
Society Desperately Needs an Alternative Web - rasengan
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/03/15/society-desperately-needs-an-alternative-web/#5f55a68424e3
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Elrac
The author's expressing a personal opinion, and not supporting it very well.
That this low-value piece complains about disinformation reeks of unintended
irony.

Here's my personal opinion: blaming technology for failures of humanity is
something stupid people do.

Yes, people are angry on the Internet. That's not the Internet's fault, it's
the fault of societies whose top products, recently, are profits and poverty.
When simple people support a guy whose slogan was "Make America Great Again,"
they're acting on a legitimate gripe.

"America great" could mean a lot of things, but I think the simplest rendition
of it could be a society where a single full-time job was enough to support a
family, pay its medical bills and save up for college for the kids. Are people
wrong to be angry that this scenario is increasingly out of reach?

What society desperately needs are smarter people. Or at least better informed
people. Or better educated people who are able to make smarter choices about
their sources of information.

This is a challenge to society, to the education system, and it's one that
desperately needs to be met. Not by partitioning, walling and gating the
Internet, because nothing assures us that the "new net" wouldn't quickly
succumb to the same basic problems. The solution to bad information is not
making less information accessible, but more.

People need to learn to distinguish fake news from the real McCoy; this is
increasingly becoming a survival skill. That being so, pressed by necessity,
people can and will learn. There are growing pains, but the Internet isn't
making the sky fall any more than steam engines did in their day.

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vorpalhex
For anyone jumping in, this is a contributor/opinion article, not forbes
directly.

That being said, this is nonsense alarmism. It's not clear what the authors
intent is aside from getting attention, but "the internet is scary and
sometimes people are mean to children on it" isn't exactly a meaningful pitch.

~~~
tasubotadas
> this is a contributor/opinion article, not forbes directly.

That's a super lame excuse by Forbes. Is it under Forbes domain? Is it
approved by Forbes editorial staff? Yes and yes, thus it's a Forbes piece.

Why I am emphasizing this? Because I am really annoyed by offloading certain
opinions and shaking off the responsibility of the quality of the content
published unto "independent" contributions.

Lots of publishers have taken this route recently such as Guardian, Forbes,
Bloomberg (this one upsets me the most) and others in favour of getting some
cheap pageviews.

Well, if that's the route they are taking, at least they deserve to be named
as crappy content publishers.

~~~
vorpalhex
Forbes is doing in many ways what newspapers like the NY times are doing. When
NY times posts an opinion article, it may well be something they entirely
disagree with - and that's OK. That doesn't mean there are no standards (can't
go against the guidelines for acceptable content ala hate speech) but if it's
clearly marked as an opinion, it's just that.

Opinion pages are by no means new.

~~~
tasubotadas
That's fine. But that content should be counted as theirs. You cannot have it
both ways - pretend that you are quality publisher and then publish crappy
content.

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luckylion
These Forbes contributer articles often read like medium.com pieces and it's
unclear what their relation to Forbes is. This comes from a self-proclaimed
"think tank" that has a website [1] which is strangely vague, has no real
terms, contact, privacy info etc, doesn't say anything about their funding and
is categorized as "Media Production" on linkedin.

What's happening here, is this just self-PR of a few people? Are they selling
links from forbes.com? Are they just hoping to sell membership on their own
site? Are they paying Forbes, or does Forbes consider those valuable
contributions?

[1] [https://cognitiveworld.com/](https://cognitiveworld.com/)

~~~
rasengan
Attacking the messenger doesn’t make the message incorrect.

~~~
luckylion
Sorry, I don't mean to attack anyone, I'm just wondering what's going on with
Forbes.

~~~
rasengan
No need to apologize! Just pointing out that we do need an alternative web!
Your questions are also excellent and pertinent, and it’s always good to
analyze everything in detail to understand purpose and intent.

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laughingbovine
And here I am thinking there would be a discussion on decentralized web
applications in the comments. Nope. Just leave now, it's a wasteland.

