HN is still too mainstream, but it's going in the right directory with early 00s-looking UI and lack of JS bloat. Imagine something that can only be accessed with a text-mode browser using a protocol completely separate from, and unlike, HTTP, with no official Windows, Android or Mac/iOS build.

The community has to be small enough that it's irrelevant both politically and as an advertising platform.

I'm sure there are weirdos in the web3 spaces, but I feel like they're very outnumbered. Projects like ENS or IPFS are probably much more interesting to weirdos than most "crypto stuff". I2P too, though I don't think this twenty-year-old project should be lumped in with "web3".

I think the Fediverse is a better place to go. Lots of little communities, almost all of run by regular nerds, each one with their own quirks and petty personal drama and constant UI tweaking? It's like forums all over again, except it's now safe to use one password for everything.

Fixed that for you.

If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p.

I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.

There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew.

I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.

I think this is the case and appears in many shapes.

* libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes.

* Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it).

* Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity.

I could go on if i had time.

I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure.

I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.

Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...

My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.

In a git repo.

We can see your crimes now.

Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness

What we do with that is up to us.

There's zero chance that the CTO at a company as big as VW is going to be personally committing to code repos.

We know that VW did not write the code. It was the supplier Bosch that did it. VW simply activated a feature through configuration.

"33. Supervisors B, C, and F, and others, however, realized that VW could not design a diesel engine that would both meet the stricter US NOx emissions standards that would become effective in 2007 and attract sufficient customer demand in the US market. Instead of bringing to market a diesel vehicle that could legitimately meet the new , more restrictive US NOx emissions standards, VW AG employees acting at the direct of Supervisors B, C, and F and others, including Company A employees, designed, created, and implemented a software function to detect, evade, and defeat US emissions standards.

tl;dr : Bosch (company A) along with VW employees created the evasion function at the behest of supervisors.

[0]: https://www.mass.gov/doc/vw-statement-of-factspdf/download

I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech.

Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!