Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Ah, so what would the Internet look like if it were built by altruistic, honest people. Sadly, I must be really jaded an cynical because that’s so hard for me to envision.
Commercial interests were always exploiting resources within their spheres of influence, even before the Internet. As technology improved and new pathways emerged, they ran full speed ahead.
Your example of a news site that didn’t push their algorithms never existed. Even pre-Internet, when news was printed, every newspaper had a certain slant. In New York City—back in the 70s—there were four major papers, NY Times, Wall St Journal, NY Post, Daily News. They all had their biases.
But the one thing they couldn’t do was collect user data. Ads were static and we had a choice to either read or ignore it.
As I’m typing and doing this brain dump—it’s 1:18am, why am I not asleep—I’ve come to realize that the thing I hate most about the current state of the Internet is the vast collection of user data how companies are mining and exploiting it. If we could stop it, I would be fine with most everything else.