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Tim Berners-Lee: Stop Foaming At the Mouth, Twitter
nk497 writes "Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, has challenged users to improve social networks. He describes Twitter users as 'foaming at the mouth' and unwilling to retweet any update that wasn't offering an extreme opinion. 'How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?' he asked. He noted that Facebook-style networks kept users within their existing friend groups, and didn't 'stretch' them to meet new people. Berners-Lee asked how can we 'make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.' Any ideas?"
" so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate"
In what....180 characters or something like that?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I am officially out of touch because "How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?" made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever. Time to set up the rocking chair on the front porch I guess. Anyone got recommendations for a nice cane I can wave at the kids on my lawn?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
In my opinion, Facebook lost a lot of appeal when it opted to become network-transparent as opposed to a way to meet people who shared similar interests at your university / hometown. The selling point of Facebook over say, Myspace, was that Facebook was geared towards meeting new people at your school (and later in your city) who had similar interests. I met some of my best friends from the university through finding people with shared interests on Facebook six years ago. With my natural introversion, who knows if we would have ever met otherwise. That has been lost as Facebook expanded...now you will find people with similar interests ALL OVER THE WORLD and since there's virtually no chance that you'll ever meet any of these people, there's no reason to reach out to them. Thus it has become a tool for connecting to your own already existing friends-network as opposed to expanding it.
Even the movie pointed it out: the selling point over Friendster/Myspace was that it was based around your local network. That was thrown out the door a long time ago.
The World is Yours.
Isn't nearly as easy to do as it is to say. The human race has sought out barriers to erect for as long as humans have been around. Even when people can't see one another physically, they will still seek out people with similar ideas and personality characteristics. You can force them into a large group of vary dissimilar people and in the end you'll find that group will still tend to segregate on some metric you didn't consider before.
I'm not endorsing that kind of action, but it is how we behave as a species.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Twitter is exactly what you make of it, for those who choose to follow you.
It is exactly not a means for you to procure a distribution network for your opinions, with followers acting as distribution nodes at your behest.
It isn't commanded, it is purely social. Those who wish to retweet your words will do so.
And there are no barriers that you do not introduce yourself. If someone you want to follow is there, you can follow them, even @-reply to them and, if the probabilities and their opinion are willing, get a reply or a retweet from them. (All the better if you aren't begging openly to be retweeted.)
Strong opinions affect a larger number of people. Weak or obvious ones don't induce the need to act. Sounds perfectly social to me.
In other words, if you want the news media, you know where to find it, and how it works.
Don't like it? Don't read it. No one is forcing little Timmy to read it. I've never had a twitter account or Facebook account and don't intend to. Of course, we could just "pass legislation" so that people can't say things we don't like. I'd rather just not click the fucking things personally.
Users will always self-select to what interests them: we can't, and shouldn't, stop that. But taking the example of political news, what we can do with a reasoned comment system like /. is create some semblance of debate -- imperfect and problematic -- but far superior to what we currently see on news websites. The NY Times has done a decent job of this actually. Not a system as good as /., where users have a bit more investment in sticking around and not trolling since modding is done by the community and sticks with you, as opposed to the invisible hand system of the NY Times.
Sure, teach people how to be reasonable, rather than devoted cultists of the mighty Temple of Opinion. Oh, wait. This is earth. Never mind.
Would anyone like to play a game of Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock ?? I need to break out of my barriers...
why does twitter need to be the worlds debate platform in less than 180 characters?
why do I want 15,000 new assholes I don't know from Adam causing me grief on facebook or possibility real life?
why is is SOOO important to be everyone's friend? what does that prove?
Maybe there needs to be one of those 'team building' ropes courses like those found at summer camps...but online.
Some sort of activity where teamwork is required and dividing positions are superfluous to the task at hand. Once friendships are established talking about differing philosophical viewpoints becomes civil and rational. It's only when the 'other side' is viewed as a pack of rabid Palinistas (or Obama kool-aid drinkers) that we lose any hope of decent discourse.
Ya wankers.
Much like his earlier creation, I have to assume the answer somehow involved large quantities of free porn...
With respect to TBL, he seems to be suggesting censorship. Twitter is designed to allow users to spew whatever arises in their minds, and to retransmit the ideas of others that you believe others should see. Who decides what's "reasoned debate" when it comes down to it?
It's been shown that human nature gravitates towards sensationalism. The craziest of rumors always travel the fastest and the furthest. The free speech model of Twitter, for better or for worse, only amplifies this tendency by making so much easier for it to happen.
Give everyone a soap box, and you get a lot of noise pollution.
We've heard this lament before: cable TV let the "PBS Liberals" and the "Fox Conservatives" go off in their cliques. Magazine subscriptions do the same thing, as does the telephone and postal mail. Sometimes I hear nostalgia for an earlier time when neighbors knew each other, and discussed the town's affairs in the barbershop and the coffee shop. The downside is that nobody could avoid the town nutcase, and anyone with an unusual opinion or lifestyle or medical condition was outside the mainstream enough to be relatively alone. The answer will not be found in technology itself, but in human motivations: what drives friendship, and common interests? Was there ever a time when politics and debate was conducted civilly?
Shorter version for the TL;DR crowd: "How do you make Twitter work better for the liberal, academic, look-before-you-leap crowd instead of the conservative, judgemental, don't-tread-on-me(-while-I-tread-all-over-you) crowd?"
This is absurd on its face. Very few people can have reasoned debate in a few hundred characters because there's no room to consider alternative views. That's the whole point of Twitter: other viewpoints are not worth the writer's time, since you can just go to someone else to get them.
Stop following the idiots on twitter and realize it's NOT a debate forum. It's identical to the most useless form of news: the soundbyte.
He who forgets will be destined to remember. - EV
HTML wasn't him! I was a large team of engineers that developed this type of document. Re: "unwilling to retweet any update that wasn't offering an extreme opinion." He's only allowed to add a few users, try different people who are more sensible! Maybe he simply needs new online friends.
The purpose of existence is to make money.
He wants to redesign a site he doesn't own to perform tasks it wasn't designed to do...
Tim, buddy, thanks for inventing the web, but to put it indelicately, what the fuck are you talking about?
People gather around commonality: religion, race, age, class, afflictions, hobbies. The Internet isn't going to change that. If anything, as he argues, it enables it. I can now feed my interest in purple llamas with people who share that.
Trying to change people's innate behaviour is beyond the abilities of a computer network.
What makes TBL think that most of the people using Twitter or Facebook are interested in reasoned debate? If that's what people were interested in, Twitter would already look like that.
Twitter and Facebook are about sharing your "opinions" and updates with people who largely already agree with you ... you think the people following Rush Limbaugh on Twitter have differing points of view from him? Or that a bunch of angsty 16 year-old kids are looking for 'reasoned debate' or anything more than "going to the mall to buy shoes"?
Hell, even Slashdot has become a place where you can make a reasonable argument, in a reasonable tone, and if someone doesn't agree with your conclusions they'll mark you as a troll -- and where most topics quickly devolve into what more or less is an internet screaming match over which of Mac|Windows|Linux users are the biggest doodie heads.
Look at how public discourse happens in Western Democracies -- do you see a whole lot of reasoned debate there? Or screeching opinions and demonizing of dissenting views? Society isn't interested in it, and they're increasingly incapable of it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
I hate it when I see the phrase "inventor of the web", etc. There are so many other people that invented the "Internet" as we know it. All he made a rather sucky protocol, and was just at the right place at the right time. He didn't invent anything related to the way information travels throughout the Internet... he just created a protocol using hypertext with items such as bold (note that he did NOT invent hypertext, either!!!!)
I'm not saying he's a bad guy or did anything bad. What I'm saying is that the credit for the "invention" he made is super, super, super overblown.
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
it's called twitter. do you expect anything other than twittering? from twits? I mean it's not like it's called reasoneddebater.
"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)
Anyone interested in designing a peer-to-peer analogue of USENET News?
He noted that Facebook-style networks kept users within their existing friend groups, and didn't 'stretch' them to meet new people. Berners-Lee asked how can we 'make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.'
How is this any different than how people interact in the real world? I usually meet people through existing friends or through activities I participate in. Why does Tim think that the Internet would cause people to behave differently than in real life?
about the only why I've seen the Internet change the way people behave is because the Internet offers a level of anonymity, which causes people to feel more free to state their true opinion, for good or bad. But I'm sure this isn't what Tim means when he talks about breaking down barriers and connecting people together.
..at least not in the U.S.
To have some sort of rational debate on twitter you have to have rational debate [full stop].
We don't have rational debate at all in the U.S. right now. It's simply one logical fallacy after another which we call debate.
Until we grow up enough to get past our anti-rationalist phase Tim's comment is rather moot.
Pull the damned system out by the roots, and then perhaps (perhaps)
actual meaningful social discourse can take place.
Humans gravitate to the lowest common denominator
in nearly everything, Give a man a chance to post his every brain-fart to the whole world,
- you guarantee an inevitable stench.
www.reddit.com
Anybody know if identi.ca has retweets? (Re-identica's?)
Identica is Linux to Twitter's Windows, by the way.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I hereby challenge the users to improve Tim Berners-Lee to stop sprouting nonsense wrt to every stupid 'net fad.
(Disclaimer: I couldn't care less about Twitter and if Facebook dropped dead tomorrow, I think I wouldn't notice (ok: maybe I'd geet a tad less spam, but then maybe not)).
Yes, We will be going live this summer.
"How do you design a form of Twitter, how do you change the retweet system, so that Twitter will end up gathering a body of reasoned debate?"
Might as well ask the Postmaster General how he plans to increase the number of Bigfoots they have as mail carriers.
I like barriers. It's why I have a yard. And headphones.
You are totally blocking my view of the wall. - Dogbert
Trolling acts as a sort of Internet Eugenics to keep the numbers of freaks and furries down.
As Weev put it
http://conuly.livejournal.com/1445545.html
I first met Weev in an online chat room that I visited while staying at Fortuny's house. "I hack, I ruin, I make piles of money," he boasted. "I make people afraid for their lives." On the phone that night, Weev displayed a misanthropy far harsher than Fortuny's. "Trolling is basically Internet eugenics," he said, his voice pitching up like a jet engine on the runway. "I want everyone off the Internet. Bloggers are filth. They need to be destroyed. Blogging gives the illusion of participation to a bunch of retards. We need to put these people in the oven!"
I listened for a few more minutes as Weev held forth on the Federal Reserve and about Jews. Unlike Fortuny, he made no attempt to reconcile his trolling with conventional social norms. Two days later, I flew to Los Angeles and met Weev at a train station in Fullerton, a sleepy bungalow town folded into the vast Orange County grid. He is in his early 20s with full lips, darting eyes and a nest of hair falling back from his temples. He has a way of leaning in as he makes a point, inviting you to share what might or might not be a joke.
As we walked through Fullerton's downtown, Weev told me about his day - he'd lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed - and summarized his philosophy of "global ruin." "We are headed for a Malthusian crisis," he said, with professorial confidence. "Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years." He paused. "The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world's six billion people in the most just way possible?" He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
Seems reasonable to me.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
and Berners-Lee, bless him, is trotting out an archaic idealistic vision that has long since died
the debate, succinctly, is whether the Internet represents
1. a library of philosophers dedicated to erudite passionate commentary on important issues of the day, culminating in a second Enlightenment of intellectual endeavor
2. a bar at 3 AM, busy with drunks full of murderous rage and nonsensical babbling
look at comments on youtube, or under any political blog, or heck, look at encyclopedia dramatica or fark or 4chan: it is clear that Berners-Lee's image of the Internet died in September of 1993
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
there's nothing sadder than an old idealist, still believing in a utopian vision that died a long time ago, and will never exist
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Unfortunately; history gets munged, and the only way to have any kind of context is to simplify things, aka, dumb it down to the average person.
Which is the way *everything* works. You're going to find that that almost everything taught to you in school was as wrong as "inventor of the internet".
Now, you can either accept that everything is wrong and just get on with your day, or you can go around and correct EVERYONE, on every point. Because just about everything is factually incorrect. Good luck being Sheldon Cooper, I've learned that people get tired of being corrected, even though I'm wasting my lunchtime to correct you as well.
Ugh. I've become what I hate. Thanks.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
base on the comments I've read so far, which offer a few insightful (read insightful according to me, not modded insightful) comments, but few actual ideas among the rest of the banter, I suggest one place place not to start looking for answers is the ./ reader base, and by extension, since I do think ./ readers are a pretty intelligent crowd compared to the rest of the idiots on the web, one should probably not bother to seek to answers to this question on the web at all.
I would like to offer one idea though: provide a goal to the community, or a cause or reason of some sort for interacting . Otherwise it seems people will just continue to blow smoke up each other's asses without cause or reason and towards no end like kids hanging out in the park, which is just as well because most social networking sites provide something analogous to a lunchroom, that is a place just to hang out and act without any greater cause, as opposed to a classroom, that is a place where a actions and discussions tend to serve the population to some beneficial end.
poop.
Reasonable people tend to NOT FUCKING CARE about internet debate. Instead they concentrate on their lives.
This guy is smoking cheap crack cut with something very dangerous. The reason people (other than him) aren't clamoring for such features is that no human being wants them. People group together on the basis of common likes, common fears and common hatreds. They don't WANT to read dissenting opinions or engage in cultural diversity. Humans are tribal animals - always have been, and always will be. This is why Internet news is so much more satisfying than a printed newspaper - you only need to see the articles you care about. The only rational reason for this hearts-flowers-and-clasped-hands-around-the-communal-bong "feature" would be to create a market for software that blocks unwanted postings from appearing in your feed/friend list/whatever term for whatever social network we're discussing.
IMO, this is not a technical issue, it's a social issue that cannot be solved thru technical means. Twitter and Facebook are marketed to people who don't have time to create complex, nuanced opinion or the capacity to digest the same. Given that these same people have a degree of anonymity (their followers don't have the time/ability to track down the actual people behind the accounts) they are stuck in a vicious cycle of creating extreme opinions lest they alienate followers.
Additionally, extreme opinions are more "interesting" than complex opinion.
You want reasoned public debate, you have to make users start before they ever lay hands on the keyboard.
"My God...it's full of trolls!"
Sure old slashcode. Before they broke it Slashcode rewarded successful posters, encouraged a tight knit community, did a good job of formulating the debate (full story) but didn't force it (just reading the summary. Knocked out trolls (-1) forced a decent contribution so people wouldn't join just to post on a hot button issue (+1 Karma Mod).
:P)
Most important points were distributed by early users, this has the effect of insulating the community and maintaining it's original focus (news for nerds). It would be even better if we could peruse users past posts based on say Tags. If the search function worked and if they developed a system to allow new comments to be added to old discussions without breaking the thread of the original discussion.
Also the new filtering settings are more complex, I'm not sure why half the posts are shown (not score, not preference [informative, funny, etc]) now.
If you let a Slashdot argument run long enough and encouraged mods to centralize key talking points into a few posts you could get to the heart of the rhetorical debate and start correlating that with facts. (How has the Internet gone on for so long without a central factual database? It could be paid for by taking 10% of the drunken bar bets it resolves
The thing to remember is that arguments are rarely binary, usually there are true and valid arguments on both sides, democracy is helpful because it breaks these down by numbers.
What I still don't understand is arguments that aren't valid, are counter factual, blatantly say they do harm to the larger group and are still supported, like Republicanism.
they killed encyclopedia dramatica, 3 days ago
"oh internet"? wtf?!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_Dramatica
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
But Mr. Berners-Lee hasn't made it clear weather he sees that 'foaming at the mouth' is just pressing a point that (you) or Mr. Berners-Lee don't agree with.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I don't want to be too much of a pessimist; but I think it will be difficult to bring people together.
The early Internet seemed to bring people together better than the current one. I think that's because it was a unique time in the development of the 'net. We were all from pre-Internet cultures, and we all had only one thing in common--we were on the 'net.
After a few years, we "sorted ourselves out". It's just like integration. The school I went to had been segregated at some point. It had been integrated for years; but racial separation persisted--voluntarily.
If history were our only guide I'd say that we should create a new network--one so difficult to work with that only a few people would be willing, but at the same time it must offer some compelling feature that would make people be willing to jump through those hoops.
Maybe the Diaspora project is the closest thing; but is the "open source social network" concept going to attract people from different walks of life, or is it just a "Free/OSS/privacy" filter which feeds that culture?
great fences make even greater neighbors. STAY THE FUCK OUT OF MY FACEBOOK
It used to be that you would see *all* tweets from people you follow.
This lead to users seeing parts of other conversations and either joining in, or finding new people to follow.
Instead, you now only see parts of a conversation if you follow the people in the reply.
I used to find new people all the time and could decide whether or not to follow them. Now it's just the same old people all the time.
nothing ruins debate like a rambling 5 paragraph diatribe. if a debate is limited to 140 characters, the quality of the debate would improve over endless rants
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Part of the problem is that no matter how extreme your point of view, there is an internet forum out there that will validate it. I think that this comes at the expense of the middle ground. There is no platform for reasoned debate. It has become too easy to insulate insulate yourself from opposing viewpoints and to find people who will validate your preconceptions.
Chat-roulette. Those are the neighbors, and the reason people build walls in the first place.
Shut down your computer and go to the pub.
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
This article is a classic example of how bright people often fail to understand how the average person thinks. "You people aren't behaving the way I want you to behave! You need to do better!" Berners-Lee is wasting his breath, and really ought to know better himself.
You want to create a "civilized" version of Twitter, Berners-Lee? Great, go ahead and create a Twitter that forces people into your desired mode of behavior. Of course, don't be surprised if no one wants to use it after you create it. Twitter is pure anarchy, and that's why it appeals to people. No one I know who uses Twitter expects it to be anything else.
I think that an older Slashdot posting about Twitter is still appropriate: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1223191&cid=27841127
Then social media is not the right forum for you. Try a properly-moderated old-fashioned message board for that.
That's right faggot, go eat yet another bag of dicks.
TBL seems to have it backwards. The web is a communication tool, and the barriers or lack-thereof are created by the choices of the users.
There are some people to whom I'd rather not be connected.
And, I'm sure the feeling is mutual.
He noted that Facebook-style networks kept users within their existing friend groups, and didn't 'stretch' them to meet new people.
Hermmm... wasn't Chatroulette supposed to fix that for us...??
It takes an idiot to do cool things - that's why it's cool!
He seems to be whining a lot lately about how people are "misusing" his invention.
>>Berners-Lee asked how can we 'make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up.'
:) argued but this is what I have experienced and the conclusions that I have arrived at through a quarter century of online forum participation.
It's a fascinating question. I would go as far as to say it is the quintessential question of the modern internet. I have been on discussion forums for well over 25 years (think Compuserve) . I have seen what makes forums work and what destroys them.
Observation #1. Human beings are not particularly well equipped to participate in a group discussion without visual cues. Letters work well for one on one communication where the participants are known to each other but in a group setting communications, more often than not, break down when we can only "best guess" as to what someone actually meant. Not everyone writes well. Communicating our thoughts and feelings through the written word is, for the vast majority of us, a learned skill and the vast majority of us have no real training in such communications.
Observation #2. In a group forum the number of people who are divisive outnumber the people who tend to bring discussions together by more than five to one and likely much closer to ten to one. Divisive people are merely interested in promoting their own point of view for their own reasons. Inclusive people wish to contribute to the discussion and possibly expand or change their own viewpoints.
Observation 3. One bad apple in a discussion forum can ruin it for hundreds of others. The worst of the worst that participate in discussion forums are those that are far too connected to the forums. I other words , the most prolific contributors are most likely to be the most disruptive. Possible reasons for this are that the more prolific participants have little other activity or concerns outside of life on their forums of choice. Bad behaviors that would normally be socially moderated by sharp glances or visual cues by group participants in real life are given unlimited free reign in time delayed written forums.
Observation 4. Since 2006 or so, paid astroturfers having no other purpose than to promote a corporation's or individual's message have become a significant detriment to online forums.
What can be done about this?
Suggestion 1. Create a web of trust among posters. A given poster is assigned a score in some manner that indicates whether their history of posts have been useful or not. Obviously this can be gamed. The challenge would be to create a system that where gaming the score is next to impossible.
Suggestion 2. Make a posting ID valuable in some manner so that creating disruption within a discussion is not cost effective to the poster. Consider Metafilter where there is a five dollar entry to contributing discussion. Look at that forum and compare it to any other public forum that you have seen. Spamming and astroturfing and generally bad behavior has a cost associated with it in that forum. It appears to work.
Suggestion 3. Decrease anonymity. I realize that here necessary reasons for anonymity (Iran, Libya) . More often than not, there are no such reasons. People as a rule behave better when they know that they will be held accountable for their words and actions. If a person can be identified then their overall history and worth to a community over the years can be better evaluated. This has ties in with suggestion 1.
Obviously all my observations and suggestions can be and likely will be
----- In Your Cubicle No One Can Hear You Scream...
The big problem with life in today's times is that evolution has become broken.
We need a "Darwin" button on our keyboards so that, when we see a web page full of stupid, ignorant, poorly reasoned 'content' (like about 99.9% of anything found by Google News, for example), we can push the "Darwin" button and the creator of the page dies, the web server explodes, the Layers 1 - 3 assets connecting that web server to civilization are turned to ash, and the ground upon which that unholy shrine of ignorance was constructed is irradiated for the next several thousand years. NOTE that when I say "stupid, ignorant, poorly reasoned 'content'", I'm not talking about content whose ultimate position I disagree with. I've been deeply embarrassed more than once by having some dumbass agree with me on the Internet - some dumbass who couldn't present an intelligent reason for why they agreed with me.
The reality is that we'll never have a Darwin button and we can't, try as we might, turn dumbasses into people worth having a conversation with (if the person has reached adulthood and is still a dumbass, they've clearly reached the pinacle of their genetic potential).
However, the problem isn't the abundance of dumbasses, it's the lack of a good selection mechanism to get them out of our lives. Like inbred vampires, the moment we invite them in, they are going to lay havoc to everything around them, so how do we keep from inviting them in?
Let's just stop right here and be done with the notion that their content is somehow salvageable. You can't polish a turd. The challenge is simply to get them -out-. The best way to do that, so far, is to filter out the dumbass' comments. The challenge is that there is just so many dumbasses on the web that you almost need an assistant to identify and filter dumbasses for you. Or, you can use the "Darwin" button to ensure that no one else after you will have to deal with this dumbass.
Is the answer 'Wikipedia' ?
Blogs are so very different from the "true" community builder: UseNet.
While UseNet is subject to spam, it's "many to many" nature allows for communities to form and maintain themselves. Unfortunately NO OTHER INTERNET structure supports the same "many to many" connectivity that allows the formation of a community. A blog-- or facebook, gather, linkedin, etc-- assumes a pre-existing connection BEFORE enabling communication.
UseNet is as good as dead and the communities-- like "Callahan's"-- are hanging on by their fingernails as more and more ISPs drop UseNet connectivity. Google is not helping, either, since you need to use their we interface rather than, say, pointing nn/trn/etc at google's server pool.
(shrugs)
Web-resident "social networking" (what a laugh!) services are just using that as a draw to bring advertising to the eyes of the people seduced into using the "network".
I see no way to bring back UseNet... because there is not enough money to be made by providing the connectivity. I miss it and will be mourning it for a long time.
-soup (GNUrd, Speaker to Machines) "Laugh at yourself- Why should everyone else have all the fun?" -Romanchek's 6th Ru
Slashdot-style moderation (moderation as in "moderated") works well to appeal to reasoned debate. Those saying that Slashdot doesn't have reasoned debate have not been on the interwebs recently......
Uh, it was invented in the 80s. They're called newsgroups.
It's an exceptional quality to seek info from outside one's own echo chamber... I think you'd have to teach kids from kindergarten to value challenge and change over approval, security and so on. Adults can train themselves with difficulty.
all they will read is "Somebody with mod-"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Bumper sticker politics.
Twitter is perfect for it.
You can see this on Slashdot too where people pounce on articles to post the established group-think for a quick '+5'
Really? And here I thought posts kvetching about how anybody who agrees with prevailing opinion is just practicing groupthink was an ideal example of Slashdot groupthink.
Whoa there, good buddy. This could get recursive faster than you can say "stack overflow."
Submit to Trusted Critic Overlords (TCOs) who are supervised by an Almighty Board of Governors (ABG) and guided by Principles of Meaningful Dialog (PMG). Enable Significant Gratification Disbursals (SGDs) to meaningful contributors and Access Denial Impositions (ADIs) to people who are absolute fucking morons. In short, create a bureaucracy to supplant the chaos! That would be way better now, wouldn't it?
Put tools in the hands of intelligent data miners ("historians," for want of a better word) so that they can get the good stuff out to the people. In other words, your tweeters/facebookers are like "reporters"--they get the frontline material. The "historians" then find, digest, and interpret the material that is flowing past them. Eventually, reporters (seeking attention and validation) will provide information to the historians, who can make sense of it all. This is a big gain for the end user. The historians will be exploited by greedy pigs (i.e., that vile Huffington woman) who can make a lot of money off them and the reporters. The reporters get nothing and a few historians earn a living. How about that?
The creation of a news/analysis model that fairly rewards (non-moronic) reporters and historians is the holy grail. Unfortunately, the rapacious Huffingtons of the world always need to take more than their share. To protect the reporters and the historians, you'd need to have a model that had ZERO barriers to entry. That way, they couldn't be ripped off by the Huffingtons of the world--they could just move on to another cluster of reporters/historians. The base problem is finding leadership that is not out to rip the reporters and historians off.
People need to learn the benefits of diversity personally so that they will seek it out in an individual basis. You can't force them into accepting it (and trying to do so will really only teach them to resent it). Also, people need to learn to look past the harsh words of others so that they can really address what is being said. These are the kinds of things that promote diversity. Trying to accomplish that by overhauling twitter would be like herding casts.
People don't want to be improved. Twitter embraces that. Facebook too.
When you say people, does that include yourself, or are you special?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
So, let me get this straight. Berners-Lee wants a forum for reasoned, logical debate, and issues the call be describing the current system as "foaming at the mouth"?
I really, really hope he's aware of the irony--maybe going for the "Modest Proposal" style somewhere here...
People are not in the habit of being civil when they're online because there is so much separation between people on the net, and little editorial protection. The net brings people closer together in some ways, but definitely not others. You normally can't see everyone you're typing at. All you see of others is their writing, and maybe a small thumbnail picture of them, or something that represents them. There are no apparent long-term consequences. It is like everyone drives around in their own personal tank, oblivious to traffic signals.
It's ironic that this question is posted on Slashdot. The answer to it is: Slashdot. The moderation system *moderates* viewpoints. It keeps crazies and lazies in check while promoting well thought out posts. Like this one ;)
How can the balkanization of the web be avoided, when every commercial interest is trying to more precisely target the users? For example: If you don't stay signed out of Google and clear your cookies, Google news will only show you news items that their algorithms think you'll be interested in. After a while, learning about some current issue that you haven't heard about before becomes almost impossible. The same holds true with ever more targeted searches. I don't mean to just pick on Google either. Everyone is doing it.
On the other hand, meeting new people is not what it used to be either. Pretty much anyone who wants to "meet" you on the internet wants to mug you.
It's a good argument for turning the damn network off, and getting out in the world more.
Proverbs 21:19
Remove any and all security and privacy settings on social networks. Only then will you get the desired coverage and not limit users to "within their existing friend groups."
It couldn't be implemented perfectly, or even well. But it would be better than the current stream of logorrhea. It should at least be tried.
I think the real question here is what are the psychology underpinnings of internet trolling...
I ran across an interesting new book the other day in the book store here in Boulder. It was called "Virtually You" by Elias Aboujaoude and it was talking about the various effects that internet usage and communication has on a person's temperament.
As I'm sure we've all experienced, the lack of clear social barriers and the anonymity of the internet can lead to questionable behavior. I think it's something that will decrease with time, as humanity adjusts to the unprecedented freedom of speech that the internet affords (in many places, at least).
Anyone who has read Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" will instantly realize that most (or any) meaningful debate and discussion cannot be conducted on twitter. It's a great medium for announcing your band's tour dates, announcing flash mobs / protests, and commenting on the trivial events of the day, but I believe that the extent of its function in fostering real discussions is in directing people to other media / message boards / whatever (and many of us these days will not bother to follow the links and read something that is more than 140 characters).
From Slashdot's own:
Johnson's law: Systems resemble the organizations that create them.
Also from Slashdot's own:
You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe
The Internet does and always will continue to mirror the characteristics of the human beings that created and now comprise it. Unfortunately, one of those characteristics is our inability to truly see another person's point of view outside of our own.
When the 'should Bush be impeached' questions abounded Obama said we should look to the future not the past. From that point on he was just like the rest - cover yourself from fallout and you know the other side will cover you when push comes to shove.
I've seen this coming years ago. Some people only read websites that they agree with, but then fall into the echo chamber. People who read only DailyKos will only see a steady stream of left-wing, anti-corporate, anti-Republican ideas, while those who read WND will see nothing but increasing proof that Obama is the literal antichrist and trying to bankrupt the country. Both of these sides have small grains of truth to their arguments, but these sites will focus on it, ignore contradicting evidence, and create a self-reinforcing narrative. You see it also on TV with Fox News, whose narrative is "the liberals are at it again."
Either you force yourself to make friends outside of your comfort zone, or social networks start exposing you to random postings, or people actually go out and start reading other points of view.
..and fuck your wingnut ideas regarding "reasoned debate."
Why would I want that? It's not racism when you hate everybody.
The net needs something like Twitter and even 4Chan. If for nothing else, to show every other forum how bad it could get.
is that you you get invited to conferences and paid a lot of money to speak. Sometimes, you know that you don't have any fresh ideas at the moment, but you can't say that, so you trawl through the issues of the day, and come up with a controversial slant on them. You know that don't have any special insight, so you to take a commanding tone - "I don't like...they should do... ".
In a day you'll be on the plane home. In a week, everyone will have forgotten your vapid remarks
I'm a software visionary. I don't code.
I think he basically wants us to shut down the portion of the web which is not wikipedia.
We asked for a Smart Pres. and maybe we got one for once. He has FOUR years to get through, so he had to buy time not to get the famous Opposite Party Squash.
He sorta did that. We may dislike lots of the provisions in "Obamacare" but someone pointed out that NONE of the past four presidents managed to get anywhere useful with health care. So as we all know, it's easier to tenderly, lovingly boil the frog, if he has a health framework in place, he / successor can fiddle with it now, it's not this "OMG don't vote that plan in" thing.
It's the SECOND term and in years 2-3 a Pres can go for broke. Look, he conquered the 150 year Race issue so easily we aren't even talking about it!!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
We asked for a Smart Pres. and maybe we got one for once. He has FOUR years to get through, so he had to buy time not to get the famous Opposite Party Squash.
It's the SECOND term and in years 2-3 a Pres can go for broke.
Is it just me or does that scream "broken political system"? The guy at the top of the executive has to go 6 years before he can get anything done?
Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
http://www.rakontu.org/
How can we "make use of the web so it connects people together and breaks down barriers more than it builds them up"?
"Rakontu is free and open source software that small groups of people can use together to share and work with their stories. It's for people in neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."
My wife and I are working on version 2.0 (in Java, semantic-desktop oriented). The design documents are linked there.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
You don't know THE TRUTH! I DO! OK, I'll stop yelling now!
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
I thought all real men came with a tool for spew preinstalled?!? Oh, Well, you live and you learn.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
...the international language that binds us all together. Who wants to share an online p0rn experience with friends and family?
I have an idea: Twitter can add a feature where users can expand a tweet to show a more insightful version of the post. In effect, this will allow users to retweet a blog post instead of just retweeting a link.
I think the use of "web" in the summary should have been capitalized, i.e.: "Web".
http://www.cracked.com/article_19120_6-mistranslations-that-changed-world.html
Though it's not mentioned in this article, I _have_ previously heard of issues as to whether the "Iran wants to wipe Israel off the map" translation was accurate.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
You can rate websites with "like" and "don't like" and then Stumbleupon starts to show you websites submitted by people with similar interest vectors. Stumbleupon also shows you the people with similar interest vectors so you can chat with them or just subscribe to their feeds.
PEBKAC... Ok, maybe six.
To me the http/html centralized architecture will always be full of crap. Apache is ok for sites until 2002 where traffic rose and a lot of things began to be possible.
Look at how p2p technologies are fast and reliable, why doesn't anyone start something with something more decentralized ? Look at DVCSs, even those Mercurial and git are replacing crap like subversion and CVS.
Decentralized is teh shit, I seriously want to start developing it as I have ideas, but the involvement and work required are huge on this.
This would really empowers the internet, make censorship totally impossible, and ruin companies like facebook.
It could be much worse. You could get a lot of things done, per George W. Then they blame it on the opposite party to fix it.
Jack Nicolson's Joker Likes this.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Thanks for that. Life gets interesting once you realize that everything you thought you knew was basically WRONG. That accuracy is fungible and subject to change.
Its a reality made painfully obvious thru Internetworking and
people, i've come to believe, just don't want to think too much anymore. Hard enough just to get them to really listen.
Causes me to wonder if the net promotes irrational behavior more than mitigates it.
my .02
resist propaganda