hardnose

"...as long as you agree with us about everything"

Let me make a counter argument - the signal to noise ratio was always awful. Look at UseNet, at Eternal September.

What changed wasn't the signal to noise ratio, but rather how the internet judged reputation of speakers. We went from forcing everyone to analyze the ideas presented, to offering them shortcuts in the form of "curation" or "moderation" that selected for better content.

Then, the gatekeepers of the "curation" and "moderation" systems developed cliques and hugboxes. They built balkanized, loyal audiences in this way. Call this the Fark, SomethingAwful, Bodybuildingforums, etc. era.

The strong balkanized cliques formed by this iteration pivoted their cliques into social media, and content began to be selected for based on who you were - how much money you had, who was on your friends list, what job positions you held. These cliques established fairly stringent, unwritten ideological litmus tests for admittance. And nobody is better at passing ideological litmus tests than motivated power seekers (i.e. activists) in fields like politics, academia, and journalism, who quickly discovered that they could blackmail/extort their way into the gatekeeping positions.

That leads us to today, where myopic moderation by ideological activists is sold to the public as "curation" and your ability to choose which speakers to hear is sold as a negative externality and a threat to public safety.

So what's the path forward? I posit that we could achieve much by actively suppressing these newer forms of gatekeeping, and returning in as much as possible to the original form that allowed internet discussions to thrive - anonymous text coupled with broad based evaluation of ideas, not speakers' allegiances, possessions, and public personas.

Seems like a recipe for elitism. The groups of interesting people would be virtually impossible to get into, and the pleb groups would be boring.

One of the things that worked about internet discussions of the past is that they prioritized quality of ideas, not importance of identity or who you know or any of that. Social media turned that on its head, I think a successful model might involve turning it back. More like UseNet than Facebook.

we'll have to ask ourselves if giving that much power to the individual a safe endeavor

What's the alternative? Every collective effort is a series of individual efforts.

Do you have any source information for this? As far as I understood, the Wright brothers started out by building hobbyist gliders in consultation with fellow aviation pioneer Octave Chanute.

I checked the Wikipedia entry, but the only reference it maintains for the Smithsonian having helped the Wright brothers is that they apparently gave Wilbur an award in 1910, after having tried unsuccessfully to steal credit from him for building the first heavier than air flyer. Somehow I doubt that's the kind of government contribution to innovation to which the previous poster intended to refer.

Isn't that a bit like saying that every innovation depends upon milk? I guess, technically, every innovation does begin with a baby drinking milk, but it seems like a stretch to attribute the innovation to the milk, rather than to the mind of the individual who may or may not have been fueled by milk?

Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.

Wow, Musk's getting coverage on HN. Let's check it out...

...oh. OK. Hmmm.

Starting to get a little worried about the neutrality of coverage. It's never good when technical issues and technical projects get polluted with political animosity.

If I was served malware by Facebook, I could definitely contact Facebook for assistance, and even sue them if necessary.

And the point about "URLs I dont know" is exactly my point - the move towards hosting content on websites of dubious operational security is a net negative for internet security. Sites like Facebook may not be perfect, but at least we know who runs them, that they've got skin in the game and incentives to adhere to their stated policies as well as laws and regulations, and where our data is located.

How safe is bladerunner.social? Do we know who runs it, what their privacy policy is, where the data is housed, etc.?

If I clicked that link, and bladerunner.social served me malware, where is the "throat to choke"?

I don't want to be a Stanford art major who describes people they meet in passive-aggressive terms like, "clear skin and dead, vacant eyes".

One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder days!

It's considered shhhware

Nerfing the world will only nerf it for the powerless. The power elites will always have full power devices, flying cars, all of that.

There is no alternative to freedom.

A combination of beeswax and microcrystalline wax (made from petrolatum) works the best, but beeswax alone will provide fine water repellency, just slightly less durability and ease of application.

"This is a noble pursuit—I wish we would civilize the women in my home country on the subcontinent."

OwO

The missile knows where it is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ

If this is the case, would we expect to see lingering side effects in adults who were afflicted by gut issues like Crohns disease in their youths?

Why would you introduce your children to anything associated with Elon Musk?

He makes good stuff, and doesn't frequently go on weird aimless rants motivated by clearly disguised personal animosity. So there's that.

The goal here of flagging Tesla up front seems entirely obvious, and to be expected of vindictive modern media in a panic over the loss of their monopolistic control over media discourse.

One glance at the edit history on the Project Vertias entry will prove the lie of this theory...

So, no thoughts on how Musk's attitude seems remarkably consistent with the speech and actions of the internet's founding minds, I take it?

I don't know how much you remember about the transition from BBSes to the internet, but the heavy handed moderation of FidoNet is one of the exact reasons we all flooded into UseNet when it started to become available, and most likely a big part of why "FidoNet" is consigned to history's dustbin despite being, at one time, the most popular forum discussion system.

government, FANG, it's all the same

If you believe that, then you also support efforts to force big tech to respect freedom of political speech, yes?

Credit scores are not determined by the government. If a credit ratings agency took that step, it would harm them because Twitter posts are unlikely to represent a meaningful variable when predicting someone's creditworthiness.

Don't confuse that with "social credit" systems, whereby China prevents you from riding trains if you say something naughty.

Developing a technology that can do that doesn't infringe on anyone's liberties.

Failing to develop that technology, leaving it to China or some other authoritarian state to do, would be more likely to harm liberties, wouldn't it?

Seems like you're just "damned if you do, damned if you don't"-ing, no offense.

I feel like this response deliberately avoids the point I was making, in favor of kicking up confusion.

He grew up on the internet. At a time when everyone was turning their internet web pages black to protest censorship. At a time when "the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" was a slogan touted proudly by technologists and philosophers.

It's not Elon Musk that changed, it seems to me. It's the cultural values on the internet that have changed, and arguably not for the better - more control, more censorship, more centralization.

Not just sanitizing, but sanitizing to US social mores.

Not to US social mores, to some weird averaged out amalgamation of Western social mores. In the US, firearms are very normal and a regular part of life, but try doing a YouTube stream or channel about them and you'll quickly find yourself "sanitized" anyway.

I was pretty firmly of the theory that his real motive re Twitter was basically narcissism, and I'm still not sure that's wrong.

Why is it so hard to believe that Musk genuinely believes in exactly the version of "freedom of speech" that everyone in his generation grew up with, that served as the impetus for much of the internet's creation, etc.?

The implication is that Google is gathering personal data to then then sell it to third parties.

No, the implication is that Google collects as much of your personal data as possible, stores it forever, and monetizes it. You can tell because that's what I actually said. What you're responding to is a red herring - you brought up third parties, not me.

If I use the Apple Mail app with default settings from my iCloud account to e-mail ten lawn care services, I won't start seeing web ads for lawn care. If I use Gmail with default settings, I will.

The main thing that Apple does differently is, that they took stronger measures to ensure that the data THEY collect from their users can only be collected by THEM.

No, the main thing that Apple does differently is make their money by selling hardware, software, and services directly to end users. This is in stark contrast to Google, whose typical business model offers free services that make the end users into the saleable product.