Major Tom
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
ExFlyBoy5 - that vertical video PSA is very entertaining!
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ExFlyBoy5 - that vertical video PSA is very entertaining!
That would work really well for reading text as if it was a large newspaper.I have shared it many, many times over the years. Sadly, most folks ignore the sound advice. If I was king for a day, I would decree that anyone who posts vertical videos would be sentenced to having all their flat panel TVs mounted vertically for one year.
Usenet was a blast. There was so much tolerance for everything... except advertising.I found USENET in the mid-90's. That was a blast. Quite a free-for-all, but still civilized. No graphics unless you painstakingly created something out of ASCII characters. Then trolls started showing up and taking over and some groups formed moderated versions of the regular Usenet group. I would put this in the late 90's and/or turn of the century. These mod groups were not popular. Then online forums popped up. Then online forums were trolled and moderated online forums became commonplace (ER.ORG is an online moderated forum.)
Those Usenet days were my introduction to online communities and it made quite an impression. Truly the forerunner of social media. I have people from Usenet I still keep in touch with via email and texts and I even met one of them last year.
Not in my book. Message boards have been around before "social media" exploded. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, are social media to me, because people post detailed personal information.
Perhaps more of a rant of the day, but I agree 100%. Here is a video PSA about it.
Usenet was a blast. There was so much tolerance for everything... except advertising.
I still remember when that lawyer broke the unwritten rule and started advertising. https://www.wired.com/1999/04/the-spam-that-started-it-all/
It was only a matter of weeks the advertising dam broke. Advertising previously was on on devices like AOL, Compuserve or Prodigy. Once it started on Usenet, it infected everything.
People tolerated a lot of crap, some of it very distasteful, and also far left and right views. Yet they cooperated.
Reddit is supposedly wide open, but through history and custom, they lean heavily one way. The owners would love for you to use up and down voting to gauge interesting posts, but the reality is down voting is used mostly to shame people who express the "wrong" political lean. It is not the real world. I admit, though, that I do like r/idiotsincars. It is mostly short video. Yeah, I'm a hypocrite. But I've actually learned a lot about driving situations and when to be more defensive. Oh that, and SUVs are incredibly easy to roll over .
The last few years before I retired management started sending videos instead of memos. No way I was going to waste my time listening to someone natter on at me for 10 minutes when a quick perusal of a memo would give me the same information in a minute. Also, if there is important information in the video, there is no way to highlight it like you can with a memo. I don't mind an instructional video at times but don't have the patience to watch something that I could read quickly. I'm hoping that there is room for both the written word and video in the future.
Before too many more years, there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth as people realize without newspapers, without printed media, they can only know what website owners allow to be on their sites. I see this happening already. Old content gets removed if it looks bad in hindsight, so you can't find it any more. The inherent trust that used to be there with newspapers and TV news is gone, everything on the web has a slant and an agenda.
There was a perfect example of this recently, the story from a major network regarding an attack on a high profile person has now changed 2 or 3 times since it happened. Rather than amending the story and linking to the old one they just supplied a different version of events and completely deleted the original as if they never reported it in the first place. Those reading the new story for the first time would have no idea what was originally reported. The original press conference with the police spokesperson with a different version of events than the current version has also disappeared from the internet.
The media wonders why people are losing trust in them. Examples like this are just one of the reasons why.
We are in the Twilight zone: "Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission"
There was a perfect example of this recently, the story from a major network regarding an attack on a high profile person has now changed 2 or 3 times since it happened. Rather than amending the story and linking to the old one they just supplied a different version of events and completely deleted the original as if they never reported it in the first place. Those reading the new story for the first time would have no idea what was originally reported. The original press conference with the police spokesperson with a different version of events than the current version has also disappeared from the internet.
The media wonders why people are losing trust in them. Examples like this are just one of the reasons why.
I, for one, won't be sad to see social networks like Facebook and Twitter fade away. I can't speak much to Twitter because I've never used it - the idea that a view can be expressed in 140 or 280 characters is ludicrous. It's like being informed by bumper stickers. Facebook is a truly awful means of communication. I'm buying an RV and the user group is on Facebook. The format makes it nearly impossible to have a back and forth discussion, there's no way to organize topics, and the search function just plain doesn't work. A topic quickly fades from people's feeds so if a question isn't answered in the first couple posts it's unlikely to ever get answered.
I know it identifies me as a Luddite, but I still think Forums are the best means of back and forth information sharing. Topics can be arranged in logical groupings, back and forth discussions are easy to follow, and searches are for the most part useful.
Usenet was a hoot. I think I made my first post in '85 or '86.
But there are advantages and disadvantages to both. What if you have a print version of a story that is simply wrong? YOU yourself, the first reader, might know the story was corrected, but that stray print copy that got passed down is the one that posterity consults! And print disappears as randomly and frequently as rapidly as online.
I first got on the internet in 1995, and was amazed at the quality of information that was out there. I knew it had to do with the fact that not everyone was on the internet, and the people who were were sort of in a club. And then someone pointed out that the people who contribute do so at a personal cost to them (time) with no tangible reward. It all made sense.I was intrigued by the OP's characterization of 1980's and 1990's internet in particular. I have also noticed that as it has become more accessible to the masses, while the quantity of what is available has exponentially increased, the overall quality has dipped due to that accessibility meaning that just about everyone can participate. And with rare exception, that does mean everyone.