keenmaster486 wrote on 2025-07-14, 01:16:

A lot of these things are low quality / high malice people making things difficult for the rest of us.

We know who they are and even the building they sit in, some look like a normal office building and despite all evidence to the contrary it’s actually a moderately small number of bad actors in a limited set of countries that create most of the bot nets and bs.

Considering what they are doing is akin to very expensive terrorism and it’s mostly in the open it’s surprising we haven’t had an international incident with a few of the large troll farms that sit in the back side of many call centers.

You have a few true hackers that have moral reasons but they are rare,
it’s all become a business like, even military like complex of entities with significant resources and budget.

lolo799 wrote on 2025-07-17, 10:17:

There are more bots than people online...

Bots are registered users?

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-07-17, 15:10:

Im going to be honest here, I was far happier before I had access to all the evil shit occurring around me both locally or internationally, knowing that its occuring doesn't make my day any better and really if it was actually important enough the News would report it, so I was never out of the loop.

Same boat here. Up until recently I was somewhat addicted to news and had several sources that I'd read and cross reference multiple times a day. A certain event about 6 months ago left me really upset and made me realise how bad this influx of bad news was for my mental health, so I went cold turkey and it's been great. Initially it felt strange to be out of the loop but local things that actually impact me still filter through one way or another.

ArbysTPossum wrote on 2025-07-17, 14:59:

Some people are chronically online, others are trying to abandon it entirely.

i think its more - "almost everyone, especailly those who grew up with smartphones, is chronically online and a very small minority are trying to control it or move away" 😀

I'm rambling a bit. But I'd personally like people to go back to smaller, tighter communities while maintaining broad communication and dissemination of information.

this is the world we evolved in, living tribally and occasionally encountering others and learning more. then living in "civilisation" and being concerned with the often low population places you dwelled in and occasionally getting news from afar. then it became more populous, living in big cities and then came postal services and telegraphy, radio and tv and slowly more and more of the rest of the world was known. and now, it seems that every personal tragedy is filmed and spreads through social media, every world event is filtered through varying political interpretations and then suddenly drops out to make rooms for the next event, shorter cycles meaning the actual truths, details and causes are lost - and just the images remain.

badmojo wrote on Yesterday, 01:22:

Trashbytes wrote on 2025-07-17, 15:10:

Im going to be honest here, I was far happier before I had access to all the evil shit occurring around me both locally or internationally, knowing that its occuring doesn't make my day any better and really if it was actually important enough the News would report it, so I was never out of the loop.

Same boat here. Up until recently I was somewhat addicted to news and had several sources that I'd read and cross reference multiple times a day. A certain event about 6 months ago left me really upset and made me realise how bad this influx of bad news was for my mental health, so I went cold turkey and it's been great. Initially it felt strange to be out of the loop but local things that actually impact me still filter through one way or another.

it seems counterintuitive that not knowing something is better, choosing ignorance seems "wrong" but actually its closer to our historical reality and more practically its living within our sphere of influence. It may even be better when we help out in small ways locally and then the next person does the same and so on, it spreads out it can elevate all. We cannot actually do much about the rest of the world as an individual and the way in which events are portrayed through media, whether big news corp or people with smartphones, is always skewed and incomplete. Often the news is just "here is a horrible thing" that you had no realistic influence over and no power to prevent and then, without deep explanation, trying to get cameras in front of crying people (or worse, dying people) and then it moves on.

I don’t mind being informed about international news.
Where I live the news on TV always reported about both national and international events, I grew up with that.
Personally, though, I just miss the time when the internet/web was a place you can goto. Like if taking a vaccation.
You'd come home and sit down in front of your computer and open a magical gate to another world (no Digivice needed though)..
Reading about new, interesting URLs mentioned in comics and magazines was fun. It was like exploring uncharted territory.
There even were printed books about the most interesting web adresses once.
Personally, I remember making notes about URLs on real paper.

PS: What comes to my nind: It wasn't too uncommon among computer enthusiasts of the 70s and 80s
to listen to the correspondence of news agencies on shortwave.
All it needed was an SSB-capable shortwave radio, a communications reveiver.
And an radio teletype. Or a RTTY decoder or RTTY program for computer.
That Bonito cartridge for C64 used to be popular, or so I heard.
Nowadays, there's this RTTY news site: https://rtty.com/itty/index.htm

Edit: Here's my test build, using a vintage RTTY decoder and portable TV from 1970s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROa11T5QRn4
That's roughly the 70s experience.
You may add an FT-101 shortwave radio, which was overly popular among amateurs.