hardnose

"...as long as you agree with us about everything"

Let me make a counter argument - the signal to noise ratio was always awful. Look at UseNet, at Eternal September.

What changed wasn't the signal to noise ratio, but rather how the internet judged reputation of speakers. We went from forcing everyone to analyze the ideas presented, to offering them shortcuts in the form of "curation" or "moderation" that selected for better content.

Then, the gatekeepers of the "curation" and "moderation" systems developed cliques and hugboxes. They built balkanized, loyal audiences in this way. Call this the Fark, SomethingAwful, Bodybuildingforums, etc. era.

The strong balkanized cliques formed by this iteration pivoted their cliques into social media, and content began to be selected for based on who you were - how much money you had, who was on your friends list, what job positions you held. These cliques established fairly stringent, unwritten ideological litmus tests for admittance. And nobody is better at passing ideological litmus tests than motivated power seekers (i.e. activists) in fields like politics, academia, and journalism, who quickly discovered that they could blackmail/extort their way into the gatekeeping positions.

That leads us to today, where myopic moderation by ideological activists is sold to the public as "curation" and your ability to choose which speakers to hear is sold as a negative externality and a threat to public safety.

So what's the path forward? I posit that we could achieve much by actively suppressing these newer forms of gatekeeping, and returning in as much as possible to the original form that allowed internet discussions to thrive - anonymous text coupled with broad based evaluation of ideas, not speakers' allegiances, possessions, and public personas.

Seems like a recipe for elitism. The groups of interesting people would be virtually impossible to get into, and the pleb groups would be boring.

One of the things that worked about internet discussions of the past is that they prioritized quality of ideas, not importance of identity or who you know or any of that. Social media turned that on its head, I think a successful model might involve turning it back. More like UseNet than Facebook.

>we'll have to ask ourselves if giving that much power to the individual a safe endeavor

What's the alternative? Every collective effort is a series of individual efforts.

Do you have any source information for this? As far as I understood, the Wright brothers started out by building hobbyist gliders in consultation with fellow aviation pioneer Octave Chanute.

I checked the Wikipedia entry, but the only reference it maintains for the Smithsonian having helped the Wright brothers is that they apparently gave Wilbur an award in 1910, after having tried unsuccessfully to steal credit from him for building the first heavier than air flyer. Somehow I doubt that's the kind of government contribution to innovation to which the previous poster intended to refer.

Isn't that a bit like saying that every innovation depends upon milk? I guess, technically, every innovation does begin with a baby drinking milk, but it seems like a stretch to attribute the innovation to the milk, rather than to the mind of the individual who may or may not have been fueled by milk?

Every breakthrough starts from government funded initiatives? Wilbur and Orville Wright disagree.

Wow, Musk's getting coverage on HN. Let's check it out...

...oh. OK. Hmmm.

Starting to get a little worried about the neutrality of coverage. It's never good when technical issues and technical projects get polluted with political animosity.

If I was served malware by Facebook, I could definitely contact Facebook for assistance, and even sue them if necessary.

And the point about "URLs I dont know" is exactly my point - the move towards hosting content on websites of dubious operational security is a net negative for internet security. Sites like Facebook may not be perfect, but at least we know who runs them, that they've got skin in the game and incentives to adhere to their stated policies as well as laws and regulations, and where our data is located.

How safe is bladerunner.social? Do we know who runs it, what their privacy policy is, where the data is housed, etc.?

If I clicked that link, and bladerunner.social served me malware, where is the "throat to choke"?

I don't want to be a Stanford art major who describes people they meet in passive-aggressive terms like, "clear skin and dead, vacant eyes".

One of my first real entries into "the industry" was as a beta tester for WC2:ToD on Mac OS. Warms my heart to see its included here. Shout out to all my Burning Blade bros from the ladder days!

It's considered shhhware

Nerfing the world will only nerf it for the powerless. The power elites will always have full power devices, flying cars, all of that.

There is no alternative to freedom.

A combination of beeswax and microcrystalline wax (made from petrolatum) works the best, but beeswax alone will provide fine water repellency, just slightly less durability and ease of application.