Go on Tik Tok for a while and count how many people complain that “their last video got them banned” (usually this is ethots promoting their only fans).

The alt right, internet strippers, people who like drugs, people who want to talk about stocks, people who want to talk about something their HR dept wouldn’t approve: these people all want free platforms. It’s not just weirdos and trump supporters.

25 years ago there were know-it-alls expressing sentiments like yours.

“The internet is a fad”

It is just nerdy men in their basements.

That's not what they said at all.

Ahem...

https://thenextweb.com/shareables/2010/02/27/newsweek-1995-b...

https://blogs.mprnews.org/newscut/2012/02/the_internet_futur...

And he was right. If you read what what you linked, you'd that everything his said is true when you dig down into it.

> Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment, and anonymous threats.

This is exactly the same issue that we are still debating today. He is exactly right.

> Won’t the Internet be useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for government reports. But when Andy Spano ran for county executive in Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press release and position paper onto a bulletin board. In that affluent county, with plenty of computer companies, how many voters logged in? Fewer than 30. Not a good omen.

He's right again. About the only thing that you can do with the government today is renew your car's registration (if you're lucky). The fundamentals of government haven't changed a bit.

The whole context of his argument is that the internet is not going to replace business as usual. You won't replace a school teacher with a CD rom. Online courses are widely regarded as being much worse than a college education. There is really no surprises in anything he said.

I sincerely thought he would just be someone who wasn't "with it"... but no, he actually has a clear understanding of how the promises that the internet didn't materialize in the 90s, and still haven't today.

...And regardless, if you need to quote literally who to find an example of someone saying the internet is bad? I mean, this is just arguing on the internet for you. Read the headline, not the substance, and dig up random factoids to "gotcha" people instead of really thinking critically about the core problems of the world. And nothing gets solved; no minds are changed.

Pretty sure when krageon said "that's not what they said" they were referring to poster of the original comment that was being replied to - not the know it alls from 90s.

That is exactly right.

Possibly. Context is fuzzy when nesting comments like this.

It was only 2006 when I worked at a company making ASIC-based network security products and had a coworker whose actual description of the threat profile was "kids who live in their parents basements, need to see the sun more"

You vastly underestimate the size of this demographic, which is exactly what the short-sellers of GameStop did.

A few hundred thousands, maybe a few millions at most. A drop in the bucket of internet users

If you look around, tons of communities have been getting banned/quarantined/etc. recently. It began years ago with literal hate groups like FPH or coontown on reddit, pedos on 8chan, later came pickup artists and incels, TheDonald, Chapo Trap House, then Apple, Amazon and Google banning Parler, YouTube and Twitter restricting Trump, and now, finally, even WSB. In isolation, every one of them is a drop in the bucket. But overall it's definitely enough to matter. If this continues, at some point everyone but the most boring will feel the banhammer somewhere. And the most boring aren't the ones producing content (aka generating all of the value).

Except the overlap in many of those communities is HUGE. Each isn't a drop in the bucket, they are often the same drop

Things that were problems have been getting banned. Nothing has changed, except it's a little more extreme right wing platforms now. That always generates a lot of noise, because they are loud people.

> Very few people care about what you are talking about.

No, very few people care about the ethical implications of what OP 's talking about. But it's pretty hard to not start caring when you become a casualty. OP is saying that if there's enough casualties, maybe it will be the catalyst for a movement.

You don't even need a majority to care. You just need enough people who can't use or refuse to use a particular platform to trigger a mass exodus.

I think it's optimistic that we'll see that with many of the huge, well-established platforms like Facebook or Twitter. But this at least presents an opportunity to get some competing platforms off the ground.

He’s saying this will give people a reason to think more about these things.

> and everyone else is rather glad to see these people chased off of platforms

Then they are lacking empathy and being short-sighted. And apparently won't see the problem until it affects them directly.

I think anyone that has spent even a second on YouTube recognizes that this crowd is much large and diverse than this.

>Very few people care about what you are talking about.

The flood of messages i got (XX is on Signal now) from techies and non-techies speak another language.

>tech savvy, young, mostly male, and vaguely misanthropic.

You forgot the word "white" ;)

ISTM you might be revealing more than you intend about the diversity of your social media contacts?

>social media contacts

Ehm no, its the Address-book of my phone. From Dog-sitters to Family and Business.