< The hopeful thing about the Internet...

~commence2897

can't say i share a lot of the sentiment here. while i agree that there's definitely going to be an end to technology at some point down the road (not too dissimilar to the end of the universe; ergo the human race too) - i feel that technology does a lot more good than it does harm.

it's difficult, in my eyes, to separate traditional notions of good and evil from most things. something like TikTok for instance: "evil" because it's centralized, not FOSS, not self-hostable yada yada, yet it has the amazing potential of sharing information at phenomenal speeds. it can be a medium for misinformation and hate speech, yet it also thrives as a way of raising awareness about societal issues.

that's a lot of words (arguably waffle) to hint at what i'm trying to say: the internet is only what you, and other folks like you make it (not too dissimilar to society as a whole, eh?) - and any one individual can be optimistic, pessimistic or both simultaneously.

personally? i believe that the internet should be in the hands of general people and that the community should come together to make it a better place. i can't tell you how that would work, or claim that there wouldn't be discordance, but i don't think that it's worth throwing out a batch of apples over a few bruises - and i think that as long as people try to cultivate a space that's supportive of one another, then that's really the point.

i've never seen anything that involves a lot of people go flawlessly.

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~tffb wrote (thread):

I mean, the WWW is decentralized by default, and you're right - the more people contibute (to anything) the higher the likelihood that there would be "too many leaders in the room", or too many egos and high-minded opinions thrown about. All knowing they are right, even if that becomes a unified chorus of wrong.

But with the TikTok example you made - I'd say digging through what a service like that is, in order to find "a" thing that is "good" about it would be the difficult endeavor. Using it (or any social media) to platform a societal issue is counterintuitive to even *wanting* to improve society - like injecting heroin in order to get close to a heroin addict to tell them how unhealthy heroin is!