Take me back
Our parents, 10 years ago “Don’t trust anything you read online!”
Parents, today: “I do my own research online!”
Ironically, that mindset predates the internet.
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
- Isaac Asimov
He died in 1992.
One year after the World Wide Web was made public. Coincidence?
We were not prepared, as a species, for a device that let us come up with any opinion at all and find validation for it.
It used to be that when you had an opinion that was wrong, you’d say it out loud a number of times, and you’d notice that everyone around you would call you an imbecile and ridicule you. It would make you reassess yourself and grow as a person.
Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.
That was an integral part of growing up and maturing. We don’t have a solution for it.
Now that societal failsafe is gone. Now people just aren’t challenged for holding the wrong opinion.
I agree with everything you said except for this. Opinions are never wrong since they’re subjective, they’re just fucking stupid.
What if my opinion on peanut butter is that it tastes like apples.
It’s not that they aren’t challenged for any given opinion, If you go into the wrong place you still get lambasted but then you’ll just say "oh that’s because I put an insert group here idea in an insert opposing group forum and thats why I got downvoted. The problem is how easily you can put yourself in a bubble online, compared to real life where unless you work/shop/live in the same community of like-minded people you’ll be forced to eventually come to grips with the fact that you’re one of many POV’s.
It’s hard to tell how popular or unpopular your opinion is in terms of the average person, now. Since it’s all just chatrooms online with vague numbers of subscribers, etc.
That’s why rather than trying to change people’s mind on the internet, I’ve resorted to just ridiculing them instead.
How constructive of you.
hOw cOnSTrUCtIvE oF YoU
You ever try to change a Trumpers mind you fucking rag doll?
Why is your name font awesome?
You too can be awesome! On the website of your instance, you can change your display name. I used a fancy font generator on Google.
This exactly. I think theres a saying that goes “our technology far outstrips our actual intelligence”. Surprisingly smart phones & arguably the internet as well are both technologies that we are unable to manage responsibly as a species. Confirmation bias is one hell of a drug
Back in the 90’s & early 00’s, if you were running around ranting about Jewish space lasers or kids being dissected in the basement of your local Pizza Hut, you’d be shunned, ridiculed and likely catch a visit from your local police department haha
Of course, sometimes those ideas being ridiculed were “I don’t think our king, who claims Primae Noctis and whips anyone who looks at him, was actually chosen by God to rule. Gramp said he remembers when the king murdered the old king and skull-fucked him. Maybe we’re just victims of an inherently violent system?”
I see the Internet getting blamed for this shit and i want to offer a counter-opinion: the tech is different but the problems we have now are the same as we’ve had before: deregulation and corruption.
The Internet is incredible. Even good ol’ r was just as great a tool for learning about other perspectives as it could be an echo chamber. I learned so much about other people just by joining their /r/ and lurking, because I’m the type of person who’s interested in people. The Internet gave me the power to do what i do normally with people but on a larger scale. Perhaps the best critisism of the Internet is also it’s greatest strength, to give more people more range to do what they were doing anyway, for good or ill.
I believe though that when we criticize the Internets current state we are looking at a symptom, not a cause. I believe what we’re looking at is actually the fallout from the media deregulation and consolidation following the telecommunications act of 1996.
Ever since that time the people have increasingly been getting their “news” first in the form of
propagandaopinion pieces, otherwise known as otherwise known as VNRs. These press releases, written by increasingly larger, increasingly right-wing corps are designed to sway public opinion rather than inform, and they are very successful at their craft.The underlying problem in my opinion is that people are exposed to these lies and vitriolic ideas first from these sources. Combine this with a dearth of credible news sources so even one with the critical thinking skills of sherlock would have a hard time finding objective truth?
Well here we are, flailing about in the dark. Some people, when searching for answers, find themselves in echo chambers filled with other people who came to the same conclusion. I don’t blame them. When there is no objective truth, where do you find yours?
Fun fact, the forum post is now 17 years old.
deleted by creator
“What colleges have you applied to?”
Forums are still around. If you really missed them, you can go find them. I don’t think it’s forums you miss.
When you see “Account created: 1997”.
“These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones.”
When you see “Account created: 1997”.
“These are the sacred scrolls of the ancient ones.”
I have boots older than some people that are posting on Lemmy today…
deleted by creator
A random EXE that does exactly as it says? That was rare even during the frontier fort days of the internet.
I look back to how many “fake virus” exes I used to download and wonder how I never actually got one.
I tried sending on a fake virus I coded myself in pascal to a teacher I hated in 2000. I don’t know if she opened it, but she did get demoted from head of science.
Good luck finding a cd-rom drive these days
Wait I have an .exe file to fix that for you right here somewhere!
What’s a CD-Rom drive?
Just mount the iso/dmg file as a virtual drive
I still have my first computer in the attic.
6MHz/12MHz turbo, 40MB internal drive, 5.25’’ floppy drive. Not sure about RAM, I think it had 64KB.
We need turbo buttons and MHz displays back on our computers!
I just replaced my wife’s desktop. Pulled the optical drive out of the 6 year old box I was replacing.
Connected it up and it works seamless. She’ll use it once or twice in the next 5 or 6 years.
That stuff was just built differently
I had to buy an external one recently to get some expensive MRI data off a CD-ROM, as none of my computers or laptops have optical drives these days.
Now I can be introspective by looking inside my head.
Those make terrible cupholders though.
Probably just those with a slot, not a tray.
Had to scroll pretty far to find this comment…
They’re still around! Discourse, phpbb, etc make it super easy to set up and administer. You don’t even need coding knowledge. I’m part of a forum that’s been going since the early oughts myself. Old Ocremix forums diaspora.
Think of it like a bookclub. You’ve just got to find some folks and get cracking
Forums aren’t gone. They just were never really big to begin with. Reddit eclipsed all of them to the point that most forums were irrelevant unless they were highly specific (not like, a gaming or show community) or couldn’t be on reddit (straight piracy with linking, other stuff we won’t talk about)
They’re not even gone, just the communities that want them are fewer and far between.
One thing that happened since I joined the feddieverse is that I’ve spend more time on the underbelly of the internet. Like, the other day I found someones blog. Not their tumblr or anything, their own personal blog.
It looked like shit and was filled with pointless entries but it was the internet in it’s rawest form
Yeah, specific forums for games or apps are still here, they’re just pretty empty unless there’s a big community for them. Some companies intentionally make forums their first and best place to get info, honestly.
We’re on a forum right now!
Without signatures or badges or big enough avatars or different sections for posting specific things or threads coming to top whenever someone posts in them or people who’ve know each other for years via username…
But sure, we’re on a forum.
It’s not a contest
threads coming to top whenever someone posts in them
Sorting by new comments kind of emulates this.
While I do like the relative anonimity we have around here compared to more traditional forums I surely wouldn’t complain if we had user flairs in specific communities like Reddit has.
Technically, yes!
I like how you would download a totally random executable and run it. Not suspicious at all!
Oh we still do, we still do.
Only time I ever got a virus that crashed my PC was from an old-school forum that apparently was hacked to include a drive-by download of some type that infected my PC just from loading the webpage. The shit wouldn’t even boot and I didn’t try to recover it, because I had just imaged the hard drive a week before luckily.
should be easy to write like a forum skin UI for lemmy, no?
(thinking like old.lemmy.world or a.lemmy.world but made to look like a forum)
technically yes, copied interface the like of vbulletin, xenforo, phpbb and such
by someone that much more proficient in creating them, of course
They have one, though it’s still incomplete and experimental.
Lmao this is great
25 years ago. I remember.
I am still active in several forums. They are great and have even more of a sense of community them they used to. People talk about the subject and even meet in person around the world.
I also host a forum for a different group. No ads either cause fuck that shit.
My wife called them invisible friends, even after we all met lol
I used to run a forum for my friends. On my own hardware for a while too. I too miss forums. I may look into doing it all over again, just cuz!
I used to wonder why my mom mistrusted online banking so much but looking back at the free programs I downloaded plus limewire it makes sense
