https://bewilderbeast.org/2019/08/16/most-of-what-you-read-o...
Nobody knew you were a dog on the internet[1] until the rise of Facebook and linking your real identity with an online identity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
People change over time. People change even a little based on who's around them. Even memories change as people see things in new lights.
The Internet of the late 90s and early 2000s was spectacular in that everyone could be as authentic and deep as they wanted to be, and as shallow and invisible as they wanted to be depending on context.
Firefox? Want to know how to really sell yourself. Be 'For the User', like TRON (but avoid that for copyright reasons and because normal people don't understand). The user should be able to TRUST that Firefox isn't selling them out, spying on them, or doing anything strange. That when Firefox creates identity sandboxes they're firewalled from each other to the maximum extent; including resisting device fingerprinting (just look generic and boring).
Don’t get me wrong, I mostly agree with your comment. I think even more dastardly is the tendency for the internet to market new personalities to you, based on what’s profitable
Primarily more educated, more liberal, more wealthy.
Turns out, when you hook the rest of the planet online, you get mass persuasion campaigns, fake genocide "reporting", and enough of an increase in ambient noise that coherent anonymous discourse becomes impossible.
I mean, look at the comments on Fox News or political YouTube videos. That's the real average level of discussion.
Before you start forming your reply, think about the actual culture back then. If you take slashdot as somewhat representative of the 90s internet culture, it was basically anti-corporate, meritocratic, non-judgmental, irreligious, educated, non-discriminatory, and once 2000 came around tended to be highly critical of the Bush agenda.
4chan at that time and places like it represented more of an edgelord culture, where showing vulnerability or sensitivity was shunned, everything revered by the larger populace was ruthlessly mocked, and distrust of society and government in general was taken as natural. Calling them conservative would have been non-sensical.
- anarchist 60s/70s
- libertarian-meritocracy 80s/90s
- capitalist-meritocracy-liberal 00s
- polarized liberal-globalist vs conservative-reactionary 10s
- polarized liberal-individualist vs conservative-statist 20s
BTW, I don't explicitly disagree with what you're saying, but it would be good to look at actual data instead of anecdata to know for sure, and the people who have the data are not telling ...
Correction, I am posting while pooping. I don't care much about social media these days and I draw the line at the toilet door.
Fido and Usenet are still around. Kind-of. IMO google virtually killed that, too, when they started peddling google groups and did the classic embrace-extend-extinguish on the Usenet.
Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.
Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.
I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.
To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal summer, and the gradual decline that came after.
One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed hopelessly non-technical.
Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much, much more about how the internet actually worked than a the average modern user, and were probably more worldly in general than todays average user.... and there are billions more of them now.
We thought that global access to information would democratize everything and expose people to a higher level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally and the world would magically become a better place. We were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream floats.
Plenty of forums still do exist, but I wonder about their future as we age out. Car forums in particular were absolute godsends for amateur mechanics - not just to look up info but to ask a self-selected group of interested folks who were happy to help for free out of a sense of community for fellow fans of their brand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Made_Man_(book)
Still a very valid experiment. I know the source of both sex' strife though: competition. I don't think we'll ever solve that, not while we're still monkeys.
Vincent stated that, after the experiment, she gained more sympathy for the male condition: "Men are suffering. They have different problems than women have, but they don't have it better. They need our sympathy, they need our love, and they need each other more than anything else. They need to be together."
I respect that, compared to the arguments that sex A is having a better time than B, or that one needs more support and focus than the other. We’re all in the same, but different, shit.
How can I agree with this? Material conditions matter: whatever problem you have, being poorer will make it worse. Women have been earning less than men for decades, and most highly paid execs are men, not women. https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/03/01/the-end...
Can you elaborate on other cases where the words “different” and “same” are interchangeable?
All the various shades of red are all red. All news is engagement bate (if it bleeds, it leads), but every piece of news is different. You are in a forest in region X and I am in a desert in region Y, both could be dealing with the same problem of keeping warm at night. It's all different, and yet still the same.
It kind of seems like the sentence I quoted was gibberish that’s short enough to seem vaguely profound. Unless somebody could give other examples of when those words are interchangeable (then obviously dogs is eggs), but as it stands it’s a duck pregnancy is optional type situation
You may be the victim right now, and I may be the perpetrator, but over time you'll sometimes be the perpetrator (what, do you think you're perfect?) and I'll sometimes be the victim (you don't think I suffer?), and over time it all averages out.
But just because you're the victim this time, you're getting all the sympathy. Is that fair?
We are not. This is the law of averages and is absolute poison. Sexism is not symmetrical. Men do not suffer from women like women suffer from men.
Norah Vincent killed herself.
r/kpop has 3 million subscribers. Take a look at the most followed accounts on Instagram. How many of them have female-dominated comment sections?
> I am saying this as a guy we really don't understand the world women live in online or offline.
You're saying this as a guy who doesn't understand the world the general population lives in, outside your highly-educated male-dominated tech bubble. You're considering only the spaces you have been visiting for most of your life.
Which makes me sad.
Apparently Y chromosome + enculturation = prerogative to send unsolicited photos of ones genitalia to random internet strangers.
Women == get too much attention, often of the wrong type. How to get the right kind of attention?
Men == not getting any attention, of any type. How to get some attention?
So women either get ‘the wrong kind’ of attention, but plenty of it - or somehow figure out the magic of getting the right kind of attention? Not easy.
And men work hard to get any attention, often overdoing it on the only way they can figure out - which usually has poor (but not zero!) results. Folks good at playing the game get excellent results, however.
Meanwhile, everyone is getting played by the folks in the middle.
Notably, there are plenty of women taking advantage of the attention they get on Tinder. They just have no problem solving for what it works for, which is getting laid with near zero effort.
The way this previously got figured out was a ‘managed market’ - arranged marriages. Religious/social rules, etc.
In my book, it's reductive to sweep unsolicited sexual harassment under "attention", unwanted or otherwise.
It's not rocket science: everyone deserves to be treated in a way that makes them feel comfortable and safe.
It’s also a crime in some places, not (!!!) in others, or called different things in other places depending on the details.
For example, is sending an unsolicited dick pic on a dating app sexual harassment? Is getting felt up at work, with the implication ‘or else’? Is being stalked by members of the opposite gender? Or having career advancements blocked by a lack of ‘playing the game’?
I can give you concrete examples from a number of cultures that each culture will write off as ‘he/she/they were asking for it’, or ‘she/they/he deserved it’, or ‘it’s just boys/girls being girls/boys.’.
I’ve seen it up close and personal, and have lived it.
The underlying ‘attention economy’ dynamic is still the same.
Edit: meant to add - plenty of 80/20 also applies here of course (though more extreme). Top 1-2% men (esp. from earning or traditional looks perspective) deal with the same issues that top 50%-80% of women deal with, bottom 20% of women (from traditional looks perspective) deal with issues that 80-90% of men deal with, etc.
If it's okay, then it's okay for all sexes. And I'm hard-pressed to name a world culture that's equally accepting and promoting of men-sexually-harassing-women and women-sexually-harassing-men.
Can you?
It feels like you're trying to make this an argument about statistics, when it's an argument about ethics and morality.
Reality doesn’t particularly care about one persons idea of right or wrong.
> "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
> Most of her friends are probably women
-> "Women don't comment on the internet (especially compared to men) because it's a hostile place".
It's no surprise they often use private and/or moderated spaces instead.
Of course men don't know exactly what it's like to be a woman, just like one person does not know exactly what it is like to be any other person. You can still have an understanding and talk meaningfully about things, in many cases.
The internet is not "dangerous for a woman", like you might say it is for a child. It can be much less dangerous because there is a very low risk of unwanted physical contact. I have never in my life "made an account" with identifiable names that are public on the internet. I don't post my sex, address, age, photos, bank account details, or mother's maiden name on internet forums either. So I have had exactly the same experience as a woman who had done the same thing in anonymous forums. I might even be a woman.
An identifiable woman will obviously attract unsolicited disgusting and horrible comments and content of course, not just sexual but threats of violence too probably more than men do. This is not some high mystery or something so complicated that we're befuddled trying to understand it. Offline is a completely different story, but online? I can see messages people I know get.
Online is about the safest a woman (or man) can be, and still talk and interact and collaborate and share with people. And I have been "stalked" (in an online anonymous account way), sent horrible graphic sexual and violent threatening things, for having differences of opinion. It's not nice, but it's not "dangerous" for me. I got ambushed and beat up walking in public one day -- offline -- that was dangerous.
A woman's online safety relative to other spaces also misses the point about their online spaces being less safe than those of men; the suggestion wasn't that online spaces are the absolute most dangerous spaces for them.
That said I would raise the point of how easy it is to dehumanise people online and how easy it is to quickly gather various data like work addresses etc.
The OP was saying that men generally don't have the awareness of how women have it in the online world. The lack of understanding is because of not knowing about it, not because of a lack of capacity or empathy.
In fact the post suggest that doing an experiment to get such awareness would help in getting the understanding.
It was never the point that it's possible to go online without recieving such ubiquitous abuse, which is what you suggest women should do. You have still not acknowledged that such high level of abuse can be dangerous, not merely for the mental health problems but for the real possibility of being stalked in the real world. That way, you're just reinforcing the point you tried to deny, which is that it's hard for men to understand such abuse without having experienced it first hand.
> I have read the full conversation, and you're still failing to recognize how the original post has a valid point. You have admitted yourself that you create online accounts without gender identification, so your own experience is different from women that do create gendered accounts.
The assertion was that women find posting on the internet too dangerous. Not that they find it too dangerous when using gendered names. See, you haven't even followed the first thing!
Nevermind the fact that the entire idiotic assertion is obviously invalidated by all the countless women who do post on the internet, and with gendered names even. For the ones who don't post or don't use gendered names it's not "danger" that drives the choice. Annoyance, disgust, unsolicited attention, whatever it is. No need to make things up, or make stupid claims like "men can't understand", it doesn't help anybody.
Every single assertion made (without evidence) is trivially false.
And finally, disagreeing and debating something is not "reinforcing" the assertions that it's too dangerous for women to post on the internet, that's just stupid. And by continuing to argue with me you're just reinforcing that you're an angry racist misogynist.
See how stupid that is?
Probably true. This is entirely different from the previous assertion you made though.
> And I think your analytical reaction to an emotional problem proves my point I feel.
It doesn't, and you have not addressed anything I said which might make your point.
All I said was I was 20, was red haired, and open minded. Nothing more, and no photo.
Indeed, within a couple of minutes there were guys asking me if I liked to be whipped while handcuffed to a radiator, and offered to send me dick picks if I sent naked photos first. One of them added later "maybe I'm too direct for you, is that why you're silent?"
I didn't respond to any message, but the offers kept coming. It's insane.
Tumblr is still doing pretty well on that front. I'm there for a fandom, and it's a super positive atmosphere where everyone just wants to make and talk about cool art.
like, it's a running on joke on most social media websites that "i hope no one i know irl finds this account..."
i think your friend is just overestimating her knowledge of her friends' lives
Yet she knows you and you and me are strangers talking to each other on this forum. I think we don't know even close friends what online communities people hang out - the reason she didn't know about you being on HN.
Unfortunately, for common people whose aim is not celebrity, this means handing over your privacy in order to have a voice.
We can do this in our IRL circles of trust, people know you because they have met or interacted with you personally.
Online, this means someone like Zuck creating a digital identity for us after we entrust them with our privacy, or some kind of open source complicated technology identifier like a cryptographically verified signature that is techno bro-free that will only be adopted or understood by tech literate.
It's a dark day for genuine human interaction and trust.
Does that really work, though? I think it doesn't -- think all the anti-vaccine type influencers -- their identities are known and they're ok with it.
> It means creating a trusted identity that can be verified, and that the identity is known to be a real human with a reputation to lose if exposed as being a bot or otherwise untrustworthy.
Surely this won't be used for nefarious reasons or to silence individuals like it's done in the UK or in the cancel culture actions. /s
I am sure there are some dead giveaways, but how can you be sure about that?
What I have experienced is both going into forums/discussions someone said was bots talking to bots, with no real clear indication by any of the many markers I am aware of that it was in fact bots; and also comments calling responses bots seemingly as a manipulative dismissal in response to something that was not the consensus or commonly approved position.
I say that because my impression is that what is happening is a full on breakdown of civic discussion and conversation as a whole. The internet destroyed IRL public forums (pubs/bars, clubs, etc) and the draconian COVID policies took the death knell to many more, and now bots and the seemingly bigger issue of immediate distrust of everything, seems to also be destroying online conversations of all sorts.
Yes, you’ll be able to have small group meetings and maybe even voice/video only conversations, but that brings a whole host of other systems changes with it, especially as mass surveillance long surpassed anything the worst tyrants of history could have ever even dreamed of implementing. It all seems a shift into unhealthy territory as a civilization in general, including since essentially all western governments cannot be trusted by their own people anymore.
When you replied to a thread on a phpbb forum (or when you reply to this HN thread), your reply „lived” in that thread, on that forum, and that was that. The algorithm wouldn’t show that reply to your dad.
I remember liking a comment on Facebook years ago, and being horrified when some of my friends and family got a „John liked this comment, join the discussion!” notification served straight onto their timelines, completely out of context. I felt spied on. I thought I was interacting with a funny stranger, but it turned out that that tiny interaction would be recorded and rebroadcast to whomever, without my knowledge.
Similarly, commenting on a youtube video was a much different experience when your youtube account wasn’t linked to all your personal information.
If you comment on a social media post, what’s going to happen? How sure are you that that comment, however innocuous it may seem now, won’t be dredged up 8 years by a prospective employer? Even if not, your like or comment it’s still a valuable data point that you’re giving to Zuckerberg or similar. Every smallest interaction enriches some of the worst people in the industry, if not in the world.
The way I speak, the tone I use, the mannerisms I employ, they all change depending on the room I’m in and on the people I’m speaking to - but on modern social media, you can never be sure who your audience is. It’s safer to stay quiet and passive.
Now the only thing I would ever consider posting on Facebook is "What a beautiful day! Went for a great hike with my family and enjoyed nature."
Of course that didn’t really pan out, and the social network itself collapsed under its own weight within a couple years without ever reaching widespread adoption. It’s interesting though, because I think it really was ahead of its time - these days I just have multiple different groupchats that I text, and that’s basically the same thing.
I miss phpBB/IPB/etc. forums having a pair of resident "trolls" who were by far the most prolific posters on the entire forum, because they would gravitate to each other and "debate" at length, ostensibly but questionably as bitter rivals
Then she said: "I know nobody that comments on online forums. Nobody would ever comment to strangers on the internet. It's too dangerous."
Took me a while to grasp what she meant with that, but I think she's right. Trust has eroded so much over the last two decades that most forums are either full of bots or full of annoyed and toxic people. It's very rare to find welcoming communities to newbies, and most of the ones I have discovered were offline connections.
She also mentioned that all of her friends use private profiles only, because having public profiles is too dangerous because of stalkers.
To me this sounded a bit absurd at first, but maybe that's a different perception on "how to use" the internet from a different younger generation that grew up post-socialmedia? My first contact with the internet was MIT opencourseware, her first contact was receiving dick pics at the age of 10 from assholes on the other side of the planet.
I miss the old phpbb forum days when the most toxic comment was someone being snarky and derailing the discussion into "did you use the search function?"
No idea how to fix the internet, maybe it's time to move to gopher or another protocol :-/