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 2025-07-18, 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.

slop

sloppification

Internet users are also what's wrong with the internet today hence the amount of buzzwords they love to regurgitate from other people thinking that it makes them sound hip n' cool.
Same with "brainrot" and the so-called "enshittification".

enshittification's defined to mean for a service that's moving previously-available features to paygates for capitalist purposes. That's a perfectly cromulent word to describe MobyGames these days. Some sites are even doing enshittification for 2FA.

Slop though should be reserved for effortless excrements from a prompt. Vogons doesn't crack down on slop enough so I have to block users that post it regularly (not naming names).

You can't decide whether something is slop based on how much effort the prompter put in. There's also for example the effort that was made to create the model in the first place and the effort the model extended in reasoning. But you can also look at it the other way, slop knowledge. You skimmed a Wikipedia article or read some forum posts instead of undertaking a proper survey of the literature. This slop knowledge is then transformed into slop opinions etc.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-07-18, 10:34:

I don’t mind being informed about international news. Where I live the news on TV always reported about both national and intern […]
Show full quote

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)..

Internet informed me about some horrible truths. There are no true allies. I don't want to go into this topic here, but let's just say I'd be fine with entire Middle East and US disappearing off the face of the Earth. I don't like the crap country I'm from either (with the fakest name imaginable, I might add), it can also burn to the ground along with its fake constitution.

So, nothing magical about the internet, just the ugly reflection of this shithole and society that will never improve.

leileilol wrote on 2025-08-16, 01:59:

enshittification's defined to mean for a service that's moving previously-available features to paygates for capitalist purposes. That's a perfectly cromulent word to describe MobyGames these days. Some sites are even doing enshittification for 2FA.

I really hate the "MobyPro" nonsense. Paywalling and watermarking a bunch of stuff people submitted over the years is just insulting.

DracoNihil wrote on 2025-08-16, 23:17:

I really hate the "MobyPro" nonsense. Paywalling and watermarking a bunch of stuff people submitted over the years is just insulting.

I noticed that the images I downloaded from that site years ago are larger than the ones available for download today.

I considered subscribing, but they don't accept PayPal, and I learned the hard way many years ago to never give my credit card details to strange websites.

I don't know if this already came up, but here it is:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NyUgv6dpJc

"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"

I assume you were trying to be sarcastic.

But surely the real problem is not governments censoring people and megacorps ruining the Internet, but regular people possibly misusing a word or two!

Of course it's not sarcasm, everything must be harvested, including your prepuce when you were a baby.

As an aside, I learned recently that there are special editions of Microsoft Windows with all the telemetry and advertising disabled out of the box.

Ordinary people can't buy these editions. They're only made available by Microsoft to special people and special organizations.

It reminds me of how members of the Inner Party were allowed to switch off their telescreens.

Errius wrote on 2025-08-17, 09:07:

"If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear"

this is one of several common errors in thinking made by people who support or are not bothered by government and/or corporate surveillance, i see it almost always in commentary to the (occasional) news items regarding surveillance whether by gov or corp

another is an argument along the lines of "as if intelligence agencies are going to be reading my messages!", the mistake of thinking humans will be looking at your individual details

everything is being analysed by systems and categorised - in a similar way to credit scoring.

Even a reasonable system can result in false positives, i.e. labelling you in some way that's inaccurate and then holding that against you - it happens in credit already, and elsewhere. It will happen in any mass surveillance / assessment systems. Even without that you can be categorised according to hierarchies you would find insulting, even horrifying

another mistake people make is a kind of ignorance; "the government wouldn't do that" for moral, constitutional or cost reasons. Well the cost falls all the time and change happens. To assume the "way things are" is the way thing s will be is a dangerous assumption

I assume the surveillance is done by AI now, with humans only notified if some red flag is raised.

Jo22 wrote on 2025-07-14, 02:26:

This also could have a positive aspect, eventually, maybe. It could cause a revival of BBSes, Packet-Radio on CB radio/amateur r […]
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This also could have a positive aspect, eventually, maybe.
It could cause a revival of BBSes, Packet-Radio on CB radio/amateur radio etc.
Or give birth to new messengers only used by real people etc.

This reminds me of the mailboxes nets of the 90s, such as Fidonet, MausNet, Z-Netz (comparable to WWIV network).:
There had been a telephone line-based network that existed in parallel to the internet.

Very good point, there. I am a Communications Unit Leader for Civil Air Patrol operations, and it has gotten to the point where everything down to our radio logs is expected to be kept through our proprietary online portal for real-time updates to the rest of the incident staff. My big problem with that approach is as simple as it gets: the express reason we have a radio infrastructure issued to us in the first place (by the United States Air Force no less) is so we have a working means of coordinating our resources in the event commercial communications infrastructure (meaning phones and internet) is disabled by whatever disaster we get tasked with providing relief from.