Amazon this year than I did last year. I've also
avoided buying goods and services on the internet because of internet
surveillance. You seem to think that's not possible, likely, or common enough
that a quarter of households would report it - because Amazon's sales have
risen.

------
siphonophore
I think the best way to be anonymous is to practice pseudo-anonymity and try
doing sensitive-looking things ad nauseum until you do the actual anonymous
activities for real. Similar to drills, or dry runs. Typically you don't want
to do fully fledged Silk-Road type things if you haven't practiced selling
lemonade out of the boot of your car at the seaside.

What you typically want to do is know your enemy and threat model. For
example, when I got my first Android phone and naively downloaded all the apps
I could find, I was super reckless and done some very sensitive things on the
phone, and only when I plugged it into Wireshark and realized any number of
beacons and analytics scripts running in the background did I stop using it
entirely. I now vet all my apps before using them, and if possible, create my
own ones where I know exactly what each line of code is doing and why.

In terms of threat modelling, I think things like TOR are sufficient enough to
blackout the NSA as long as you're using it correctly and know of all the
attacks (previous and current) which are used against TOR. What always annoys
me is that people don't include the NSA in their threat model and make up
stupid excuses not to use TOR, thereby downgrading the security of others and
making the Internet a breeding ground for more spying.

I know TOR is not a silver bullet though, and there are many strategies to
compliment TOR like compartmentalization. For example, separating work from
play, using disposable email addresses, having no centralized e-mail account
for ever single thing you do (a big problem that still hasn't been solved
yet). And just general OS hardening. Using OSX over Windows, using disposable
VMs (Think Qubes), and paying attention to the last mile of The Internet
usually holds us in pretty good stead. Using crypto for everything, and
locking shit down with 2FA are two other strategies entirely missing from vast
swathes of Netizens too.

------
totony
Why are credit card fraud and identity theft so feared? Most often (always?),
the bank/credit card company assumes the risk. The worst that will happen is
you lose 1h of your time calling them.

My biggest problem with the internet today (like other people in this thread
apparently) is that it's becoming quite hard to stay anonymous and having
things tied to me is a risk I, most often than not, am not willing to take.

------
Yaa101
+- 120.000 people is hardly representative of 320 million people... Is it?

------
aaron695
Bullshit.

People might be saying it, but it's obviously not true.

Commerce is continuing to rise.

Social media is continuing to spread across different mediums.

Old people who were afraid or couldn't use the net are dying and new young
people are coming into the fold.

People are now more aware of privacy and security because they are using all
the things so much.

~~~
drivingmenuts
Thank you. For a minute, I thought I had wandered into an old folks home and
my shins can't take any canings.

What I'm seeing here is a bunch of people afraid and resentful of change: "it
ain't like it used to be". Most of the things y'all are griping about were and
are inevitable because it's not just the nerds anymore.

Why are y'all even in tech?

------
ArkyBeagle
One change is paywalls.

