Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/13/new-government-data-shows-a-staggering-number-of-americans-have-stopped-basic-online-activities/

by doctorshady • 10 years ago

109 67 10 years ago

washingtonpost.com

jpeg_hero• 10 years ago

Nearly one in two Internet users say privacy and security concerns have now stopped them from doing basic things online — such as posting to social networks, expressing opinions in forums or even buying things from websites, according to a new government survey released Friday.

Ha! I was asked to put in my email address before I could read the article. I almost didn't read it, but I put in a fake address and they let me through the gate.

CaptSpify• 10 years ago

usually just turning off JS fixes this

wallacoloo• 10 years ago

[Firefox's] Reader Mode also fixes this, though it does get confused and includes the "enter your email" text as if that were a part of the article, in this case.

xufi• 10 years ago

That's a godsend for Facebook ... I can't stand those live videos on my feed

ams6110• 10 years ago

They've stopped because websites designed like the washingtonpost.com have made it insufferably annoying. Most of web used to be actually interesting and useful, now it's just a constant game to compete for marketing profiles and ad views.

Olscore• 10 years ago

Was just saying the other day how it sucks seeing the web change. It's like when musicians complain about the music industry being over produced and too commercialized. I remember back in the 90's how excited I was just by making links underline or change color (before CSS.) Thought it was the coolest thing ever. The web used to be a place to find people who shared the same interests and I feel that is no longer the case. Everything is hyper focused on metrics; likes, re-blogs, shares, comments, etc. It's pointless.

mike_hock• 10 years ago

I remember making links NOT underline to be the coolest thing ever.

chx2• 10 years ago

There are still pockets of resistance, specific forums that do not go away. The traffic have dwindled on some but still, there's enough. Others are thriving.

electricEmu• 10 years ago

Where would someone find these pockets? I've felt a real lack of pulse since reader went away and the IRC channels I used to frequent sputtered out.

api• 10 years ago

Same is true with music. There's a whole world of amazing music out there that never gets a second of radio play or mainstream exposure. Occasionally it shows up in movie and TV scores but that's as close as it gets.

Same goes for art, literature, etc. The great and ground breaking stuff is out there but you have to look for it.

There is and probably always will be a pop "matrix" and a "Zion" known to those who stray.

PhasmaFelis3• 10 years ago

Niche forums have a been a major holdout for a long while, but even those are fading as profit-focused megaforums like Reddit take over the space and draw off potential new users. There's nothing that the commercial web won't suck dry if it can.

bordercases• 10 years ago

If we know the platforms they're running on then they could be detectable with deep-linked information via some Shodan equivalent, perhaps.

gambler• 10 years ago

Chat rooms, forums, comment sections of smaller, targeted, online magazines. I miss a lot of those. Centralized platforms pretend to replace and "improve" those technologies, but the end results are fake on many levels and ripe with problems that just weren't there before.

Indeed, many forums are still there, and they're living proof that what I feel isn't just nostalgia. For me, they're the only only online places that still feel like... well, places. With certain space and boundaries. With people having conversations. You can get to know people on a forum. Can't imagine that happening on Reddit, especially on more popular subs.

I think that a large part of it is UI. "Social" media has marketing-driven UI, which might look cool, but encourages bad behaviors from users. Just look at YouTube comments. Do you think they would be so horrible if there was more separation between different videos and more effort required to post something?

russell• 10 years ago

The Eternal September all over again. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

fucking_tragedy2• 10 years ago

It never really ended.

meddlepal• 10 years ago

I'm wondering if something like IPFS is where the next layer of fun will really be for developers.

kingkawn• 10 years ago

Money makes things suck.

fighting• 10 years ago

The internet really should come with a warning, anything you say or do can and will be tracked and stored and used against you in a court of law (or guantanamo)

tempodox2• 10 years ago

Not just the internet. Any non-surveillable form of communication is about to be made illegal.

dredmorbius• 10 years ago

This used to be the case, particularly when submitting forms on non-HTTPS sites. Well, not the court-of-law and Gitmo bits, but that the information could be intercepted. Old Netscape browsers and such.

Not so much these days.

Mendenhall• 10 years ago

When net started tons of people used to say how dumb of an idea it was to use credit cards on it and post information about themselves etc.

Was interesting to watch that opinion change and now change back.

fao_• 10 years ago

I think: Those who predicted the danger, safely avoided it and warned people. Everyone figured these people were just naysayers and went ahead. Now they have experienced (perhaps second- or third-hand) the danger, they know that it's there.

The only thing is, it's a little too late now to backtrack entirely.

ArkyBeagle• 10 years ago

One change is paywalls.

soared• 10 years ago

The article's premise implies that the trend is increasing - more people are worried about security online. But this isn't justified anywhere; there are no historical numbers.

I would find it more believable that people do more activities online now that actually require security, and aren't convinced it exists. This is a totally different problem than they think they are less secure than they were before. I doubt people find ecommerce and email less secure now than 10 years ago.

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

It helps that the web is now terrible. It used to be that when I typed in some band, movie, show, book, or piece of ephemera into Altavista, 50 sites would come up with 50 different voices commenting on it from 15 different directions. Now, 50 sites still come up, but they're all using the exact same anonymously-written copy.

Sometimes you get lucky and you can use Wikipedia to index into the Wayback Machine, and see a broken bit of the old web, hopefully with an unbroken link into another bit.

csydas2• 10 years ago

I think it's less that the web is terrible and more that the centralization of content to a few singular systems has made it very easy for junk content to be gamed to the top. There still is a grand amount of content out there but it does take significantly more digging to get to it.

Blogs for example are still striving very strongly, it's just that a lot of the content that you seem to desire (as I do as well) is buried past the first four pages of SEO items and various aggregation websites. It's like digging through strata of earth; for example finding good cooking blogs means you have dig through layers of Yummly, Cooks.com, Foodnetwork.com, and About.com search results. Then you have to drill through the various food labels such as Pillsbury or Kemps. Then you have to go through the chinese cloned sites that just scrape content and repost it along with thousands of ads. Finally, when you're down around the 20th results page, actual blogs start to pop up.

And exclusions in searches just aren't good enough. Every time you think you've excluded out the unwanted aggregate sites and food producer sites, you have thousands of auto-generated Chinese sites to prune through, or brands you've never heard of.

There is still great content out there after looking for it - the main methods of discovering this content has just been gamed and polluted. While Google, DDG, et. al. have taken steps to ensure that when you search for some content you get the most desirable result in a special pocket on the page, that's not the same as discovery.

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

One surprisingly simple way to break through all the SEO is through https://millionshort.com/ which simply trashes the first million (or 100k, 10k, 1k, or 100) results.

tudorw• 10 years ago

I blame Google, their search is so outdated, it's barely functional, why can I not visualise results, sort sites by 'uniqueness', search a domain (sport, education, music), search by feeding it things I like, it's just an ad sales engine, any improvement that would get users to unique and interesting stuff is time they don't spend googling and seeing more ads, ripe for disruption!

tempodox2• 10 years ago

The economic consequences of the chilling effect will have to be severe before they impress either lawmakers or internet companies. For the latter, there is too much riding on the monetisation strategies. And the race for the smartest exploitation of personal information is the new Wild West (or Gold Rush, if you will), only this time not confined by a limited amount of square mileage.

Yaa101• 10 years ago

+- 120.000 people is hardly representative of 320 million people... Is it?

ori_b2• 10 years ago

I think this may be partly because the internet is becoming a lot less anonymous. There are lots of things that I would not mind discussing online, but which I really don't feel like putting into the public eye, or having related back to me. They're pretty bland, honestly, but for many of them they're not things I'd like to discuss. Hell, even recipes for pork are something I'd rather not have popping up in my strongly Jewish grandmother's news feed.

I'd imagine most people have things like this, from innocuous things that might just get them teased at the office, like an obsessive interest in historical reenactment, to embarrassing things like health problems, to even mildly illegal things like enjoying weed.

Paradoxically, at the same time, the internet is getting more private. Because everything is tied to a real world id, and people don't want to expose everything about themselves online, things are moving to private forums. Things like closed facebook groups for friends, instant messaging, etc. Personal websites that someone put up and made open to the world out of their own interest are getting harder and harder to find. Blogs seem to have killed them, and now even the blogs are dying.

And it really is getting harder to be anonymous, as far as I can tell. Most major email providers really want some sort of information that ties your identity down, like a phone number. Same with a bunch of larger social networks. Forums seem to be dying slowly, and even there, often an email tied to a real phone number is needed.

sverige• 10 years ago

It's harder but not impossible. An email can be on a domain with anonymized WHOIS and a burner phone paid for with cash bought at a place without surveillance cameras. Hell, I do that sometimes and I'm not even doing anything criminal.

ori_b2• 10 years ago

That's kind of missing the point. For casual communities, it's easier to just not post.

I don't care enough about posting that awesome recipe for brussel sprouts with bacon lardons to go through the effort of setting up a custom domain so I can sign up for an anonymized facebook account so that I don't have to worry if it will show up in my family member's news feeds. I barely care enough to tweak facebook settings to keep it hidden. I also don't necessarily want to share who I am, where I work, what my other hobbies are, and so on to the world, which means that in the absence of a good anonymous forum implies that I'd prefer to keep my posts restricted to a more private audience, so I don't necessarily feel like posting with my facebook account.

As the weakly anonymous communities are dying or shrinking, the separation of "who I am" and "what I do" makes it more difficult to share the interesting things I know publicly without exposing my real world identity.

Since I don't care much, the post doesn't happen, and I move on with my day. And the internet is a little bit poorer for it. I suspect that lots of little dyanmics and frictions like this are what's killing the 'old way Americans used the internet'.

It's theoretically possible to fight this. But for almost all casual content, the friction is just not worth overcoming.

PhasmaFelis3• 10 years ago

It doesn't need to be impossible for Big Brother to win. It just needs to be hard enough that it's not worthwhile for the vast majority of citizens.

(And both of the things you mentioned are things that would take hours or days to hunt down and figure out for the average internet user. A privacy mechanism that isn't really, really easy to use is--in terms of the global internet and its citizens--worthless.)

nsxwolf• 10 years ago

I will sometimes stop myself from googling something I'm curious about. I imagine a situation where I become falsely accused of a crime and the search I'm about to make coincidentally incriminates me and is discovered with a subpoena.

Gibbon1• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure they have me set to ignore. (Threat Class: Nerd. Threat Level: 1/5. Threat Target: Probable Self)

On the other hand I have a machine for messing around on the internet. And a machine for work. And a machine I do things like banking and taxes on.

executesorder66• 10 years ago

I'm pretty sure being a nerd puts you on a threat level of 5/5.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/nsa-linux-journal-extrem...

Godel_unicode4• 10 years ago

You're being paranoid, that will never happen. Full stop.

I realize this attitude is unpopular around here, and tin-foil hat one-upsmanship is the name of the game, but seriously. Relax. You're over thinking it.

TeMPOraL• 10 years ago

TSA did detain people for their tweets, didn't they?

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

It has happened before, and will happen again. People will be rounded up en masse from lists generated by state intelligence organizations, interrogated, shot, and dumped into mass graves. It may not happen in the US any time soon, but what if you live in Saudi Arabia and the US shares your Google searches with them? How about Singapore? The West Bank? Indonesia? South Korea?

You offer no argument but your own comfortable middle-class security. Relax, you can probably get a job writing the software that makes the list. They'll never use it anyway, and shouldn't we keep an eye on those people?

marssaxman2• 10 years ago

It's already happened. Proof:

http://www.illinoiscourts.gov/opinions/AppellateCourt/2012/1...

But seriously. Stop relaxing so much. The situation has already become worse than you apparently believe possible.

stevewilhelm• 10 years ago

26 percent of internet-using American households [self-reported in US Census survey] avoided buying goods or services

The retail giant [Amazon] tallied $23 billion more in U.S. e-commerce sales in 2015 than 2014, the report found. [1]

The difference between reported behavior and actual behavior can be very large.

[1] http://s831.us/229QeKz

pessimizer4• 10 years ago

I've purchased many things from Amazon, and I'm a member of Amazon Prime. I've purchased more items on Amazon this year than I did last year. I've also avoided buying goods and services on the internet because of internet surveillance. You seem to think that's not possible, likely, or common enough that a quarter of households would report it - because Amazon's sales have risen.

aaron695• 10 years ago

Bullshit.

People might be saying it, but it's obviously not true.

Commerce is continuing to rise.

Social media is continuing to spread across different mediums.

Old people who were afraid or couldn't use the net are dying and new young people are coming into the fold.

People are now more aware of privacy and security because they are using all the things so much.

drivingmenuts• 10 years ago

Thank you. For a minute, I thought I had wandered into an old folks home and my shins can't take any canings.

What I'm seeing here is a bunch of people afraid and resentful of change: "it ain't like it used to be". Most of the things y'all are griping about were and are inevitable because it's not just the nerds anymore.

Why are y'all even in tech?

siphonophore• 10 years ago

I think the best way to be anonymous is to practice pseudo-anonymity and try doing sensitive-looking things ad nauseum until you do the actual anonymous activities for real. Similar to drills, or dry runs. Typically you don't want to do fully fledged Silk-Road type things if you haven't practiced selling lemonade out of the boot of your car at the seaside.

What you typically want to do is know your enemy and threat model. For example, when I got my first Android phone and naively downloaded all the apps I could find, I was super reckless and done some very sensitive things on the phone, and only when I plugged it into Wireshark and realized any number of beacons and analytics scripts running in the background did I stop using it entirely. I now vet all my apps before using them, and if possible, create my own ones where I know exactly what each line of code is doing and why.

In terms of threat modelling, I think things like TOR are sufficient enough to blackout the NSA as long as you're using it correctly and know of all the attacks (previous and current) which are used against TOR. What always annoys me is that people don't include the NSA in their threat model and make up stupid excuses not to use TOR, thereby downgrading the security of others and making the Internet a breeding ground for more spying.

I know TOR is not a silver bullet though, and there are many strategies to compliment TOR like compartmentalization. For example, separating work from play, using disposable email addresses, having no centralized e-mail account for ever single thing you do (a big problem that still hasn't been solved yet). And just general OS hardening. Using OSX over Windows, using disposable VMs (Think Qubes), and paying attention to the last mile of The Internet usually holds us in pretty good stead. Using crypto for everything, and locking shit down with 2FA are two other strategies entirely missing from vast swathes of Netizens too.

totony• 10 years ago

Why are credit card fraud and identity theft so feared? Most often (always?), the bank/credit card company assumes the risk. The worst that will happen is you lose 1h of your time calling them.

My biggest problem with the internet today (like other people in this thread apparently) is that it's becoming quite hard to stay anonymous and having things tied to me is a risk I, most often than not, am not willing to take.

Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to

Related Stories