Does it, though? I'd actually like to see a thorough study done on this. My hypothesis is different from yours: the proliferation of "specialty sites" is a product and symptom of the walled garden phenomenon, and further serves to sequester and censor undesirable content from the wider audience.
What are you suggesting is better, though? really, that we all just publish one of 10000 articles to dev.to and hope their search and popularity algorithm puts your article in front of peoples' eyes? That everyone should upload video to a single time-ordered feed that you have to scroll through until you find something you like without algorithmic involvement? Im seriously confused, how do you do content selection or personal curation in a world without niches
I seem to recall a survey in South East Asia asking people about their internet use, and there were more Facebook users than internet users...
Ah, here: https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
"11% of Indonesians who said they used Facebook also said they did not use the internet."
I remember a rash of such loaded survey questions going around my country a few years ago, it looked like it was specifically designed to be answered with answers that could be used to slander my nation with "N% of these people think this" results. It's usually not disinterested parties investing the time and resources to run these survey, rather, it's usually people for whom the investment will pay off if they can get the results they want.
That's the magic part: you don't have to be explicit to promote certain thing, you just create the ground tech-knowledge to enable the easy access of such thing, and hand everything else over to natural progression.
The Internet for example, enables everyone to exchange information with everyone else. That's textbook democratic-builtin design. Some undemocratic nations are so fearful such network, they go as far as creating their own little net to protect their pathetic little propaganda, the propaganda that those nations don't even dare to show to the world. And even that, they still have to fight a propaganda war (actual names might be different) in their own little net to keep democratic force in check.
Internet is democratic, there should be no question about that.
The problem about the Internet today, is that most people thinks Amazon+Google+Facebook+Twitter+other big brands is the Internet. They forgot that they can host things themselves without those big tech companies.
With all due respect the problem with the internet is that you (and many others) don't know what the Internet is.
You and many others believe the Internet is what the internet is capable of. It's not. The Internet is exactly what it is to the vast majority of people that use it. And that's Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok...
It doesn't matter that the internet could be what you want it to be, not that it once was. But it's not now, and history isn't on your side - ask usenet or IRC.
So here we are and yet again technologists are shocked or in denial after believing that the existence of a technology would somehow overpower the interests of the powerful and the system they've built - instead of realizing it will be co-opted by them.
The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.
If you are a technologist and failing to rigorously think through the negative cases and faults of your tech, or how your tech can be used against the interests of people or society you are a failure of a technologist. It doesn't matter if you're building an ML model, crypto, or a TikTok app.
As an example, where does crypto end?
1. High efficiency money laundering, permitting sanctions evading (like Russia would love to do right now on a massive scale), and the medium for illegal business like digital extortion / ransomware
2. Just as regulated as the existing banking/credit system, centralized in a few exchanges, failing at any anonymity, no better than existing banking and CCs, while using up massive resources.
Neither is any good and yet tons are in denial that that's where we'll end up.
Technology does not exist independent of society at large as much as we'd like it to.
> The martial arts adage - don't bring a weapon unless you know how to use it / control it. Otherwise it will simply be taken from you and used against you.
To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.
While I do agree a technology should be designed with good intention, I must point out that your opinion is too idealistic.
Most technology that we utilize today were invented not actually by one inventor, rather, they were invented by the iterative advancement of our (as human) knowledge. Further more, technology itself is not static, instead, it iterates too, sometimes by different people in different organization at different place across different time.
Put it under the context of the Internet, an inventor maybe "rigorously think through the negative cases and faults" of their invention, but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.
Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.
Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy, the world will be a far worse place if the Internet don't exist.
> To put it simply, you think: a technology must be tested safe and can only be used for the intended purpose, otherwise it will hurt you back and it's your (a technologist) own fault.
No I don't belive a technology can only be used for it's intented purpose. In fact exactly the opposite - almost every technology will be used for purpose other than what you intented it to be used for. So understand what common, or motivating alternate purposes you are enabling with your tech and make sure you evaluate the consequences of them.
An example (not ideal because it is not how history happened): Inventing/discovering atomic enery also invents the atomic bomb. Don't jump start spreading the atomic energy everywhere touting its benefits unless you understand you'll also be spreading atomic bomb tech everywhere. Don't be surprised later when it happens and say "it's not supposed to be used that way". "They've corrupted the ideals we had of cheap clean energy for everyone".
> but it is almost impossible for them to have complete control over even their own invention, let the lone alterations of it.
Noone has absolutely/complete control over anything. (And a side point, frequently when arguments describe absolutes they are often standing up straw men)
> Often in the end, you can only hope that you've designed something good, and let the progress of things take care the rest.
This I strongly disagree with. You cannot an should not "only hope you've designed something good". You should also have evaluated in designing something good that you're not also designing something bad. That is your responsibility as well.
Don't make an information harvesting platform and then be dismayed when people use it to harvest information you don't think should be harvested. Don't make cell hacking software then be shocked that authoritarian govts use it to hack their citizens' phones. Don't put backdoors in software then be apalled that the "wrong" people use them.
> Let me put my end opinion here: Internet is promoting democracy,...
It is now. And I sincerly hope it continues to do so in the future. History, all of the above and the linked article on TikTok shows that "[letting] the progress of things take care the rest" means that it likely will not continue to do so in the future without diliberate concerted effort to ensure it does. When most of the internet looks and behaves like TikTok.
It's still besides the point, though: Internet is like radio waves; sure you can be prosecuted for using them for activity that's illegal in where you currently are, but it does not constitute a threat to electromagnetism.
Clients host the content they access.
The real IP address of people hosting any particular content is discoverable.
Using IPFS for this use case could make for an easy list of targets.
Truth is that people largely place trust in institutions and people they are used to and identify with, often for irrational reasons. People are prone to FUD. Theyre lazy and passive.
This means that, for example, Rupert Murdoch has a disproportionate level of political influence in the UK because he dominates media through which people watch and read about sports.
And Tiktok is an effective propaganda delivery channel because it already feeds kids videos of dances they like.
Sadly, programming people on a mass scale is just as effective as it ever was because it turned out how trust is acquired mattered way more than mere access to information.
I think to a degree, this is a misunderstanding. The Russian approach to disinformation in particular does not sell the message "trust us!" - at least, not in the West. Instead, they push the message "trust nobody!" In fact, RT's slogan is "question everything". While that sounds enlightened, in fact, total lack of trust makes you cognitively disabled. You can't believe anything or any expert. All too often, you then "do your own research" and, as a gullible amateur, are sucked into conspiracy theories.
The problem isn't the sheeple, it's the wake-up-sheeple people.
Russian FUD propaganda resonates in the west because of the lack of trust in western media. That's them successfully exploiting a hole our media dug for themselves.
The fact that we've responded by banning RT highlights that that hole goes deep enough that we're responding by, as a matter of imminent practicality, violating a core value of our civilization. That both hurts and deepens the hole.
Unfortunately we cant go back in time and reinstate the fairness doctrine and render RT a pathetic waste of time. The cat is out of the bag now we deliberately eroded trust in our own institutions and autocratic regimes have been exploiting it for years.
Speaking of antivaxxers, the same thing happened in reverse. I have friends in Russia who absolutely refused to take sputnik because why the fuck would you inject something into your arm because Putin told you to?
You're arguing that RT exploits a hole the West dug itself into. The comment you're responding to argues the hole is besides the point. The exploit would work with or without it. (The fact that all media is lumped into a single category, a fallacy, seems to prove the point.)
They're making no comment about why RT resonates, just that those people it does resonate with "are the problem".
By media I was referring exclusively to mainstream newspapers/sites, TV, etc. I realize that the way I used the term was slightly ambiguous.
We are the problem. Not the misinformed masses.
Is it really so irrational? How many people have the technical know-how and access to equipment to personally verify that COVID vaccines are safe for human consumption? (Can you even verify that on your short of running mass human trials?) And yet, by and large, most of us are not conspiracy theorists who wonder if the vaccine will secretly kill us or render us infertile.
There are often good reasons to trust the official narrative. There are often good reasons to distrust it too, but placing trust in people and institutions is often not so irrational.
Anyone can publish a paper nowadays, technology has made that very easy. But trust is still something that needs to be earned, and that takes time. It makes sense to have trustworthy institutions, I don’t think it’s something we can easily replace with technology.
Humans will always accept some axiom as truth without really verifying it. It's impossible to do so. Can any single person truly know how everything in their computer works? Or how the machines that made the semiconducter work? Nope. All we can do is try to determine the truth by proxy, which means the truth can and will always be manipulated.
I'd argue it's deeply unhealthy to have any trust at all in governments that have shown themselves to be authoritarian or oppressive.
The question is which institutions and people do we place trust in? When they contradict each other whom do you believe? Should we believe them sometimes but not others?
That's where people get irrational and antivaxxers are just one example of that.
Yes, it's blindingly self evident that you cant run your own vaccine trials.
The internet original was little else than implicit promises of such things, if not explicit. “It routes around censorship” and all that…
The internet is a group of technologies enabling near-realtime dissemination of information. It has no implicit promise of freedom of speech or press, democracy, or any other political ideal. Even the World Wide Web has no such implicit promise.
The great democratizing force to which you refer is the ability to publish content, and to an extent the content itself, and that still exists (modulo nationwide firewalls). Just get off other peoples' servers and start hosting it.