Rant The internet used to be good.

[Dickie]

Sorry, please bear with me. Here goes:

Does anyone else feel the web has gone downhill in the past decade? I don't mean advances in bandwidth or the potential quality of website design available, but I distinctly remember in the late 1990s/early 2000s how the web seemed to be a vast collective of available knowledge and finding your way to what it was you were looking for was reasonably straightforward combined with a number of decent sites offering though provoking and newsworthy articles about whatever your chosen subject was (in my case mainly aviation, space flight and science). Fast forward to now and everything seems purely there to drive advertising revenue, articles seem to be getting shorter, dumbed down and more sensationalist and whereas before you'd find an article on something interesting with links to other related stories at the bottom, all you find at the bottom now is adverts for skinny pills and ridiculous crap "you won't believe!" (Even on the likes of Space.com and Popular Science)

On that note, do those particular adverts drive anybody else up the wall? I mean, I see an ad for a "skinny pill" that "has doctors baffled" and understand that it's clearly b*****ks but the fact that these ads are so prevalent suggests that enough vacuous people (I mean, who wants a skinny pill? You want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more - how difficult is that?!) must click on them for it to be worth it. What kind of morons are out there? Don't get me started on Game of War either, Twitter use to be a great way to follow interesting people/organisations however now every time I open it, it seems like I'm confronted with Kate Bloody Upton advertising some moronic mobile game?!

Alas, I needed to get that off my chest. Anyone got any advice for cutting through the dross online?

/rant

 

[HarvesteR]

I would argue that it's not so much the quality of the internet... it's the quality of the people in it.

We have it good in our little corner here (KSP community included, ofc). It gets much worse further out.

Cheers

 

[fsci123]

Theres more knowledge and good info on the internet than any other time in history... But there is also a whole bunch more crap on the web...probably by several orders of magnitude.

I just find that as long you stay away from cheap layman(TMZ, buzzfeed, etc...) sites, you can avoid the worst of it. The thing that usually gets me is the adverts that spam your computer and open up multiple unclosable pages. Then the game of war ads which appear non stop.

 

[Urwumpe]

I think that the Internet itself has not changed since I joined it in January 1996.

I changed. In the past, a lot of the stupidity and superficialness has never bothered me. Internet is for porn? Hey, thank you for it. Warez? P2P? Napster? We had it all.

I think the internet has become on the good side a lot more professional and accessible. Everybody can not only enter the internet - you can also do it everywhere. Even in space.

On the opposite end, yes, being more accessible also attracts people who are too stupid to breathe. It is not like the idiot quota was ever low. But now, yes, there are more of them. People who know that in the internet, nobody knows that you are a dog, and in that conclusion, spend their life in the Internet to become the person that they would like to be. And commit one or two murders, should ever reality bother to destroy their Internet fantasy.

The Internet has become a much bigger source of information. yes, its sad that many people don't use it that way.

But information is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom.

 

[boogabooga]

Spend more time on Wikipedia.

 

[RisingFury]

Spend more time on Wikipedia.

Yuuuuuup! If nothing else, Wikipedia has links to its sources that you can then browse.

Besides, if you want the 90's you can stay off Twitter, Facebook and news.

 

[Cairan]

Let me put it this way:

We get better stuff than we did in the 1990s / early 2000s. (signal)
Unfortunately, Facebook, Twitter and the likes, now connected with cellphones, increased a lot the userbase of the internet from "knowledgable" people to "the whole society", combined with an increase in irrelevant stuff (noise).

The signal to noise ratio has unfortunately plumetted in the last 5 years...

Yes, I'm looking at you, George Takei. When even him just post 95% of clickbaiting material now, you know the Internet as we knew it is an endangered species.

 

[jedidia]

The Internet started to reflect society. No more, no less. To sum up how the internet changed, here's a short, but very descriptive anectode:

Once there was a woman who told her Son to not sit in front of the computer the whole day, that we don't really need Internet, that relationships over the Net "aren't real", all that stuff. Those were the 90ies.
Today, the same women carries around a Samsung Galaxy, nonstop chats with friends and family, checks her facebook every few hours, watches funny youtube videos with her grandchildren and even installs cute puzzle games for them, and couldn't imagine a life without Skype and What's app. Additionally, she pesters her Son why on earth his skype account is never online, why he stubbornly refuses to install What's App and what good reason he could possibly have for not being on Facebook.
Ok, maybe not so anecdotal, but I think you got it.
And you know what? I think it's utterly, completely awesome! The internet has gone above and beyond any expectations: It has become an integrated part of society as a whole, being part of our culture and driving our culture at a breathtaking pace. Maybe not always in the best direction, but everything has its disadvantages.

I mean, who wants a skinny pill? You want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more - how difficult is that?!

Well... erm... watch at 6:45 if you want the fast tour:

 

[Fabri91]

I agree that its mostly an issue of changing priorities due to aging/maturing and possibly "signal-to-noise ratio" rather than outright quality, and please keep in mind the possibilities that are now available: I mean, a high-definition livestream FROM SPACE?

 

[SolarLiner]

all you find at the bottom now is adverts for skinny pills and ridiculous crap "you won't believe!" (Even on the likes of Space.com and Popular Science)

You Won't Believe How Dickie Reacted After 20 Years On The Internet! Line #6 Changed My Life!
/s

I think Internet is pretty much the TV; the more people gets access to it, the stupider the average user is, and content creators accommodate for that change. Back in the 60s (at least in France) TV programs were made for the intellectuals who were interested in taking part of helping the society with the big problems, but now it's all reality show driven (the best example for this forum: the Mars colonization project that has made it the farthest is one that would be in conjunction with a reality show), and celebrity stuff makes up for 90% of TV content nowadays.
It's not good or bad, it's different than what you were used to. (Okay, I'll be honest, it's pretty bad.)

The Internet is following a similar slope. The more people get access to it, the stupider the average user is, and content creators accomodate.
News articles are becoming shorter and shorter: people have less and less time to "read news" since they have so many things to do, so articles get straight to the point, and it's better for the publishers because they still get the same advertising money even if the length is shorter and shorter.

On that note, do those particular adverts drive anybody else up the wall? I mean, I see an ad for a "skinny pill" that "has doctors baffled" and understand that it's clearly b*****ks but the fact that these ads are so prevalent suggests that enough vacuous people (I mean, who wants a skinny pill? You want to lose weight? Eat less and exercise more - how difficult is that?!) must click on them for it to be worth it. What kind of morons are out there? Don't get me started on Game of War either, Twitter use to be a great way to follow interesting people/organisations however now every time I open it, it seems like I'm confronted with Kate Bloody Upton advertising some moronic mobile game?!

Actual advertisements actually target stupider people, not only because of the average, but also due to the same principle scam emails are really, really badly made up; in doing so you will filter the less likely to go through completely and buy their stuff, so that they don't lose time with people that clicked on the ad, but won't actually buy their stuff. (Microsoft Research's Cormac Herley paper on it)

But, like for TV, you have to look at the upside: You can choose. You can choose to watch a program if you like it, and pass along if you don't; on the Internet, you can also choose the sites you visit. If you don't like the stupidity of the average social network user, then don't go there. (Although there might be an exception where it can still be useful for long lost friends or chatting with family over long distances). And if you don't like the stupidity of the ads that are shown to you, AdBlock is your friend.

Yes, the Internet is becoming quite stupid, yes rumours and false theories can get popular really fast, but think of what you wouldn't have with the Internet.
For me, without the Internet I wouldn't be that much interested in space (I'd still be, but I wouldn't have been as much knowledgeable as I am now), I wouldn't have Orbiter to make interplanetary trips under 2 hours, wouldn't make nor listen to the music I listen. And without the Internet, I wouldn't have become that good in English, I wouldn't be good in maths, physics, and I wouldn't know what job to do later in life (that is, software engineer of course).

Like everything, the Internet has downsides, but you just have to let them aside and enjoy what you like about it.

---------- Post added at 20:28 ---------- Previous post was at 20:20 ----------

Well... erm... watch at 6:45 if you want the fast tour:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Dr. Oz and Nutritional Supplements (HBO) - YouTube

John Oliver on OF, that's something I wasn't quite expecting.

But yeah, he gets it right. Dumb people will follow anything you tell them, as long as you can convince them, using logical fallacies to your advantage.
Take any authoritative image and make him say something utterly stupid, and 99% of the people will believe it, the one percent doing research ... on the internet most of the time.

To connect with my above post, this is something amazing about that: Google anything you might not know, land on a Wikipedia page, browse around for an hour or two, and you ended up learning about 4-5 completely random subjects, after only one query to the Google servers.

 

[n72.75]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

 

[Thunder Chicken]

I agree, the internet signal-to-noise ratio is getting lower and lower by the year. There is a lot of great content for sure, lots of information, but getting to quality content is harder and harder every year. It seems that the best stuff has been out there for a while, but there are lots of people busy putting up pictures of their cat, and companies are working harder and harder to stuff advertising into every corner of the web and popping it up in my face when I absolutely don't want to see it.

So search engines have a harder time finding good content for me (i.e. just because the first letter of my search term was a 'B' does NOT mean I want a million pages about Justin Beiber, believe it or not). And even then I have to hash through pages with maddening amounts of advertising. If I have to work hard to wade through all these pages broken because of all the scripts for advertising (blocked by my Adblock and Ghostery) before I even find the content, well, guess what, I don't want their product. As a matter of fact, I put certain products on do-not-buy lists because their advertising is so egregious.

I find that as time passes my list of favorite links has been shrinking; very little new content has passed my radar and made it to my links. Websites that used to be fairly informative and interesting are now dying, apparently because thinking and pondering important issues and science is no fun and doesn't attract enough advertising revenue.

I'm glad I found Orbiter Forum after the old M6 passed away; this is a good community, and it is funded by the community itself. I am not a regular contributor of funds, but if it is the end of the month and I see that OF needs $10 to get it done, and I am not feeling money-crunched I'm happy to pitch in. I'd rather do that than see OF go to an advertising based model that really won't work with the folks that frequent this site.

 

[sorindafabico]

You can even improve the signal to noise ratio of Facebook if you have patience to carefully select who will appear in your timeline.

 

[fsci123]

You can even improve the signal to noise ratio of Facebook if you have patience to carefully select who will appear in your timeline.

When your trying to unfriend a person and you can't determine if their stupidity is funny or dangerous.

 

[Urwumpe]

When your trying to unfriend a person and you can't determine if their stupidity is funny or dangerous.

No need to unfriend them. Just set the settings properly.

And you don't need to like everything George Takai posts. But some of it is really funny (but 99% clickbaiting for some time now)

 

[Keatah]

The internet, today, feels like a huge clickfest. Even Neil deGrasse Tyson worked up a storm on why Pluto is not a planet, in order to generate clicks and advertising revenue. Even said so himself!

The internet seems to have gained a special power to make even the smallest most trivial things seem all important. Without any selectivity.

Over the years I've become more judicious and returned to the basics of using it as a research & information lookup tool. I don't do social media, I don't pass along links in excess, I tend to visit sites without advertising.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

For me, social media is noise generation mostly.

I was on Facebook for a while and realized that even trying to control the noise was a challenge. The media *wants* noise. It did allow me to get in touch with some former classmates from high school - but then it seemed I was deluged with drunk posts and cat pictures. Some things are better left in the past.

I killed my account a few years ago - the people I want to talk to know to email me. Even my friends that actually put good content up (several friends are artists and travel quite a lot and post beautiful pictures) just send me links to their albums. It's all signal, no noise.

I think the ability of the internet to keep people at a distance connected is a good thing, but the implementation needs a lot of work. I believe the instant message nature of social media is so addictive that it is rewiring our brains to the detriment of our face-to-face social skills. I teach college and it is spooky and somewhat frightening to see thirty or so college kids file into a classroom, all sit down, pull out their phones, and silently text - no one interacting with their classmates at all.

 

[Dickie]

All valid points, I'm by no means a technophobic Luddite by any stretch of the imagination (although I do find myself going back to analogue pen-and-paper for note taking, planning etc more and more). Anyone got any recommendations for reliable and unbiased news sources? I tend to stick with Reuters at the moment but even their articles are more and more full of typos and inconsistencies.

Edit: or decent sci/tech sites for that matter?

 

[Thunder Chicken]

Anyone got any recommendations for reliable and unbiased news sources? I tend to stick with Reuters at the moment but even their articles are more and more full of typos and inconsistencies.

My recommendation is to understand that there is no such thing as an unbiased news source. All get funding from somewhere - know where the money comes from and you'll get indications for potential biases.

Having said this, I like PBS News Hour and NPR news. Usually reliable, cleanly presented, in-depth, and they seem to do a better job with world news than most other U.S. news organizations. They get money not just from viewers/listeners but federal funds and so are not overtly political. But they have their biases still, but they are not nearly as obnoxious as the other major networks.

The best you can do is to confirm facts against various sources, and do not dwell on their analysis.

 

[boogabooga]

I like PBS/NPR and also the BBC.

I hear good things about Al Jazeera English, but I don't follow it myself.