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A Thread About Terrible Internet
KharBevNor:
Schemechsae
Johnny C:
re: the gawker redesign: don't you people use google reader
KharBevNor:
google what?
Why do they keep making new things, It confuses and frightens me!
Alex C:
--- Quote from: KvP on 04 Mar 2011, 01:06 --- Class activity - check out the comments section of your local paper's website. More than likely, you will be revolted. You need to do stuff like this once in awhile, else you lose sight completely of the fact that a lot of people will vote Republican, and will hate you or your friends or your family for no real reason at all. It certainly keeps you from having a disposition that's too sunny.
--- End quote ---
Back in '03 my li'l hometown newspaper still had a forum. That's because frankly, they had no idea what they were really doing yet as far as the internet goes and it devolved quickly into a largely unmoderated cesspool of paleoconservative anti-Mexican ranting. Meanwhile, the senior editor often wrote regular attacks on atheism, young people in general and especially secular Europe-- although at least he had the decency to separate his opinion from that of the paper's. If I had to single one out as more annoying, I suspect I'd go with the latter, even though in a vacuum his attacks were generally less repulsive. That's because, unfortunately, I worked there as a pressman at the time. So roughly twice a month I'd be on my break and would thumb through the paper to find out that I had just printed off another few thousand copies of a prosaic, inaccurate and borderline offensive attack on people that I strongly identify with.
So, yeah, that job wasn't fun, but as KvP pointed out, it's probably for the best that people inoculate themselves from the idea that society naturally will improve by virtue of sheer inertia. Life will likely never be that easy.
est:
Occasionally I make the mistake of reading the comments on a new site like smh or news.com.au and instantly remember why I use AdBlock element hider to get rid of them asap. When I was messing about with Safari I found a great plugin called "SHUT UP" that hides the comments on a bunch of sites, Aus news sites included. It was bliss. I really should look for something similar for Firefox.
Sometimes it seems like there are people who think that they are becoming some sort of internet celebrity by making inflammatory remarks on news site comments. I see the same names over and over and some people who will tell the person off or make a comment that makes me think that they are all regulars on the site. Who the hell is sad enough to be a regular commenter on a mainstream news site?
Also, one last thing. I really think that at some stage forums like this are going to become obsolete. Twitter is the first step, but at some point surely there's going to be something like it that is more of a protocol than a centralised service. Imagine if the comments sections of all websites, webcomics, blogs, etc were basically just like twitter feeds, or say, News.com.au's comments was one feed and each story had it's own sub-category feed. Hashtag searchable, can subscribe to certain ones. I'm not explaining it overly well, but I'm envisioning a kind of distributed comments/forum threads/conversation system where you subscribe to individual topics, and some are public, others private. Websites won't need to have their own forum as such, they'd just have their own info feed that the author(s) update & people can respond to that. Each comic would have a hashtag that people could comment on, that sort of thing.
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