You're a white Bernout!!1

Is that my boy, DBG?!

No woman did anything consequential in the 20th century except Hillary Clinton, and if you don't agree you're sexist and a de facto Trump supporter!

Au contraire... check out Harriet Tubman as an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more.

Jones, did you miss the blatant sarcasm there? Or is it me who's missing something?

Yeah, just having a bit of fun at the expense of le président.

That said, it still blows my mind that the man is still walled up in that embassy across the pond.

I see.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=as+an+example+of+somebody+who%27s+done+an+amazing+job+and+is+getting+recognized+more+and+more.

In the page after this, a young Hillary "does" Benghazi.

The entire Trump presidency is like goofus and gallant, if there was no gallant.

By the way, I saw some fish sticks with the brand name "Ocean Sea". Isn't that just a stupid name?

I miss 2003-2007, you guys.

This makes so much more sense as parody now.

https://twitter.com/ACLUVA/status/901572207079555073

So, I could have sworn I heard a gunshot at one point, I guess I really did. I didn't know this had happened. I was like 50 ft away in the direction the guy shot.

2017:

Oh isn't it just the most shimmering and nostalgia soaked time now?

I dunno.

Is it any coincidence that 2007 is the year that I first heard of Facebook? My feeling is that that website is really what trashed the web and turned the place into a giant cluster****. I mean, I remember a time when there usually were no comment sections for national and world news.

The other night I found myself reading some Usenet posts from 1985 in order to learn about a band. Which is funny to think that the quality of information all the way back then was still better than what a quick Google search will get you now, simply because most people who write content on the web today ("social media", hah!) know jack all about anything. The web has necessarily become a tidalwave of bull****, on purpose, since this is what grows the fastest and makes the most money. But it destroys the signal.

Centralization of the internet in general is cancerous, Facebook being a large part of the general trend.

Capitalism etc

I think the problem could exist without capitalism, although for sure the companies like Facebook would never have blown up large enough to abuse their users like they do.

Without capitalism, I think the web would still only be as good as the large subreddits. Which is to say, pretty noisy. I think the basic problem is that people would rather insert their own ignorance into a discussion, and moreover, that this kind of network activity (call it "social media") scales up much faster than a Usenet discussion between graduate students about stuff they already have knowledge about. There are only so many educated folk out there.

Imagine if people who went to the library didn't read the books, but instead just passed notes to each other, possibly making reference to the unread books. This is basically what social media is. Which is to say, like high school students use the library. So the web is like a giant high school.

Centralization is definitely bad, but, in the "capitalism" vein, I think commercialization is worse. Than again, they do go hand in hand. The centralization of the internet wouldn't happen at the same scale it has without its commercialization happening too.

Part of it must be that for websites like Facebook to develop at scale, they had to jettison any kind of moderation or communal standards, or else they would've turned people away. That's why there's all this nonsense about allowing any kind of abhorrent behaviour, whether sexual harassment or bigotry: it's not that they really care that much about the First Amendment. It's just that those sites simply don't want to fracture their user bases. Facebook and sites like it describe what they've created as a "community", but it isn't anything like a real community. It involves none of the obligations, or any of the demands for conformity, that are usually associated with belonging to a community. Back in its day, websites like this one were so good because there were strict guidelines moderating behaviour, and we kicked out people who were abusive, or, in some cases, we even kicked people out if they were dumb. I suppose there's an element of herd/mob mentality in that, but it still kept the quality of discussion relatively high, or at least it weeded out fools. And if this wasn't the place for those people, there were other places for them.

It was good because it was bad.

****, that is nostalgia, isn't it?

The funny thing is, I believe the original architecture of the ARPANET was rather decentralized, although admittedly in those days a "computer" meant a large room. I think it's through things like workstations that weren't powered on / connected all the time, TimBL's WWW, plus NAT's / firewalls that we got stuck with this centralized server model which requires a server. Only now with things like Bit Torrent and IPFS are things starting to look like they might become decentralized again. Unfortunately, most people who use P2P social networks seem to do so for nefarious purposes.

What's an example of a P2P social network?

GNUnet. I don't think it's a "social network" in the sense of Facebook, but Wikipedia says you can do things like have a friend's list that anonymizes their IP. And now there is Tor and associated onion sites, which of course are supposed to be full of illegal material.

I think the problem is that in large part, decentralized systems like these build encryption into the protocol. In practice this creates a massive performance hit, which incidentally means that only people who really, really want to remain anonymous are going to put up with it.

IPFS, on the other hand, is more like Bitcoin, in its use of a blockchain-type data structure, which is to say, that it is basically the opposite of anonymous, in that it is super persistent / public / distributed.

That all said, I'm not sure there ever will be a "decentralized social network", which is sort of an oxymoron in my opinion. (Maybe Usenet was the closest there ever was to that? But even that grew out of existing Unix installations.) The closest analogy of such a thing would be a flash mob, but otherwise it would be like herding cats, rather than cattle (e.g., Facbeook). I think a crucial aspect of "social media" is that you have a sort of "person rancher", who tries to grow the size of the site at all costs by leveraging human psychology.

What I am waiting for, is for Brian to take the plunge and drastically increase the user base of this here site, and call it "Mass-Ass-I: The #1 site where I Ass myself to the Masses".

It's hard for me to say whether or not this would entail paying people to draw Kermit-the-frog themed furry porn, or just becoming a green colored Facebook. Either way, I think the man is passing up a Massive opportunity to cash in. Take some lessons from George, will `ya!

I was hoping for a site with one big ass with a lot of mass, rather than bringing a multitude of asses to the masses. That'd be a true Massass... i.

My girl's ass has alot of imaginary mass.

I think the important part is that the rest of her isn't imaginary.

But hey, who am I to talk.

Maybe we ought to follow the Lesbian GNU/Linux model, which is the name of a program that was a parody of apt-get ( slogan "apt-get into it" becomes "apt-get off to it"), but also functioned (I am told) as an actual command line porn retreval system.

That's what Massassi ought to be: bringing masses of massive imaginary ass to I.

That all said, I don't want that to turn into a social network. I like you guys but not that much.

I once worked at a company that made a social network of sorts. It was smaller and you probably haven't heard of it, and at any rate they are gone now. But one funny thing that was an inside joke was that we had a feature called the "friend finder". One guy couldn't help but snicker whenever he saw this, and dubbed it the "adult friend finder".

Social media would certainly have happened without capitalism - for example, Mark Zuckerberg originally created Facebook to solve a problem that he personally had, and network effects guarantee that a single service would eventually win. It’s just that without capitalism, that’s where the story ends. Companies like Facebook and Google would look very different (and more ethical) without the relentless drive for horizontal and vertical integration - which would be illegal if the US enforced existing antitrust law, anyway.

It’s not about the users at all, it’s because moderation is labor intensive and Facebook doesn’t want to pay for it. That’s why tech companies worked so hard to get safe harbour laws, and why they’re so reluctant to engage in moderation at all. Facebook doesn’t want to make users/regulators aware that they do have the means to moderate their service, and that when malicious or illegal content stays up it is because they are deliberately ignoring it.

What you see is what you get. ARPANET was decentralized in the sense of routing; initially the vision was to have a communication mesh too dense for an adversary to feasibly disrupt, rather than having single points of failure. Doing this is still theoretically possible. Services, however, were never decentralized. Internet addresses, after all, do not describe services, they describe the physical location of the recipient. And every one of the earliest internet services, while sometimes designed for redundancy, always require you to know the location of some proximate and trustworthy endpoint.

There is one: e-mail. The problem with e-mail is that you can’t discover, follow, and broadcast - and apparently these are important features to some stupid crazies.

That last point is a good one. And mailing lists pretty much fix all of those problems.

In order to find a mailing list, you have to be have the knowledge that doing so would be worthwhile. So the rest of people don't even show up. And actually, the spam problems that killed Usenet off completely (thanks Google) are nicely solved by email spam filtering.

That said, most forums (hello!), mailing lists (and historically) even more so Usenet, have infamously suffered various clowns and crackpots through the years, who either just want to monopolize the list / board with a dumb idea, and make just enough sense to escape moderation.

Of course some newsgroups were (apparently) downright awful / noisy, to the point that it was possible to generate indistinguishable content from a Markov chain.

The really sad thing is that that article's Mark V. Shaney excerpt comes across as highly literate in comparison to what we've come to accept as typical content on Twitter.

I blame SMS for creating a market for Twitter by raising a generation of kids predisposed to sending short, lazy (it's hard to type on a phone, let alone one with only 12 buttons), semi-literate messages.

In fact, I still remember the day I saw my younger teenage peers laying around on the couch in silence as they texted idiotic messages to pass the time. In retrospect my apprehension was right, and I should have seen it as a real harbinger.

Something really ****ty happened to Google a couple years after their IPO. They pretty much abandoned their original mission to "organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful", leaving things like Groups and Books to rot, and outright killed too many other interesting projects to count. And then they just panicked and tried to become another Facebook. It's just sad. Really the only good thing I can say that they do today is email and maps, and the former really isn't that hard (and let's not forget that all the good things about it are old, and the various "features" they've tried to add, like Buzz, were awful).