The Golden age of Internet comes to a close?

googling "prelapsarian" now

Yeah, Pinterest has fucking destroyed image search.

Agreed that both google search and image search are noticeably worse than they once were. Image search is muuuuuuch worse, I can’t believe it. Even the “visually similar” search is somehow worse. Possibly a truck full of tartar sauce crashed into their algorithm room

FUCK PINTREST FOREVER for polluting Google image search results with useless garbage.

^^^

it’s the worst

youtube thumbnails in GIS results are also deeply fucking aggravating. it's getting to the point where you have to start using elaborate filters to get viable results, ex.:

cute pigs
(9 of the top 20 results are facebook, pinterest, or youtube images)

cute pigs -inurl:pinimg -inurl:ytimg -inurl:twimg -intitle:facebook
(problem solved!)

site:ilxor.com cutest pigs
(pretty decent if you can put up with the occasional giant isopod and/or Thom Yorke headshot)

https://gizmodo.com/100-websites-that-shaped-the-internet-as-we-know-it-1829634771

i don't think i'm much of an outlier here, but it was really odd to scroll through this list and know EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM already

Ha, same

ILX was robbed!!

the screenshots should really go below the headline, not above....

interview w/ jill leopore about her new book, 'these truths':

https://www.chronicle.com/article/The-Academy-Is-Largely/245080

Q. For democracy to work, of course, the people must be well informed. Yet we live in an age of epistemological mayhem. How did the relationship between truth and fact come unwound?

A. I spend a lot of time in the book getting it wound, to be fair. There’s an incredibly rich scholarship on the history of evidence, which traces its rise in the Middle Ages in the world of law, its migration into historical writing, and then finally into the realm that we’re most familiar with, journalism. That’s a centuries-long migration of an idea that begins in a very particular time and place, basically the rise of trial by jury starting in 1215. We have a much better vantage on the tenuousness of our own grasp of facts when we understand where facts come from.

The larger epistemological shift is how the elemental unit of knowledge has changed. Facts have been devalued for a long time. The rise of the fact was centuries ago. Facts were replaced by numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries as the higher-status unit of knowledge. That’s the moment at which the United States is founded as a demographic democracy. Now what’s considered to be most prestigious is data. The bigger the data, the better.

That transformation, from facts to numbers to data, traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge.

i often think about the mixture of humanistic and scientific/technical cultures that seemed to me to characterize the aspects of the internet i liked back in the 90s. i don't know fully what lepore has in mind here but i imagine that in my 90s internet even the technical stuff was sort of on an even footing with humanistic 'fact' because of the way the gears were relatively visible and lots of people had knowledge of how they ran things. dealing with a compiler error is something on the same scale as close-reading a poem; having a debate on usenet is something on the same scale as holding a city council meeting. comparatively speaking, 'numbers' and 'data' held little sway in the sense lepore apparently has in mind.

https://jacobinmag.com/2018/11/log-off-facebook-twitter-social-media-addiction

👍

Things I was shockingly old when I learned: the internet had a golden age. Here I thought it was always something of a hot mess.

https://www.theringer.com/tech/2018/12/19/18148701/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-year-in-review

max: http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html

yeah it's good

max links to this on tw too, which is good value in the "post it directly into my veins" school of internet ire

Amazing thread https://t.co/bLxjIaNgGJ

— Max Read (@max_read) December 26, 2018

What I liked about the internet in the past was that websites from regular folk populated the search results. Blogs, niche websites created by one person, user groups... Nowadays you are lucky if you can go through all the google search results for something specific and come across a site that isn’t mainstream - which has plenty to do with search engine algorithms. This keeps the little guy from wanting to make their own (non-commercial) site in the first place.

had an argument with my spouse who didn't understand why i was so upset about tumblr. no, i don't look at tumblr porn, or much of anything on tumblr really, but my impression was that a lot of tumblr was what i now think of as the "wikipedia internet" - knowledgable enthusiasts sharing their knowledge, what that ny mag article would characterize as "real". and it's become increasingly clear to me that the corporate internet dislikes this model and favors shouty internet, people angrily yelling about anything and nothing, because it's more profitable than genuine information.

i don't know. obviously there are still pockets of value. my dream is to one day be able to treat the internet the way i did facebook, as something that does more harm than good and something therefore to be avoided at all costs, but i don't actually believe we'll ever get there.

man I love all these articles about the internet eating itself.
I'm quite happy to have been a teenager online during the Golden Age. when I started cybersurfing the information superdotmotorway I used to chat to the only other people online: teen manics fans, German goths, American nerds and music journos

"Why do I need a 4Ghz quadcore to run facebook?" This is why. A single word split up into 11 HTML DOM elements to avoid adblockers. pic.twitter.com/Zv4RfInrL0

— Mike Pan (@themikepan) February 6, 2019

fuckin lol

well this Instagram egg thing just totally fuckin passed me by

j. that post from a few months back (epistemology) is great, thanks.

a moment of looping silence for YTMND, which quietly shut down yesterday

— 🍀🌳 eevee 🌳🍀 (@eevee) May 15, 2019

funny to read the OP of this thread, which is like, "am i onto something?" when it seems so clearly obvious now, four years later.

sorry, not the OP, the M@tt H3lg3s0n post from 2015

we call him ums, man

a moment of looping silence for jaymc.xls

one type of guy you don't hear much about anymore is the Linux Guy. if you were on the internet in the '00s you knew all about the Linux Guy. you had to. for your own safety.

— Jingleghost (@JeremyMonjo) October 16, 2019

it's sad, i miss their can-do spirit

A lot of Linux guys are now trans women

wait wut?

yeah um

what exactly are you going for there?

could he have been any clearer

Not sure what's confusing

The Linux Guy
1h 14min 2016

The Linux Guy is an interesting story about five college losers who become achievers when a new college professor teaches them linux and networking. During the project under Alok Sir, each student's life begin to turn around after memorial events and competing for the project of the year. Full of love, drama,fights, family issues, friendship and great college life fun.

it reads to me as a slam on transwomen since the context is the idea of a stereotypical and unpleasant "linux guy," and even the idea that some particular group is more likely to be trans

there's also a weird "used to be into Linux, is now into something different" thing to it

not a slam on anyone, including Linux guys! Just an observation, I shouldn't have said "a lot", could say "some" or "a discernible amount"

anyway to get back on topic as late as 2008 or so a rather hippieish Linux guy at college was going around pressuring unsuspecting fellow students to install Linux on their computers and also sleep with him

I think he got expelled for some reason

as a onetime Linux-guy-adjacent type I now advise people not to use computers

they don't anymore, everyone's on phones, running Linux. Huzzah!

not a slam on anyone, including Linux guys! Just an observation, I shouldn't have said "a lot", could say "some" or "a discernible amount"

― president of deluded fruitcakes anonymous (silby), Friday, October 18, 2019 11:09 AM (two hours ago)

my comment ("wait, wut?") was about the actual content of your message. some like how many? a discernible amount? is this based on personal experience or some other observation? the comment put me into 1000 questions mode

not to criticize but because i am curious

i dunno about silby but just eyeballing it from my internet experience i would have said yeah, that's a definite social ~identity~ now

"Linux guy" is too narrow a scope really; I know several and know of many trans women and nonbinary ppl (NB mostly white) who are software or systems or devops people, to the point where I would believe they're overrepresented in those professions (no hard data though). Like it's enough of a "thing" that one sees complaints that too much is made of it, like I've read tweets like "yeah most trans women are not white programmers in lesbian polycules" in response to the currency this social identity has gained.

Oh! Hey! Another opportunity for me to run my mouth about Trans Shit! Thank you!

Geek culture is where I come from. These were the people who were my heroes growing up. Dani Bunten was the first trans person I ever heard of. It's one of the things I have so much guilt about taking so incredibly long to finally come out. If Dani had that shit figured out in the '80s, why did I not figure it out until 2017?

My feeling on this is that the stereotype of the Trans Geek, which is both a stereotype and rooted in reality, is in some sense a function of the staggering amounts of privilege these people were handed, perhaps possibly coupled with an equally staggering deficit in their understanding of or ability to conform to conventional social norms.

These were weirdo outcast kids and the people with the power and the money for some reason decided that they were essential to the Future of Humanity, that they were the homo superior. So the people with the power and the money said to them "You can have anything you want".

A lot of them bought sports cars. Richard Garriott decided he was going to go to outer space. Compared to that, I guess, just saying "Cool, I'm a woman now" seemed fairly reasonable?

And nobody of course ever told me I could have anything I wanted, I idolized these misfits but I wasn't really like they were. That's where I come from, though. That's where I learned about this first. Wasn't punk rock or queer spaces or sex work, it was these awkward weirdo geeks who invented the Internet while wearing dresses. These days I respect the latter more than the former.