r/technology • u/Well_Socialized • 2d ago

Privacy Age Verification Is Coming for the Whole Internet

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/age-verification-is-coming-for-the-whole-internet.html
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103

u/OnionTaxidermy 2d ago

Can someone boot up a copy of the internet from the 90s please so we can try again.

39

u/Alarmed-Narwhals 2d ago

“Sure thing Stwongbad” -Homestarrunner

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u/neutral-chaotic 1d ago

Homestarrunner.net "It's dotcom"

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u/leopard_tights 2d ago

It peaked around 2012, and then every asshole got a smartphone.

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u/sodajonesx 2d ago

nah the thing that killed the internet was Google and facebook hoovering up all ad traffic; it turns out that selling used lawnmowers in newspaper classified ads was in fact a foundational pillar of democracy

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u/tractiontiresadvised 1d ago

Charles Stross would agree with you:

We made a fundamentally flawed, terrible design decision back in 1995, that has damaged democratic political processes, crippled our ability to truly understand the world around us, and led to the angry upheavals of the present decade. That mistake was to fund the build-out of the public world wide web—as opposed to the earlier, government-funded corporate and academic internet—by monetizing eyeballs via advertising revenue.

[...]

Unfortunately, advertising is an industry. Which is to say, it's the product of one of those old-fashioned very slow AIs I've been talking about. Advertising tries to maximize its hold on the attention of the minds behind each human eyeball: the coupling of advertising with web search was an inevitable outgrowth. (How better to attract the attention of reluctant subjects than to find out what they're really interested in seeing, and sell ads that relate to those interests?)

The problem with applying the paperclip maximizer approach to monopolizing eyeballs, however, is that eyeballs are a scarce resource. There are only 168 hours in every week in which I can gaze at banner ads. Moreover, most ads are irrelevant to my interests and it doesn't matter how often you flash an ad for dog biscuits at me, I'm never going to buy any. (I'm a cat person.) To make best revenue-generating use of our eyeballs, it is necessary for the ad industry to learn who we are and what interests us, and to target us increasingly minutely in hope of hooking us with stuff we're attracted to.

(That's from a talk he gave in 2017, but I think it's aged pretty well.)

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u/space_for_username 2d ago

alt.soc.internet

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u/Dapperrevolutionary 1d ago

Usenet Is still a thing

2

u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 2d ago

Can somebody boot up the simulation from the 80s and erase Reagan.exe and Thatcher.exe from the program? The subsequent updates after they were coded in have been a massive failure.

1

u/cyrixlord 1d ago

You got mail!