This was a period where web site discovery services like Stumbleupon were all the rage. It was like spinning the Wheel of Fortune anticipating where you'd land. It was fun! Then poof. It disappeared.
What’s missing from the calls for an old web is navigation.
Discoverability requires a crawler, a directory, a hot ranking, or randomization.
What is needed is some kind of hybrid wiki/directory that is more than “page of links to good travel blogs.” It needs to be a database that can be navigated with filters and categories. Filter by travel, filter by country. Filter by food, filter by cuisine, filter by reviews or recipes. It needs both hierarchy and dynamicness, but it also can’t be an open ended search or chat that has no inherent navigation. I want to be able to see what exists before searching, and search should be a tool to refine and pare the results.
I made Flash games back then and had a personal website I kept them all on. I got a huge burst of traffic thanks to someone adding my site to StumbleUpon (my webhost had analytics and would show me referral links). Ran out of bandwidth several months because of it.
Most of them are only on here[1] now, or in one of the Flash game archives. I should figure some way to get them up and playable elsewhere again. Been debating getting an itch.io page going or something.
I'm in the BI space. I'll answer anecdotally since I pay attention to the job boards in the US quite a bit. I've got no hard data for my assertion full disclosure. For the last 3 months entry level work has dried up. I'm seeing very few postings for underling positions. Mid level 4-7 years jobs have markedly declined as I'm seeing fewer postings across this same time span month over month. 7+ years experience seems to be flat, but not down as the other tranches of work. You asked for a sense. That's my sense.
Cohen plead guilty to the hush money as an excessive personal campaign contribution. Going forward, it's not likely that the contribution can be recharacterized for the purposes of charging DJT with a crime. This case is going to be tossed out of court.
"The former mayor has offered a number of explanations for the missing messages, including that she dropped her phone in water, that she inadvertently changed the phone’s deletion settings and that “someone” set a new phone to delete messages older than 30 days, resulting in a rolling deletion of previous messages."
Could the writers of this piece not come up with a more lurid and entertaining headline?
That part isn't a great quote, The actual explanation is all of the above.
The mayor dropped their phone in water and it stoped working and after they received a new phone it had the 30d retention setting set (and this all being city equipment, the mayor didn't set their own phone up). Also pretty much everybody in the case (defendent + plantif) had deleted some messages ...
No. Part of the reasoning provided by the judge as to why the sanctions were limited was that the plantif's own efforts could not determine which of the deletions by the defendants were manual or automatic.
Chemotherapy too, since it usually causes DNA damage (cancers replicate quickly, so DNA damage affects them more). Very aggressive treatment has double-digit odds of giving you a new, additional cancer.
I was also (I got online at the age of 4 in 1993) and I think a lot of avoiding the pitfalls was being around adults in real life who understood how the internet worked. Not just my parents, but other adults as well. For example, I understood very young that there was a lot of overlap between people I talked to online and the awkward adult men I met at computer shows. I also got to listen to my mom's complaints about existing as a female geek in IRL geek spaces. It prevented me from putting internet people on a pedestal. I always knew we were all weirdos.
I'm not entirely sure I agree. I mean, maybe I do. I think one could argue that the internet is a lot more moderated in this day and age, but maybe you were referring more to the addictive and destructive effects of social media.
Moderation seems to be best at getting rid of low-hanging fruit. There is much less easily accessible gore, shock and radical content online these days. But thanks to the very large scope of the internet, there's plenty of more insidious threats of the cultural (unsavory, doomer), physiological (dopamine-bombing scroll media, attention-grabbing content, personalized emotional manipulation by ads), and societal (dating/friendships moving online, echo-chambers, etc) nature.
Probably like the author of the comment you are responding to, I also grew up with the early pre-y2k internet. As a kid, I've seen some extremely disturbing thigns online that are burned into my memory until today. And yet they do not have as much impact on my life today as the terminally online society does.
It's hard to exactly quantify how our lives would be different if the internet never developed past it's 1990s state. But I feel strongly that they would be very different. Would my life be much different if I didn't see one or two unsavory images as a kid online? Probably not. Even when I was young, I had functional mental/emotional boundaries for that. On the other hand, as an adult, I still have to consciously stay away from doomscrolling because I know my brain has never evolved for that kind of abuse.
To sum up, moderation doesn't seem to target threats online that are actually dangerous. And they seem to have impacted our society tremendously from my perspective.
It's so incredibly easy these days to go down some internet rabbit hole and end up with some extreme beliefs.
The popular thing on the news is of course grampa going right wing into facebook rabbit holes or whatever but that's just one example. Teens going left/right going down whatever rabbit holes, eating disorders, other political beliefs, body issues, need I go on. Your kid ends up in some discord group of strangers and sorry but you can pretty much forget about getting him or her back to reality. It's all the same mechanism.
Sure there are nice things too like hobbies but the internet is filled with the freaks and weirdos. They have nowhere else to go to. Why put your child in a pit with them?
