The internet could have saved mankind from ignorance...now it's just a cesspool of hatred

originally posted by: MagesticEsoteric
a reply to: mikegrouchy

I had no idea about any of that MySpace/Facebook stuff.

Are there any links still out there u can post?

Interesting question.

I have never searched for a write up or links to the story, before. I was just a witness. If I had to guess I would recommend the phrase "the fall of myspace", and I bet someone has talked about it.

I have similar tales about what I saw with the old website Digg (before Reddit) and how their best were hired away to work for companies doing the very things to the internet they had previously been writing against. How Youtube used to be before Google bought them out, how wikipedia used to have some very useful pages, before the gatekeepers took over. Hell I even remember when AOL unleashed the troll army onto what used to be an academic safe space called "usenet newsgroups". A brief paradise where you could talk directly with authors and leading scientists in their fields. But Al Gore passed a law, and AOL flooded us with the unwashed masses so government could then later sell us protection against the very thing their laws had created. The day the Interstate Commerce clause was grafted whole-cloth on top of the internet so lawyers could get their hooks in, creating a frankenstein in the process.

If I had to sum it all up in three sentences full of angst, criticism, and grouchiness, it would be this. Our internet has been ruled on by fat judges sitting on the bench never having written a single line of code in their lives. Code is law, one can either code something or they cannot. Writing a law to govern code will not make faster code and at best it will make things more bloated.

In other words code is the living manifestation of what law always dreamed to be, and in jealousy it has stolen the labor of thousands of forgotten 90's hackers, sold it to the advertisers, and guilted the public back into believing that authority knows what is false vs true.

ATS is one of the last places where self moderation still reigns.


Mike Grouchy

No worries. NEO will wake us all up soon before the Men In Black mess it up again.

originally posted by: IAMTAT
It's still in it's infancy...and our relationship with it is still evolving.

Yep.

"Progress is not a straight line".

...BHO

a reply to: MagesticEsoteric

The problem with us and I am including myself is we typically are drawn into the conflict side of things, not that it's bad but if that's all we are drawn to then the world seems like that, another thing is anonymity ,90% of folks who act like extreme jerks online wouldn't do so offline.

The net has never been nice. Even with non anonymous accounts, FB, people are still not nice. Not even to mention, it doesn't make it right, especially the trolling that harasses people enough to harm their lives
.
The difference now is most everyone is on it compared to some on it. Seems like you may have been around during the AOL years(not limited to just there as other chat systems were more active as well). The most active, the most angry and absurd were the political chats.

For example, largely pro gun chats were filled with anti gun people and anti gun people who were pretending to be pro gun to make that look bad. Same with other politically charged social issues. You wouldn't to those areas try to chat, debate, or even observe because it was a cesspit of trolling.

Chats, I maybe wrong, appear to be a thing of the past and have moved on from that to social media and message boards. The comments stick around a lot longer, there's a stretch in activity with that compared to chats active time and un active times.

All of the nastiness, hatred, the political circus, what have you carries over because it's easier to do it in the comforts of being behind a screen-whether anonymous or not. Not even to mention sometimes it's hard to convey what you're saying through text as compared to irl, in that way comments may come off as nasty.

a reply to: dreamingawake

I hope Melanie Trump keeps her word and takes on the battle of online bullying. That is a life-long endeavour and if she and her son tackle it, they will gain my respect.

a reply to: InTheLight

True that would be nice. Also, I believe it should be dealt with, without removing freedom of privacy from internet users.

originally posted by: IkNOwSTuff
Im not sure calling someone Ignorant or a cuck is really that bad.
I would argue that its actually quite tame compared to say Aztec human sacrifice or the Inquisition.

I get what your saying, people are unnecessarily nasty, I just reckon weve been considerably more hateful in the past

I'm pretty sure you know what it means right?

The cultural importance of the cuckold in America is rooted in racism: in pornography, the wife of the cuckolded (almost exclusively white) husband is most commonly sleeping with African-American men, meant to provide an additional layer of humiliation if the white husband sees that man as “inferior.” In the world of pornography meant to elicit humiliation as an erotic sentiment, cuckold porn takes advantage of its viewers’ racist perceptions.

After the Civil War, the white supremacist movement radicalized its supporters with the fear of black men raping white women. Even Shakespeare evoked the sexual element of racial angst: in Othello, Iago attempts to pit Desdemona’s father against his Moorish son-in-law by evoking very specific imagery: “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe.”

Source

Sure people want to use it towards Bush, etc., Conservatives and towards Hillary supporters, but it's background is rooted in rascism whether the user of that is using it in context to it or not.

a reply to: MagesticEsoteric

It sure is a pretty hate machine....

a reply to: InTheLight

Or maybe they could all grow some skin.

# those sue happy scumwads.

a reply to: mikegrouchy

Great post

And a perfectly timed reminder.

Thank you

a reply to: mikegrouchy

If I may, sir: arstechnica.com...

We can all thank that guy.

For personal use, I recommend this place and Quora. Two of most civil chat forums around.

For business use, the sky is the limit. When you deal with people online or off on a business level, civility gets things done and the amount of useful information is only limited by your search skills.

As for the trolls........look the other way. If all you do and look for on the internet is civility and knowledge, you'll find it in spades. There is more of that than the other.

a reply to: seeker1963
I agree it's the advent of texting I believe,kids these days can't hold a conversation,they only hold cell phones,the old days of holding your toungue so you don't get assbeat,in texting they don't see the person,so easy to spout off,but ultimately the end result,though not immediate,is the same,false sense of security

a reply to: seeker1963
I agree it's the advent of texting I believe,kids these days can't hold a conversation,they only hold cell phones,the old days of holding your toungue so you don't get assbeat,in texting they don't see the person,so easy to spout off,but ultimately the end result,though not immediate,is the same,false sense of security

the worst thing to have ever happened to internet is 4chan it turned internet once used to store scientific and military information on a hivemind of insane people that use as communication something called "dank memes" whateever that means

a reply to: MagesticEsoteric

It still could save mankind.
It needs to be cleaned up, though, and its users need to be better educated and refuse to accept "alternative facts."

I like you and this thread.

Thank you for it.

The internet is a tool, or a weapon, and the freedom to bare it is a doubled edged sword. Or something smart sounding like that.

It's like the manifestation of an all seeing eye to me.