Sorry for the minor clickbait title

Let's talk about ISPs in USA. In my personal opinion, they do so much "bad" things to their clients, as opposed to, most noticeably, Europe (I guess it's because, (at least in my country, IDK about another European states) much bigger competition, even in village with 500 people, there are about 3-4 ISPs, but there are even more of them in bigger cities). They throttle websites (even before they destroyed Net Neutrality), they track that you use your network too much and throttle you because of it ("they may send you a warning for excessive internet usage and throttle your bandwidth for awhile.").

Now, they track that you download/upload too much and/or pirate movies and can throttle your account, downgrade your account, or completely refuse to provide you any service.

Why? Why are they allowed to do this? Why they can track users and throttle them just because they download too much (I've read article about it, downloading too much, ISPs slowing down internet for few hours, link soon) or they suspect you of pirating. How they dare intercept your packets, read them and throttle you because of this? Why is it wildly accepted as completely normal behaviour?

And I could continue on things like them publicly buying votes to remove Net Neutrality from the way, and so on.

I honestly do not know why so much people are OK with this. Could we start a discussion on this?

Throttling because of piracy sources: 1 2 3 4
Pre-NetNeutrality-End websites throttling: 1 2

I myself is a pinboard user since 2011 and have since bookmarked 4 274 links. But I find it funny that I never visit those URL or page ever again.

When I bookmark something I thought it was useful or important. But often it turns out not the case.

Am I the only one? What do you guys do with thousands of stuff you bookmarked?

We're obviously being denied the benefits of so called advances in algorithmic search, as evidenced by the poor showing of Google Itself in unusual searches. For example, if you search images for "runners wearing green hats -shamrock -st. -patrick" Guess how many runners wearing green hats you get?

So search is hard? I think it's more likely that Google and everyone else is more interested in selling you a hat than helping you find a picture of a runner in a green hat.

I've been noticing a social effect lately and I'm curious about others' takes on this. I'm calling it "specialty fatigue" because I've noticed mostly in specialty communities. I differentiate between this, elitism, FAQ annoyance because there seems to be a more complex cause at work.

To put it in general terms, specialty fatigue is caused by the overexposure to others' work in a given area of expertise. Whereas elitism is more of an ego driven personality traits, and FAQ frustration arises from repeatedly answering the same basic questions, this fatigue seems to be caused by seeing too many things that don't live up to standards (often arbitrary personal standards, but sometimes can be industry standards). In others words, people notice their industry getting flooded with novices getting away with crap they'd never tolerate. It can be disheartening and disillusioning. Most often, it results in the community of specialists becoming overly critical of things that didn't originally bother them. People who were once helpful and encouraging become raging internet monsters.

I see this happen a lot because I'm a bit of a jack of all trades, master of none, and largely autodidactic. I don't have very many strong opinions on how things should be done because I've learned to constantly question the efficacy of norms, and try to establish a system that just works best to achieve the results I care about. Despite that, I'm still interested in finding out how others go about doing things, or even just listen to the sort of stuff they care about. What factors do specialists find worthwhile in determining quality? How feasible is it for me to achieve those results?

Quite often, specialty communities are so corrupted by overexposure that many members of the community start acting as gatekeepers. "If you can't afford decent equipment, don't even bother." And they'll criticize anything that could remotely be interpreted as a newb question or point of view, frequently to the point of acute toxicity where just about any discussion becomes unfeasible.

I'm a propenent of openly sharing knowledge. But the offshoot of increased introductory material is that there will be a corresponding increase in novice level production. I can see why people might be bothered by that (personally, I'm not), but it blows me away that anyone would be surprised by that. That's exactly how it seems sometimes, though. Almost as if people just wanted to show off how much they know without anyone else using that knowledge for anything productive.

This seems like the social deflection point between "old school" methods of passing down specialty knowledge (apprenticing, higher education, family businesses) to "new school" methods (look it up online and just try it out). With the removal of a mentor figure from the equation, there is less of a filter for what's quality and what's crap. Add social media into the equation and there seems like there's a constant influx of garbage into every industry out there. But for specialty communities, it definitely has an "end of the world as we know it" kinda feel because it seems like the entire specialty is getting flooded with subpar work that is a threat to their livelyhoods.

Has anyone else noticed this sort of thing? Do you have a specialty? If so, what trends have you noticed within that field regarding apparent willingness to share information? Have you ever dropped a hobby because people seemed to take it too seriously? How do you personally feel about the balance between open sharing of information vs keeping secrets (for example, a technique a process from which you derive a substantial portion of income)?

Edit: Fixed a typo. Can and can't are a bit different. Oops.