InternetUser

I have been and still am friends with people who have all sorts of prejudiced views, ranging from those who hate particular ethnic groups and nationalities (including my own), to those who disparage and insult those with different interests of educational backgrounds (such as one friend who is an I.T. guy and who constantly refers to non-I.T. people, even within his own family in shocking misanthropistic terms). Everyone has their own views, and I believe in acceptance. If someone expresses or suggests violent impulses, that is one thing, but to just express hatred is part of humanity. Do you hate anyone? To turn it around, there are plenty of people who hate themselves, but are all of them physically masochistic and/or suicidal?

> To promote an idea, you need only put it in people's heads over and over again.

As a voracious consumer of news, I spent hundreds of hours from summer 2015 to November 2016 having my mind exposed to headlines, articles, images, and videos on TV (both on TV news programs and late-night comedy shows), and on news websites (NYT, WaPo, Yahoo, MSN), and on social media (in 'Trending' sidebars of Facebook and Twitter) telling me that Trump is a crazy, racist, misogynistic, fascist maniacal idiot who is totally unqualified to be president, and whom "everyone" hates except for white racists and uneducated rednecks. Well, it didn't convince me, and didn't convince a majority of voters in 30 other states. That being said, I'm very open to consuming just as much anti-Trump and pro-Democrat content as soon as the Democratic primary begins in early 2019, or even before then. Maybe I can be persuaded that time around.

> Yeah, but when you have enough money

Imagine you are appointed the new CEO of Amazon.com. Please define "enough money," even a loose ballpark estimate.

What would be an example of a non-garbage ad that could've been there?

> except that i researched chevy thoroughly and decided that it sucked

Time for a re-decision. Expect to see those ads for years to come. How does a 2019 cherry-red Corvette sound?

You are overthinking it so much. It's all about just shoving that brand name or product reminder in front of you as often as possible, wherever they can. Eventually you might click the ad and give them .002 cents of revenue, or you might even click through and buy that new car for $30,000! Before I installed AdBlock, I myself constantly saw ads for eBay items I've looked at, and I see them on all sorts of websites. I've also found that certain T-shirt websites are particularly persistent. And even when I unblock ads on certain sites, as I've done on about 40, I'll see the eBay ads again.

But the millions of people working at news websites and at ad companies need to feed themselves and their families. What do you have to say to them?

That comment is a fantastically informed response piece in itself. Are you going to post it elsewhere?

And the circle of capitalism...continues.

What is your age, height, and weight?

Can you please fill out the first "etc." there? When you have the energy, of course. Thanks.

> Even search, where google has the clearest leads other offers exist

What are 3 or 4 alternatives?

> something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually use in the future.

Right now, the top 3 crypto-tokens are Ethereum-based, as are 89 of the Top 100:

https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/

Word-find "token" here to see what the word means in this context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethereum

There is now the Dream Market:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_Market

https://www.reddit.com/r/Dream_Market/comments/6pp9oi/dream_...

Same here. I follow HN FROM Feedly so I can minimize the risk of missing any post.

$19 a year? Must be a joke.

I love Google Reader as well, but switched quite seamlessly to Feedly. What's your problem with Feedly? I assume it's something about the aesthetic design of it, because it's very much the same as Google Reader.

Just as a side-note about the Wayback Machine including video: I searched for a good copy of a certain music video a month ago; first tried YouTube, then Google Video, where I found this copy, to my surprise, on Archive.org:

Peter Schilling - "The Different Story (World Of Lust and Crime)" (1988)

https://archive.org/details/Peter_Schilling_Cretu_-_The_Diff...

Just found this too:

https://archive.org/details/musicvideobin

Another video better than any copy on YouTube:

https://archive.org/details/Ultravox_Vienna

About the archiving of TV news broadcasts:

> In 2013, the Archive received an additional donation of "approximately 40,000 well-organized tapes," from the estate of a Philadelphia woman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Archive#TV_News_Searc...

Exactly; you are referring to survivorship bias -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

> Eventually she seemed to start avoiding me, and then went psycho and left the organization.

I often think that people say that someone is "psycho" when the person is actually just someone stupid who ended up with some power, perhaps through physical attractiveness, or through simple dishonesty, or maybe even both. Was that woman less intelligent than you? Was she not very intelligent to begin with? I think it's actually more helpful and more accurate for people to replace a psychoanalytic view of others, with a straightfoward smart-or-stupid view, and of course that is to be done in context. It's important not to overthink things. A professional chef may think I'm "crazy" for how inefficiently and poorly I cook my food every day, but actually I'm just stupid at it.

>The difference in mood is massive.

What are two adjectives that describe your previous mood, and two that describe your current one?

I'd be interested to hear your response to the point I made in my above comment in this thread. The fact that younger people increasingly view Facebook as uncool is a big problem facing the company; yes, Facebook Inc. still has Instagram, but Zuckerberg himself saw the rise of Snapchat, and tried to buy them out. The stock may be crap right now, but in terms of where people are sharing their minds and their lives (i.e. personal data), Snapchat is very relevant these days. In that way, it definitely does resemble Twitter; it's a very important part of the daily lives of tens of millions of people. I was about to say "daily online lives," but everyone is online for at least half the waking hours of their day now. (And for the record, virtually every B2C Internet stock stays below its IPO price in its first several months.)

Well, if you have made your account impossible for you, or anyone aside from certain employees of those companies, to access, the account is deleted. I mean, the social network MySpace, which still exists today (and is currently ranked #1,343 in the US by Alexa [0]), can have tons of data about you from 2006 to 2008, just as Yahoo Search can have tons of data about you from 1995 to 1998, but if you have completely stopped using both of those websites altogether, what's the value there?

Better yet, a girl you dated for the past 3 years but then broke up with could have tons of knowledge about you, and photos, and videos, but unless you're a politician, celebrity, or high-level business executive, where's the risk there? I'm not saying it's risk-free for everyone, but for the majority of people, it effectively is. Even just consider how Snapchat became so popular among teenagers over the last few years; new generations use new technologies, including, in this case, computer programs, which are now called apps, and even Windows 10 retrofitted that word from smartphones to desktop computers.

[0] https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com

> Now, the awkward silence never occurs in the first place. It's been entirely replaced by everyone scrolling the feeds on their phones. To start a conversation, you have to proactively interrupt what the person is doing and ask for their attention.

That is exactly right. No one can be bothered to exert the effort to carry on a relationship--not when their handheld Internet has an ocean of stuff that's easily more entertaining and less judgmental or potentially problematic, whether that content is memes, videos, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter posts, or incoming text messages, which now look more like rebuses, with the emojis. I saw a very representative meme that said "In the early 2000s, it was 'Why would I text message someone when I can just call them" and now it's 'Why would I call someone when I can just text message them?'" The asynchronous nature of those communications, and how the contact is divided across multiple services, whether text message, WhatsApp, Kik, Instagram, or whichever, makes it that the user gets used to having low expectations for the reliability of their dozens or hundreds of online "friends," and of course Facebook redefined that very word.

See this statistic from a recent article in The Atlantic published just the other day:

> The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out.

"Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation? - More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis."

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...

And the New York Post had an article saying that those in the next oldest generation (Generation, or I suppose "pre-Millennials") should try to address those problems, as though people in their 30s and 40s aren't glued to their phone screens as well:

> Generation X needs to save America from millennials

http://nypost.com/2017/08/05/generation-x-needs-to-save-amer...

Wikipedia: Generation Z and their use of technology and social media:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z#Technology_and_so...

If I may ask, what's your age and your marital status?

> The "Fear of missing out" is something I try to avoid like the plague, but sometimes I wonder why do I even care?

Ok, then don't care. Maybe it's time to finally grow up. Or then again, maybe the desire for company is perfectly natural and instinctual.

Are you inspired to take your own silent retreat, and if so, to what kind of place and for how many days or weeks?

> A boards job is to reign in the CEO's bad tendencies.

A board's job is to rein in the CEO's bad tendencies.

"hook into a LOT of places" - That optimism isn't well supported by acquisitions and IPOs in recent years. I maintain that the "pop-culture-image sharing" craze, which obviously includes gifs, hit its monetary-value peak when Yahoo bought Tumblr in May 2013 for $1.1B. It's been more than 4 YEARS since then, and what goin' on with Pinterest? I mean they are now 7 years into their existence and have neither IPO'd nor been acquired. Meanwhile, Imgur keeps chugging along--though downward, and since Reddit began hosting its own images, Imgur's decline has only accelerated, as even the Google Trends popularity graph reflects [0].

VIDEO is the future, and with AR, VR, and mixed reality on the rise (where the Almighty Facebook's Oculus is actually 5th place in sales [1]), images and gifs are looking about as exciting as innovations in the design of mobile flip phones. Snap, with Snapchat, went public earlier this year, but I don't think they ever could have done if they remained merely a photo-messaging app, rather than a photo-and-video messaging app, as well as a news-publishing app and now a TV app with its own proprietary programming.

[0] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=imgur,re...

[1] https://uploadvr.com/psvr-vive-superdata-sales/