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21 votes
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The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in their software collection
20 votes -
Winning back the internet by building our own
11 votes -
The world's first internet bench
5 votes -
UK sees record bandwidth use on Xbox Series X/S launch day
8 votes -
SpaceX Starlink beta users provide first impressions and unboxing pictures
10 votes -
Introducing "How to Fix the Internet," a new podcast mini-series from EFF
7 votes -
Web history - Chapter 5: Publishing
4 votes -
Microsoft Edge Browser on Linux: Surprisingly good
12 votes -
Announcing Good Reports, a new review site with recommendations for "non-toxic" online tools available as alternatives to Big Tech services
18 votes -
SpaceX reveals monthly cost of Starlink internet in its "Better Than Nothing Beta"
14 votes -
Using GPT-3 for search
8 votes -
[SOLVED] US websites no longer work, at all, in EU (?)
So, I had an issue with the radionouspace.net website, referenced here. Since then, I've started hitting the exact same issue on a few other sites ... webpage never resolves, the browser just...
So, I had an issue with the radionouspace.net website, referenced here. Since then, I've started hitting the exact same issue on a few other sites ... webpage never resolves, the browser just spins its wheels until it times out.
I went thru and systematically shut down all of my add-ons, no joy. Tried other browsers, does not work anywhere ... except, oddly, sometimes, in TOR. On a hunch, I fired up my VPN service and tried to connect thru a US-based VPN server ... and there it is.
I have now confirmed, multiple websites (I'm assuming these are all US-based -- have not checked) no longer resolve for me, here in Hungary. Can anyone, anywhere else in the EU, confirm this?
I'm guessing this is the US response to the latest GDPR ruling against data-sharing across the Pond, but I'm on a "news fast" and haven't been keeping up-to-date ... anyone care to fill me in -- the "in a nutshell" version?
Update: Definitely something local-ish, probably specific to my ISP. VPN thru Hungary works, non-VPN thru Hungary does not.
10 votes -
A legislative path to an interoperable internet
9 votes -
Radio Nouspace: Experimental internet radio
7 votes -
Helping people spot the spoofs: A URL experiment
7 votes -
How Reddit's "Am I the Asshole?" subreddit created a medium place on the internet
9 votes -
It's been twenty-four years since internet companies were declared off-the-hook for the behavior of their users. That may change, and soon
20 votes -
Speedrun.com acquired by Elo Entertainment (owner of Dotabuff & co.), founder steps down
13 votes -
2.1 million of the oldest internet posts are now online for anyone to read
14 votes -
A GPT-3 bot was posting on /r/AskReddit for a week and routinely getting upvoted and replied to
43 votes -
Time to decolonise the internet
25 votes -
AT&T shelving DSL may leave hundreds of thousands hanging by a phone line
6 votes -
The end of the American internet - Technology is becoming a regulated industry, and we can no longer assume that companies, products, and users will be primarily from the USA
11 votes -
After vanishing from the internet for seven years, Allie Brosh of Hyperbole and a Half is back with a new book
29 votes -
EARN IT Act introduced in House of Representatives
37 votes -
The Online Content Policy Modernization Act is an unconstitutional mess
7 votes -
Washington emergency responders first to use SpaceX’s Starlink internet in the field
8 votes -
Project Gemini: Stripped back web // souped up Gopher internet protocol
19 votes -
Moxie Marlinspike on decentralization
14 votes -
The flashing warning of QAnon: The embrace of apocalyptic memes is a symptom of hyperconnected societies in distress
9 votes -
President Trump is continuing his war on Section 230 and the right for the open internet to exist
8 votes -
Does anyone here feel like talking about how social media sites are probably used for way too many different purposes at once right now?
In this thread, @viridian said this: Twitter, in my limited usage, has a completely different problem. It actively encourages you, by rule of the 280 character limit, to strip away all nuance and...
In this thread, @viridian said this:
Twitter, in my limited usage, has a completely different problem. It actively encourages you, by rule of the 280 character limit, to strip away all nuance and conversational tone. You can avoid this of course, but the UI ensures that you then suffer the consequences of having to
split up your posts into multiple tweets, which is bad by design in every single way for the user. Replies become distributed to different tweets, and thus inaccessible without a series of 2*(# of tweets) clicks. Everything about the design is just begging you to
box in the entirety of your thoughts to 280 character blocks, which I think is the single largest issue the platform has when it comes to encouraging thoughtful engagement. Twitter actives fights nuance and explanation, and so the platforms users follow the bad behavior
patterns Twitter encourages.
Completely agree, it is a bit of a feedback loop. You do have to say though that even the fact it's no longer at the original 140 characters is a concession to the fact that the kind of discourse that now happens on there rather than what it was intended for. I imagine designing something to handle both types of usage well while maintaining the platform's identity can't be easy.
(Okay, this one was said by @culturedleftfoot.)
It's certainly not an easy problem to solve, it may even be impossible. That said though, maybe a 280 character mass social media platform is just destined to be a net negative for society.
And it reminded me of this comment I wrote a while ago:
To be fair it the term 'social media' is pretty useless when it comes to describing a site's purpose. In twitter, for example, you have celebrities rambling about random aspects of their lives, politicians delivering serious to obviously canned responses to serious or made-up problems, anime artists sharing their work, YouTubers sharing sneak peeks for future videos or shilling out, all in the same platform, which is disponible in 33 languages across every continent except Sub-Saharan Africa. (which was started specifically as a SMS & microblogging site, hence the word limit). Not many 'social media platforms' actually have their intended purpose be their sole purpose, which can backfire intensely. Social media platforms might have decided to recommend people with similar opinions to you as an unintended consequence in order to find people with similar hobbies to you, rather than to create an echo chamber of radicals and stifle communication between different political beliefs.
(Not that the fact that's a real possibility excuses them from not doing anything to combat it once they realized that was one of the side effects of their decision for most or all of my lifetime.)
One of the IMO most underrated problems with the state of social media today is that social media platforms are used in far too many ways for any one site to be designed around.
YouTube for example is used as a meme-consumption feed, source of education, video-game feed, ASMR feed, news feed, music feed, child cartoon feed and more.
And since YouTube was designed mostly for video sharing, things like the comment section were of secondary importance and areas like educational or political content are greatly harmed by that since the YouTube comment section is basically impervious to serious discussion. The algorithm also appears to be basically universal for all these vastly different types of content. This also hurts educational and political channels (unless they somehow accommodate to that, usually by lying ala PragerU) but also animation channels.
Another example would be Facebook which originally (supposedly?) started off as a platform for connecting with people, apparently limited to universities initially. Now it's used for sharing memes, news, personal life updates and more, things which are fundamentally quite different from one another and probably shouldn't be under the same site, since the things important when it comes to spreading a news article are wildly different from those when spreading a meme (format?). (Or management, obviously.)
IMO, decentralizing social media along these lines into say news sharing platforms, meme-sharing platforms, image-sharing platforms, educational platforms, social platforms (where you go to make friends, which is what social media billed itself as early on IIRC) is IMO one of the more interesting but underlooked options and in some senses is looked on into with places like Instagram and pinterest (although obviously if these sites aren't regulated to provide privacy it's all smoke and mirrors and given this requires government action I don't blame people for ignoring this all that much).
So does anyone else have any more thoughts?
23 votes -
Starlink starts to deliver on its satellite internet promise
8 votes -
A crash course in CDA Section 230, and a discussion between two lawyers about the EARN IT Act and what it means for free speech and privacy online
5 votes -
Web history - Chapter 4: Search
4 votes -
Has anyone in an online discussion/argument ever actually changed your opinion about something?
I don't mean an issue where you're maybe ambivalent or undecided beforehand, or if you've willingly made an /r/changemyview type of post. I mean an instance where you already have your own stance...
I don't mean an issue where you're maybe ambivalent or undecided beforehand, or if you've willingly made an /r/changemyview type of post. I mean an instance where you already have your own stance and come face-to-face with an opposite, more convincing and/or more factual viewpoint that compels you to change your perspective.
I'd like to think I'm more open-minded than the norm, and I can't recall it ever happening to me... which is not to say it's definitely never happened, but you'd think it'd have made an impact worth remembering. And frankly, if it actually has never happened, well, what's the freaking point of discussing anything?
19 votes -
How to be helpful online
15 votes -
What the internet could be
18 votes -
Poolside FM: Transport yourself to 1980's Miami
13 votes -
Radio Paradise: Listener supported, commercial free internet radio
9 votes -
Does Google know me better than I know myself?
5 votes -
Online, no one gets to be young
17 votes -
Please read the paper before you comment
25 votes -
Inside the Boogaloo: America’s extremely online extremists
14 votes -
The historical amnesia of culture warriors
7 votes -
How to not make an ass of yourself in online discussions
24 votes -
Belarus is trying to block parts of the internet amid historic protests
9 votes -
QAF: A Chinese fan-forum that's grown into a hub for volunteers subtitling foreign LGBTIQ media and a support community
8 votes -
Beware of Facts Man
11 votes