
Online Communities Are the Best Thing About the Internet - beautifulfreak
https://biznology.com/2018/01/online-communities-best-thing-internet-not-worst/
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Santosh83
In my opinion the best thing about the Internet is it enables everyone to
reach anyone, anywhere and share anything. It's a great levelling force, or it
potentially could be. It's rather worrisome that in recent years the same kind
of top-heavy power structures out in the real world seem to have taken control
on the Internet too. It would be a pity were it to become just a glitzed up
version of our world.

To reach its potential the most important single technology remains
decentralisation. The average netizen should be able to serve and control his
own data, even if he/she didn't create much of it in the first place.

I wouldn't want to live in a world where all real functionality moves to the
Cloud and all our devices just become I/O thin clients. Saying that the
average user won't care is frankly self-fulfilling and defeatist. How would
they care if they are not provided alternatives to centralised services that
are usable and compelling?

~~~
_sdegutis
Per your second paragraph, even in the real world people have little to no
control over what data of theirs is shared between third parties (eg gossip).

~~~
BurritoAlPastor
There's a baseline ability to control how much information third parties have
in the first place - some people keep to themselves, some people tell anybody
everything about themselves. People who care about it can, for the most part,
at least know what other people know about them.

In any case gossip is lossy and low-bandwidth, and people understand those
limitations when operating on information from that channel. The same cannot
be said for, say, comprehensive real-time browser history.

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jancsika
There's a nameclash here: _internet of the 90s_ which the OP pines for, and
the current internet which is weaponized and truly has all the problems the OP
calls exaggerations.

It's fine to pine for the 90s internet when nobody knew about your subculture
much less tried to monetize it through advertising. But to actually get the
spirit of obscure 90s internet on the current weaponized internet is a hard
problem. The danger is that you implement some kind of nostalgic 90s interface
and simply _hope_ that nobody on the internet hates your subculture
sufficiently to destroy it. After all, that's exactly what you did in the 90s
and it seemed to work.

The problem is that now a) a plethora of attackers know exactly how brittle
and easily gamed these services are, and b) all your users know it, too. And
that includes knowledge about how certain types of speech can attract the ire
of people with bot armies, exploits, etc. So your userbase either self-censors
in order to keep under the increasingly automated radar, or it doesn't and
raises the likelihood of attacks.

And that's assuming nobody ddos'd you to oblivion in the first place.

Anyhow, I think it's correct to characterize online communities as dangerous
and unhealthy places, because at present their brittle designs make them
hazardous to use. Until programmers actually solve some of the deep problems
of designing a social networking for use over a weaponized internet (in the
same way that git has largely solved that problem wrt source code management),
I don't see any reason to change that characterization.

People with nowhere else to turn and no money to physically move to a safer
location will certainly still use these messaging services. But the best of a
series of bad options is still a bad option.

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analognoise
I think overall the connectedness is actually a bad thing, because it didn't
come with education in critical thought and temperment. We're losing the
battle of enlightenment to echo chambers of hatred and fear.

~~~
tw1010
Having the option to live in an echo chamber also means we have the option to
pick the wise and rational sources from which to listen to. Whereas before
when TV and the local community supposedly was the source of diversity of
thought, did you also have to put up with a lot of irrational bullshit that is
inherent in socially propagated truth. I'm glad I'm not forced to live in that
world anymore. For people who live in the outskirts, or who don't have access
to a university culture to get their rational (isolated, echo chamber-y)
conversation from, the internet is a godsend. Saying that you wish that echo
chambers wasn't an option anymore also means that you wish people didn't have
the option to experiment with a community whose values don't align with the
norms of their local enviourment.

~~~
weberc2
> Having the option to live in an echo chamber also means we have the option
> to pick the wise and rational sources from which to listen to. Whereas
> before when TV and the local community supposedly was the source of
> diversity of thought, did you also have to put up with a lot of irrational
> bullshit that is inherent in socially propagated truth.

I definitely have to deal with more socially propagated bullshit now than at
any time in my history. Perhaps ironically, much more of it seems to be coming
out of academia and journalism than ever before. For example, I can't think of
a time when fields as patently ludicrous as "critical theory" have been taken
as seriously as now. I can only speculate as to the cause.

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simmons
I wonder if part of the decline of small online communities is the sheer
numbers of people using the Internet today (versus the 90's). I'll sometimes
connect to an IRC channel about a niche programming topic, and see 1000 users.
Likewise, I think it would be hard to make a personal connection to others in
a large community like Hacker News where, outside of a handful of prolific
posters, each discussion may be filled with different usernames than the last.

I guess this is sort of a "small town" vs. "big city" effect. I suppose the
"small towns" of the Internet may still be out there somewhere, but under some
conditions that keep them from growing into "big cities".

~~~
IIAOPSW
Eternal September?

~~~
simmons
I think a big part of Eternal September was a culture mismatch where newcomers
didn't understand the norms and expectations of Internet culture, more than
just the sheer numbers of new users. Now that Internet culture and mainstream
culture have converged, this aspect probably isn't that big of a deal.

~~~
fragmede
> probably isn't that big of a deal.

It's a _huge_ deal, we've just accepted it as normal. If I were to create
something online today, where users were allowed to comment, I'd be an idiot
if I didn't predict it would get abused by spammers and trolls as quick as you
could say "4chan". Anonymity was previously believed to be a barrier to that,
but comments on local news sites and Youtube comments continually prove
otherwise.

While our systems have become more centralized (Twitter/Reddit/Facebook)
compared to connecting to your ISP's Usenet server, there's no real digital-
social-etiquette training system for new users given by those centralized
authorities because we've simply accepted the ramificiations to Eternal
September.

If I try to make a new Reddit account to post a bunch of hate speech, Reddit
itself does little to dissuade me from doing so. There's a huge amount of
effort to dissuade bots from creating accounts, but other than drop a link to
"reddiquette" during account creation, what does Reddit do to teach me social
norms during account creation? Better yet, what could they do _before_ letting
me roam wild, hurtling death threats and hate speech until the post-per-second
rate limiter kicks in?

Laughably little, that's what. Thats Eternal September's penalty.

The idea of giving an hour long lecture, followed by an hour long interview
and training session, for every single person that wants an account on a site
the size of Reddit, before granting them an account, is ludicrous on the face
of it simply due to the sheer number of new users.

Moreover, Internet culture is not a single monolithic thing. /r/AskHistorians
has wildly different standards of acceptability from /r/Nintento,and those are
wildly different from /b/ or Facebook.

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kleiba
I would say the best thing about the internet is that it's not just one thing.
It's multifaceted. It's a lot of things to a lot of people.

For instance, I personally don't do any social networking at all. But I
immensely benefit from sites like wikipedia, or by other contents that I would
have otherwise never read about.

So, I don't think you can say there's one thing that is the best about the
internet. It's so many things. And that's great.

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nayuki
Server seems to be hit with HTTP 503 Service Unavailable. Here's a Google
cache in the meantime:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FkpouJ...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:FkpouJV88UMJ:https://biznology.com/2018/01/online-
communities-best-thing-internet-not-
worst/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca&client=firefox-b)

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Chiba-City
This is true. Ancient USENET was once fantastic before SPAM and trolls
invaded. The stores of free non-fiction books and journal articles in PDF is
also a giant treasure few could have imagined a few decades ago.

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chrisabraham
Wow, thank you! -- the writer, Chris Abraham.

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IntronExon
Access to massive troves of academic writing, research and studies are far
more valuable. Most of an education is available online now, and that’s truly
incredible.

Edit: This is not meant to be a complete list, just one example of something
incredibly valuable which eclipses online communities. IMO obviously.

~~~
jchw
Of course it's subjective. Not all people have as much to gain from this
additional access. There are people close to me that I'm pretty sure would've
hung themselves by now without internet communities.

Though for humanity as a whole, obviously access to information is the biggest
deal. But why stop at education? People today have more awareness than ever
about everything. In some cases, including things that average civilians would
_never_ have gotten to see, like government leaks, or videos of executions.

And neither of those things are always positive obviously. Not all educational
materials are good, not all communities have a positive effect, and sometimes
there's just too much information to find the signal in the noise.

So I think it's fair to argue either really. And, truth be told, it's possible
we couldn't have had one without the other, given how much individual people
have contributed to the internet knowledge stores.

~~~
adamnemecek
> There are people close to me that I'm pretty sure would've hung themselves
> by now without internet communities.

I wonder how this worked in the past. Were people less "weird" that the people
they knew IRL were enough?

~~~
txsh
I remember when people were generally more tolerant of people who were
different. If you were weird you kept the majority of your unpopular beliefs
or behaviorsr to yourself and hung out with people with different interests.

Today, people seem to only want to hang out with people who are like
themselves, who completely accept them. If someone has a different opinion or
a different interest, they’re a predator trying to eat your herd.

