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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

> The internet is an emotional medium, not a rational one.

utterly floored at how obvious this is but almost everyone has missed it. "the information superhighway", indeed.

im kind of speechless. this fits so well with everything: the degredation of media, the explosion of tracking and near-total destruction of privacy no one cares about, the most-used social media (twitter, fb, ig) having the smallest information exchange, the prevalence of easily disprovable conspiracy theories.

people have always been irrational, emotional animals. im not sure why we thought itd be different now.

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> utterly floored at how obvious this is but almost everyone has missed it. "the information superhighway", indeed.

Interestingly, there was a class of people who never missed that from day one. "Don't believe everything you read on the internet," our teachers warned us. We scoffed: if we could be so stupid. No one believes anything you read on the internet.

Only looking back do I notice the slow change. We have become a people who believe everything they see on the internet.

> We have become a people who believe everything they see on the internet.

And the "traditional" media scrambled, falling all over themselves, desperately trying to become relevant as their business model disappeared, moving their content online, competing in the cacophonic nightmare of screaming known as the internet. Little did they know that adding more signal to the noise just tricked us into believe that noise was signal.

> We have become a people who believe everything they see on the internet.

Speak for yourself. I only believe things I see on the Internet if they fit my preconceived ideas.

How do I make people go back to the old days?

Bring back national TV broadcast as peoples primary source of information?

> Only looking back do I notice the slow change. We have become a people who believe everything they see on the internet.

These days, if something is NOT on the internet, it is suspect. Even if the evidence is in a well-researched book, if people can't find a URL for it, they immediately dismiss arguments out of hand. You see it all the time on this forum as well.

I once had a disagreement with a colleague about a claim in a lab manual for undergraduates. About 10 seconds into the discussion, his instinctive reaction was "Does the internet say that's right?"

After speaking with the professor that teaches the class, his instinct was also to check that the internet says it's right before updating the lab manual. I had a simple argument based on a well-known formula, but ultimately it's the internet that decides whether it's right or not.

Perhaps the internet is best understood as a reasonable shorthand for general consensus.

Well, most of the people who made it, and the early adopters tended towards being rational, eh?

Boiling frogs and Eternal September and all that.

> utterly floored at how obvious this is but almost everyone has missed it

It's a combination of the confirmation bias of addiction and not being skeptical upfront about technology.

It's sad, but empowering once you realize it.

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