On Thu, 25 Jul 2024 08:06:54 -0400, Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam>
wrote:

>On 7/25/2024 2:18 AM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> Social media sites do need to be financed. They are not sites that are
>> themselves advertising a service, like a retailer or a doctor or
>> whatever. In a social media site, the site is itself the service --
>> the service of helping people to connect to other people online.
>>
>> A lot of people started social media sites because they thought of
>> original ways of linking people in ways that people find useful.
>>
>> Think of some of the early social media sites. An example is
>> Geocities, which offered free web hosting in a series of themed
>> communities. As it's popularity grew, so did the cost of maintaining
>> it, servers, internet access fees. One way of financing it was ads,
>> and banner ads could be targeted at the themed communities. Then it
>> was taken over by Yahoo! where the main idea was as a source of
>> revenue. They did not understand what made it attractive to users, so
>> they messed with the model and killed it.
>>
>
> Social media is an interesting category. As far as I know,
>the Meta companies seem to be doing fine financially. But Reddit is
>in the red and have recently gone public while selling out to Google
>and OpenAI/Microsoft, selling both companies direct access to
>postings. Reddit now requires logging in with script from Google.
>
> Like news media companies, social media have very real costs and
>struggles. But I think we need to clarify the issues. The question
>was really about the role of the Internet for humanity. Should
>we allow flim-flam salesmen to turn it into a Miracle Mile shopping
>mall, infested with virtual drug dealers like Zuck, addicting our kids,
>in exchange for free stuff? Is there any point at which surveillance
>becomes unethical? Is there any truth to the assertion
>that the Internet will collapse and disappear without surveillance-
>fueled ads? Should barely socialized young men, obsessed with
>power and greed, be allowed to manipulate children, making them
>addicted to the likes of Facebook? Where are our priorities?
>
> To claim that the Internet must be a business is, first of all,
>a claim with no evidence. To claim that such businesses can't
>run without cheating and lying is even more farfetched. More
>importantly, it's looking at the issue backward.
>
> It's our moral duty as citizens and humans to work
>toward an ethical, humane society. The Internet is foremost a
>new PUBLIC communication medium. It's not a company whose
>stock value must be maintained.

Indeed.

There is a difference between a service that meets a need that is free
to users and supported by advertising, and one in which the users are
themselves the product that is sold to the advertisers.

Many social media sites started as the former, and were taken over by
companies that turned them into the latter, or tried to, and if they
failed, they were dumped -- as Yahoo! took over Geocities, destroyed
everything that made it attractive to users, and then dumped it,
leaving a lot of dead links on the web, and a lot of useful
information rendered inaccessible.

Google started out with a better search engine, and the slogan "Don't
be evil." But they've become evil anyway.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

On 7/25/2024 9:19 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:

> Many social media sites started as the former, and were taken over by
> companies that turned them into the latter, or tried to, and if they
> failed, they were dumped -- as Yahoo! took over Geocities, destroyed
> everything that made it attractive to users, and then dumped it,
> leaving a lot of dead links on the web, and a lot of useful
> information rendered inaccessible.

I think of Geocities as a good example of the early Web. I wasn't
aware of that history. I just remember that a lot of people set
up interesting and creative websites on there... then they were
gone.

At one point around 2000 I had an unusual eye disorder and
went online to research it. One of the things I found was a
website set up by a man who'd had the same thing and
just decided to write about it in order to help others who got
it. A few years later I had another bout and searched again.
I found no useful information. The top return was an optometrist
in Florida. To me that was what changed in a nutshell. Google now
values the age of a site, incoming links and espcially frequent
updates. All factors that favor large commercial websites.

On 2024-07-25 19:41, Newyana2 wrote:
> On 7/25/2024 9:19 PM, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> Many social media sites started as the former, and were taken over by
>> companies that turned them into the latter, or tried to, and if they
>> failed, they were dumped -- as Yahoo! took over Geocities, destroyed
>> everything that made it attractive to users, and then dumped it,
>> leaving a lot of dead links on the web, and a lot of useful
>> information rendered inaccessible.
>
>  I think of Geocities as a good example of the early Web. I wasn't
> aware of that history. I just remember that a lot of people set
> up interesting and creative websites on there... then they were
> gone.

Because the infrastructure that let them stay up had to be PAID FOR.

On 7/25/2024 11:53 PM, Alan wrote:

>>   I think of Geocities as a good example of the early Web. I wasn't
>> aware of that history. I just remember that a lot of people set
>> up interesting and creative websites on there... then they were
>> gone.
>
> Because the infrastructure that let them stay up had to be PAID FOR.

Indeed. Didn't Geocities have ads? I don't remember now.
I seem to remember there was another one called Xoom
that ran banner ads on homemade sites. And Steve just
explained that the Geocities problem was Yahoo.

My own first site, on which I taught myself HTML, was
on Mindspring, my ISP at the time. They provided 5 MB
of space to any customer who wanted it, for free. It came
with the ISP account. A lot of ISPs did
that. It was part of the vision -- that the Internet was
for everyone, so everyone should be able to have a
connection, email, and a "front door" onto the information
superhighway. Even today one can get a free site on
Wordpress, or a dirt-cheap site at servers like Dreamhost.
Are you, perhaps, too young to remember when the Web
wasn't a shopping mall? It's really true. :)

In you money-obsessed zeal you snipped out the rest
of my post, which explained how Google gradually choked
to death the "long tail" of the Internet. Those sites disappeared,
in large part, because Google wanted to focus on their
advertisers and on the sites hosting their ads. To look at
search results today one could be excused for thinking that the
Internet is composed of a couple hundred commercial sites.
A big e-shopping mall. Google drops out the rest, for the most
part. At one time, Google results went on endlessly. Today you
get a couple of pages. Same with DDG.

We could do something like add a small tax to Internet
service in order to provide free resources. That might be a good
idea. We could even have a publicly funded search engine. But
it's a matter of priorities. If you want to sell the public
parks to ParkCo, and let them put ads on trees or meters on
benches, then that's another way to go about things. Personally
I see that as a sign of a society without self-respect, with everyone
just out for themselves.

On 2024-07-26 05:49, Newyana2 wrote:
> On 7/25/2024 11:53 PM, Alan wrote:
>
>>>   I think of Geocities as a good example of the early Web. I wasn't
>>> aware of that history. I just remember that a lot of people set
>>> up interesting and creative websites on there... then they were
>>> gone.
>>
>> Because the infrastructure that let them stay up had to be PAID FOR.
>
>   Indeed. Didn't Geocities have ads? I don't remember now.
> I seem to remember there was another one called Xoom
> that ran banner ads on homemade sites. And Steve just
> explained that the Geocities problem was Yahoo.
>
>   My own first site, on which I taught myself HTML, was
> on Mindspring, my ISP at the time. They provided 5 MB
> of space to any customer who wanted it, for free. It came
> with the ISP account. A lot of ISPs did
> that. It was part of the vision -- that the Internet was
> for everyone, so everyone should be able to have a
> connection, email, and a "front door" onto the information
> superhighway. Even today one can get a free site on
> Wordpress, or a dirt-cheap site at servers like Dreamhost.
> Are you, perhaps, too young to remember when the Web
> wasn't a shopping mall? It's really true. :)

Cut the condescension...

I was at the University of Waterloo when Brad Templeton was putting the
"dot" in "dotcom".

>
>   In you money-obsessed zeal you snipped out the rest
> of my post, which explained how Google gradually choked
> to death the "long tail" of the Internet. Those sites disappeared,
> in large part, because Google wanted to focus on their
> advertisers and on the sites hosting their ads. To look at
> search results today one could be excused for thinking that the
> Internet is composed of a couple hundred commercial sites.
> A big e-shopping mall. Google drops out the rest, for the most
> part. At one time, Google results went on endlessly. Today you
> get a couple of pages. Same with DDG.

My "money-obsessed zeal"?

LOL

>
>   We could do something like add a small tax to Internet
> service in order to provide free resources. That might be a good
> idea. We could even have a publicly funded search engine. But
> it's a matter of priorities. If you want to sell the public
> parks to ParkCo, and let them put ads on trees or meters on
> benches, then that's another way to go about things. Personally
> I see that as a sign of a society without self-respect, with everyone
> just out for themselves.

How would you DISTRIBUTE that "small tax", sunshine?

On Fri, 26 Jul 2024 08:49:43 -0400, Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam>
wrote:

>On 7/25/2024 11:53 PM, Alan wrote:
>
>>>   I think of Geocities as a good example of the early Web. I wasn't
>>> aware of that history. I just remember that a lot of people set
>>> up interesting and creative websites on there... then they were
>>> gone.
>>
>> Because the infrastructure that let them stay up had to be PAID FOR.
>
> Indeed. Didn't Geocities have ads? I don't remember now.
>I seem to remember there was another one called Xoom
>that ran banner ads on homemade sites. And Steve just
>explained that the Geocities problem was Yahoo.

Yes, and I didn't mind the banner ads because I knew they had to be
paid for. They weren't pop-ups or anythin g annoying, they were just
there.

And the themed communities were moderated by volunteers, and it
developed a community spirit.

Yahoo! saw an opportunity for profit, and bought it. But they didn't
understand what made it attractive to useers, and abolished the themed
communities, because they did not see it as a social medium, but they
were selling web hosting. They offered more space for payment and
things like that, but it ceased to be a social medium and became just
another commercial entity. It stopped growing, and became less
attractive, so Yahoo! decided it was less profitable than they had
thought it would be and pulled the plug.

They did the same with a lot of other things as well.

When blogs became popular ab out 20 years ago, various services were
offered that helped blogs with similar themes to link up, rather liked
the themed communitiews on Geocities. They were called Webrings. It
was just a bit of code that you put in your blog which linked your
blog to a themed ring, and you could click on it to take you to the
next site. Yahoo! took it over and killed it.

There was a similar thing called MyBlogLog. Again a bit of code that
showed the last five blogs you had visited in a sidebar. If someone
liked your blog, they might like one of the ones you visited, so it
was a social medium, linking people with similar interests. Yahoo!
took it over, tried to turn it into something like Facebook, which it
wasn't, and killed it.

Then there was eGroups -- a public mailing list server, with a bunch
of useful features you could access if you went to the web site, where
they displayed banner ads.

Yahoo bought it, called it YahooGroups, and improved it still further,
which made it very useful indeed. Then appointed a different person to
run it, who again didn'ty understand what made it attractive to users,
and tried to make it more like Facebook, with "friends" and
"followers". and support began to drop off, so they killed it.

But there is a replacement, called groups.io. You can join it for
free, and start a mailing list. If you want more, you can pay. It's
basically run by one bloke, Mark Fletcher. If it grows, and the work
becomes too much for him, he might sell out to one of the big
companies, and it will probably go downhill and die, like its
predecessors.

> My own first site, on which I taught myself HTML, was
>on Mindspring, my ISP at the time. They provided 5 MB
>of space to any customer who wanted it, for free. It came
>with the ISP account. A lot of ISPs did
>that. It was part of the vision -- that the Internet was
>for everyone, so everyone should be able to have a
>connection, email, and a "front door" onto the information
>superhighway. Even today one can get a free site on
>Wordpress, or a dirt-cheap site at servers like Dreamhost.
>Are you, perhaps, too young to remember when the Web
>wasn't a shopping mall? It's really true. :)

Yes, Geocities was like that, and that's where I learnt html.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

Isaac Montara <IsaacMontara@nospam.com> writes:

> On Tue, 23 Jul 2024 05:58:32 -0700, John C. wrote:
>
>>> In a shock move, Google has suddenly confirmed that its long-awaited
>>> killing of Chrome's dreaded tracking cookies has just crashed and
>>> burned.
>> Perfect example of why I've never used Google Chrome.
>
> Does Safari or Firefox or Bromite or Edge do cookie tracking different?

Firefox stores cookies in containers by default, i.e. one container per
site, so in theory this means they cannot be used for tracking. It may
break some things where two different login domains are used though,
like live.com and microsoft.com.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cookie-protection-standard-mode

On 7/29/2024 6:23 AM, Richmond wrote:

> Firefox stores cookies in containers by default, i.e. one container per
> site, so in theory this means they cannot be used for tracking. It may
> break some things where two different login domains are used though,
> like live.com and microsoft.com.
>
> https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cookie-protection-standard-mode
>

That's of very limited value. With Google on nearly
every website, their 3rd-party tracking can connect
the dots. It's ironic to call it "enhanced tracking protection".
The very idea of 3rd-party cookies is to spy and
conflicts with the original intent of cookies, which was
to hold data between webpages and only within a domain.

With TCP, Mozilla is still allowing 3rd-party cookies. They
claim they're not allowing a Google cookie at ace.com to be
read from acme.com, but that's of little value when Google
is setting cookies at both domains and therefore still follows
people around online. What Mozilla are effectively doing is
to turn 3rd-party cookies into 1st-party cookies. Big whoop,
as the saying goes.

Anyone who wants better privacy but must allow cookies
would do best to set FF to delete cookies at the end of the
session -- then don't leave FF open when not actively browsing.
(Of course, that solution won't work for people who like to
leave 100 tabs open. They're being tracked continuously.)

On Mon, 29 Jul 2024 07:35:48 -0400, Newyana2 <newyana@invalid.nospam>
wrote:

> Anyone who wants better privacy but must allow cookies
>would do best to set FF to delete cookies at the end of the
>session -- then don't leave FF open when not actively browsing.
>(Of course, that solution won't work for people who like to
>leave 100 tabs open. They're being tracked continuously.)

On my Win 10 laptop I use the latest version of Firefox, which doesn't
offer the option of session-only cookies.

On my Win XP desktop I use an older version of Firefox, which does not
see the "we value your privacy" pop-up messages at all. but the
browser has its own pop-up which asks what you want to do with
cookies, and unless it's a site where I'm a registered user and visit
freqently, I always choose the "this session only" option.

I wonder why more recent versions of Firefox don't offer that.

--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk