re: #246 Yeah Sure WhatEVs

“Social Media was a mistake”

The problem with that is people think if Facebook and Twitter weren’t things, everything would be sunshine and rainbows.

They are just the latest biggest versions of something that’s existed since dialup modems, and BBSes.

There were “communities” that formed and grew on BBSes, USENET, chat rooms on AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve. They were just as toxic back then too, only limited by the numbers with access to them. A huge portion of the militia assholes and Alex Jones style conspiracy theory crazies became such because of shit they read on USENET groups. If it wasn’t for the Internet as it was in the 90s I might have never dabbled in crazy Libertarian land at all and might have saved myself years of being on “the wrong side” before coming back to my senses.

You could say. “The Internet was a mistake” and I think the number of ways it makes things better far outweighs the problems. The problems exist only because the damn thing was invented by tech nerds with little imagination on how it could be abused. Practically every security and privacy mechanism built into the Internet was something added way later because “oh shit…”

We have to continue tweaking it, not just ditch it.