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5 votes
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100 Websites That Shaped the Internet as We Know It
9 votes -
VC folks talk about social media, community, and the failings - includes ex-product head of YouTube
3 votes -
Discord just added a forced-arbitration clause to their Terms of Service (Discord staff response in comments)
39 votes -
Apple CEO Tim Cook is calling for Bloomberg to retract its Chinese spy chip story
13 votes -
Google responds to EU by adding a fee to Play Services
18 votes -
Ubuntu 18.10 released
28 votes -
How Facebook’s Chaotic Push Into Video Cost Hundreds of Journalists Their Jobs
11 votes -
Disrupting cyberwar with open source intelligence
5 votes -
Repair is as important as innovation: Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation—and is harder to measure
11 votes -
The Australian prime minister has forgotten to renew his domain name
10 votes -
How do you view your participation on the Internet?
It’s no secret that the Internet has significantly changed even from just a decade ago. I’ve been thinking about online communities - particularly forums - and I’ve really begun to miss the sense...
It’s no secret that the Internet has significantly changed even from just a decade ago. I’ve been thinking about online communities - particularly forums - and I’ve really begun to miss the sense of discovery when finding a new one while browsing online. It was like lifting a rock and finding an entirely new collective of people writing to one another about anything (complete with graphic signatures). It was an internet subculture in progress. Something something Wild West.
Small forums like that did a number of things that I feel we haven’t been able to replicate. You got to know people over time. It wasn’t a feed you vaguely subscribed to, but a forum (in literal definition of the word) that you chose to participate in.
I often think about what probably defines a typical experience online for people these days and I feel that the smaller and more cozy feeling of actual community has been replaced by the digital equivalent of big box stores. Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, Netflix. Big corporate places with portals and algorithms.
These aren’t necessarily bad things in and of themselves (aside from the chasing of a world in which nothing is left unplanned), but I’m trying to hone in on the idea that the sheer randomness of this medium has more or less vaporized. The concept that anything and everything you do on the Internet wasn’t aggressively being tracked and developed into digital profiles to be traded, used, shared, and sold by ad companies and an array of other organizations was a fart in the wind compared to what it’s like online today. Websites simply didn’t have 5 megabytes+ of Javascript whereas now you need a half a dozen browser extensions to make the internet a halfway decent thing to be on.
My hunch is that once upon a time, people (at least those that even had access to it) had a kind of amateur desire of wanting to create an account at a website (particularly a forum). Coming up on 2019, I think long and hard before creating another account anywhere. There even was an expectation to introduce yourself in some introduction subforum at many of these boards.
A theme that has become completely domineering is the inflated ego linked to tribalism. I see people being so serious about everything; there can be no reciprocal discussion about anything.
I think it’s probably trivial to dismiss this as nostalgia but I feel there are some real truths to this. The Internet is something you had the choice of actually logging off and disconnecting but today, everyone is constantly connected. We are in the age of distraction and preoccupation. Think about it: how many times have you picked up your (smart)phone purely out of reflex, not even to check something with purpose? You see it everywhere in public, certainly. The constant stream of brightly colored iconography, beeps, alerts, buzzing, push/notifications, and beyond are endless. Everything demands your attention, and it is never enough.
53 votes -
Thoughts on private trackers
What are y'all thoughts on private tracker, or p2p in general? How private trackers compete with usenet, scene ftps etc.
27 votes -
Did Uber steal Google’s intellectual property?
7 votes -
Faster check-in as Shanghai airport starts using facial recognition
4 votes -
Twitter makes datasets available containing accounts, tweets, and media from accounts associated with influence campaigns from the IRA and Iran
8 votes -
The internet apologizes …Even those who designed our digital world are aghast at what they created. A breakdown of what went wrong — from the architects who built it.
32 votes -
Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen dies at 65
26 votes -
Facebook says it's immune from Washington State law governing election ad transparency
8 votes -
A genocide incited on Facebook, with posts from Myanmar’s military
8 votes -
Instagram Has a Massive Harassment Problem
24 votes -
'Do Not Track' the Privacy Tool Used by Millions of People, Doesn't Do Anything
20 votes -
One healthy diversity data point: research reports an uptick in women applying for IT jobs
4 votes -
Twilio to Acquire SendGrid, the Leading Email API Platform
8 votes -
Foreign disinformation is killing Americans
9 votes -
Sneaky subscriptions are plaguing the App Store
16 votes -
Bitcoin must die: if Bitcoin were to cease trading tomorrow, 0.5% of the world’s electricity demand would simply disappear
60 votes -
Facebook to ban misinformation on voting in upcoming U.S. elections
10 votes -
The employer surveillance state: The more bosses try to keep track of their workers, the more precious time employees waste trying to evade them
9 votes -
Palm is back (sort of), and it built a tiny smartphone sidekick
9 votes -
Rogers, Fido and Bell call centre workers penalized for reducing plans, offering credits
4 votes -
Pinboard on Twitter: Palmer Luckey has made the maximum legal donation this year to Steve King, the nation's most openly white supremacist congressman.
@pinboard: Palmer Luckey has made the maximum legal donation this year to Steve King, the nation's most openly white supremacist congressman.
25 votes -
PeerTube reaches its first stable 1.0 release
23 votes -
Mastodon's two year anniversary: A retrospective
16 votes -
‘I Fundamentally Believe That My Time at Reddit Made the World a Worse Place’
31 votes -
The rise and demise of RSS
11 votes -
Reddit is changing the r/popular algorithm so that more discussion-focused subreddits and posts gain visibility
56 votes -
Alexa, should we trust you?
10 votes -
Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot Atlas does parkour
18 votes -
Facebook Says Hackers Stole Detailed Personal Data From 14 Million People
10 votes -
Internet hacking is about to get much worse - We can no longer leave online security to the market
22 votes -
Why are African governments criminalising online speech? Because they fear it.
8 votes -
Amazon scraps secret AI recruiting tool that showed bias against women
15 votes -
Now Is the Time to Start Planning for the Post-Android World
22 votes -
Belgium has regional elections on Sunday, voting machines use USB sticks and store votes on a Linux partition which users will be prompted to format when using Windows, deleting all the votes
@rubenvanassche: Belgium has it's regional elections this sunday, the voting machines are using USB sticks and store the votes on a separate Linux partition. But the stick should also be used on windows which wil ask the users to format it and so it will delete all the votes. 😮
32 votes -
Amazon and the bridge too far
5 votes -
Apple's new proprietary software locks kill independent repair on new MacBook Pros
38 votes -
EEVBlog looks at the method used to shred the Banksy Artwork
5 votes -
Microsoft re-releases Windows 10 October 2018 update with explanation of data loss bug
23 votes -
Google's beefing up user data privacy (which includes shutting down Google+)
42 votes