Comments on 2019-01-26 Why am I telling you this

Another benefit of findability is the opportunity to communicate and, hopefully, collaborate with people you don't already know. Aside from the social benefits of meeting new people, evidence points toward enhanced creativity when working with people you don't know well. This is fascinatingly explored in the Hidden Brain podcast found here: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/24/687707404/creative-differences-the-benefits-of-reaching-out-to-people-unlike-ourselves

Marty. 2019-01-26 22:53 UTC.

Right, I just listened to that again, because I was distracted when it was on this morning. It's sort of like the hack Enjoy Good, Clean Memetic Sex from Mind Performance Hacks. You don't want to exchange ideas exclusively with people you know, lest your memetic offspring be sickly and inbred. You want "new blood"!

Ron Hale-Evans. 2019-01-27 01:51 UTC.

What do you think of the metanet, on Bitcoin SV? I feel like permanent uncensored blockchain storage is a more open open web than hoping that things are echoed by archive.org when they go down. With metanet you pay a few cents once to post something and then it's a safe stable permanent link forever.

mungojelly. 2019-01-27 04:26 UTC.

My brain has needed nutrients from your brain that it doesn't get by itself. I have this old person aversion to newness, and a tendency to burrow into the past, including the futurism of the past. There's a reason that steampunk is so popular and fun, as it feeds this need for a kind of silly speculation and extrapolation that is just.... wrong. Fun. That feeds some deep desire that the real world is never got feed.

The anarchic notion that providers and hosters have no responsibility for the content their applications hold and use, that tool manufacturers bear zero responsibility for what is done with their tools, is one of those absolutes, like freedom of speech that shades into gray in the real world around some weird stuff. (Like, say Child porn, which can be evidence of a crime and criminal exploitation as well as a document) Zuckerberg laughed at the idea that he was in any way responsible for the content on his platform, as he took millions from Russia to hack the election with carefully crafted and tested info-poison.

Of course it's the profit motive that weaponizes the platform, that gives it its weird monopolistic power. You can't be brainwashed by an anarchic raft of largely text based communications. You need videos and branding and the echoes of social media. Great New Yorker piece on how the Non-Story (the hat story) is ginned up by twitter trending which is fed by bots, again, many Russian.

The anarchic web, with fake identities based on email addresses, is an illusion of anarchy where bots and tools and paid agents spew poison into every commons. Yelp? Amazon reviews. Social media. If the content has commercial value, it can be exploited, manipulated, and the amount of signal needed to drown out the noise grows every larger.

Smaller communities resting on meat-world, real-time components or built up slowly over time and jealously gaurded by moderators can be wonderful things. In the same way that grocery stores sell real food on one aisle, and monstrous addictive machine food in the other 20. I have had to train myself not to walk down those asiles to reduce my dementia risk by a factor of three. (turns out gum disease is another factor of three I've been working on for years now). I have to know now that FB is the soda and chips aisle, Twitter is the old school boxed pasta and canned vegetables and nestles quick and drink powders, etc. Your blog a curated experience created by a dedicated and incorruptible lensmen like yourself, is the produce aisle.

But is a different kind of walled garden; you're the wall; you weed the garden. If nazis show up and put up flags for genocide, you take them down. You don't have algos that can't tell the nazis from pussy hats, and giant fields of crops so huge only robots can tend them. You don't worry about the knock on effect of taking down swastikas. You're one of a million points of light. Thus far, the million points of light have never been enough to really drive back the darkness. Or maybe the points of lights are the candles carried that do change everything. Though they are also the torches.

Anonymous. 2019-01-27 14:38 UTC.

And now I have to figure out the UI here because the software isn't showing my name. And like a cranky old person learning new UI bugs me

Jay O'Connell. 2019-01-27 14:40 UTC.

Jay, thank you for your thoughtful response. I certainly enjoy being called a dedicated and incorruptible Lensman. However, I have to disagree that this blog is yet another walled garden. I'm not stopping anyone from posting here. You don't need an account on Overwhelming Gearwheels to post on it. There are no passwords. There's no special client necessary. And so on.

It's true that if someone started posting hate speech (or spam) I'd delete it. But I think this makes me more of a gardener than a wall. In the end, this blog is a "curated experience", as you put it: not a wilderness, but a garden, and definitely not a walled one.

Ron Hale-Evans. 2019-01-28 04:32 UTC.

mungojelly, the press release for metanet, from only a month and a half ago, says that metanet is a for-pay "secure alternative to the Internet". Sounds like a walled garden to me.

Gott's principle indicates that metanet, being brand new, is less likely to stick around than the Internet Archive (functional for decades) or the Internet itself (even longer). I'm just not ready to have faith that this brand-new tech is ready to create a "safe stable permanent link forever" for my data. Talk to me in twenty years. Meanwhile, if you'd like to pay to back this blog up on metanet, be my guest.

Finally, you don't need to "[hope] that things are echoed by archive.org when they go down". You can point archive.org directly at a URL you want to archive with the Save Page Now feature and it will be saved immediately.

Ron Hale-Evans. 2019-01-28 04:51 UTC.

(If the author doesn't want it archived or changes their mind) then content can be retroactively-removed-from/never-archived-by the Internet Archive. Content is most preservable if using open standards (i.e. html+css) and non-walled so making a copy is easy, under a license that allows making/sharing copies (i.e. Creative Commons), and compelling enough that people bother to make/share local copies (especially easy if source code of website hosted somewhere like Github although there are plugins to make local copies of non-walled websites).

TrevorLDavis. 2019-01-28 17:49 UTC.

I don't have special insight into Internet Archive policy, but knowing how they feel about preserving information, I'd be willing to bet they don't actually delete data on request, but instead mark it as unreadable.

Ron Hale-Evans. 2019-01-29 02:15 UTC.