Writer Sanctum
Other & Off-Topics => Bar & Grill [Public] => Topic started by: Post-Crisis D on December 28, 2018, 04:02:47 AM
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Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot.
Interesting article. Click farms are used for more than just KU page reads.
Also shows the pitfalls of online advertising. How do you know that your ads are being seen by actual people? And how much ad spend is simply wasted on fake traffic?
How Much of the Internet is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually. (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/how-much-of-the-internet-is-fake.html)
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"...it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real."
Scary crazy world.
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Wow. Maybe the level of scamming on Amazon isn't so bad, given the bigger picture. :icon_eek:
It's funny ... one world-building premise of the Dune books I always found a bit lacking was the idea that computers had been banned as irredeemable dangerous to humanity. But I'm starting to see why people might come to feel that way.
We're not quite at the point where video and audio can be faked in a 100% convincing way, but I'm sure we'll get there. How are societies going to function when there are no trusted institutions and no good ways for the average person to distinguish better from worse information?
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We're not quite at the point where video and audio can be faked in a 100% convincing way, but I'm sure we'll get there. How are societies going to function when there are no trusted institutions and no good ways for the average person to distinguish better from worse information?
I guess we have to hope for holographic Mr. Garibaldi's. :hehe
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How are societies going to function when there are no trusted institutions and no good ways for the average person to distinguish better from worse information?
The same way they used to before we had TV?
Besides, societies are about to become much smaller. When you live in a tribe of a hundred people on an asteroid, you don't have to care much about what someone millions of miles away might or might not have said.
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How are societies going to function when there are no trusted institutions and no good ways for the average person to distinguish better from worse information?
The same way they used to before we had TV?
TV, before cable came along, was okay. When there were just four channels on TV, the family would watch shows together on their single set. The only phones in the house were in the kitchen and possibly one in the master bedroom. As a kid, you had to ask before you called someone. If your family was typical, you read the local daily paper and had a few magazine subscriptions. We got Time, Newsweek, Economist, Life, National Geo, Atlantic Monthly, and a few others. I'd read them cover to cover. We would watch the half-hour nightly news together (for my father, a Republican, that meant no left-wing Cronkite).
I was a kid living in South Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. There were fighter jets and cargo planes flying over us every day. We wouldn't know what was happening until the nightly news--imagine that (I don't recall any 24-hour radio news back then). Everybody talked to everybody else--neighbors over their fences, on porches, in the diners, while shopping. Not a single person would be staring into their palms scrolling through Zergnet or Outbrain clickbait.
I don't recall **** being an issue (back then, news organizations would just leave stuff out of their reporting to suit their audience). The yelling took place in the opinion pages between professional types who'd earned the right have an opinion. Now that right belongs to anyone with an internet connection.
Guess I was feeling a little nostalgic there and got a little off topic...
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How are societies going to function when there are no trusted institutions and no good ways for the average person to distinguish better from worse information?
The same way they used to before we had TV?
TV, before cable came along, was okay. When there were just four channels on TV, the family would watch shows together on their single set. The only phones in the house were in the kitchen and possibly one in the master bedroom. As a kid, you had to ask before you called someone. If your family was typical, you read the local daily paper and had a few magazine subscriptions. We got Time, Newsweek, Economist, Life, National Geo, Atlantic Monthly, and a few others. I'd read them cover to cover. We would watch the half-hour nightly news together (for my father, a Republican, that meant no left-wing Cronkite).
I was a kid living in South Florida during the Cuban missile crisis. There were fighter jets and cargo planes flying over us every day. We wouldn't know what was happening until the nightly news--imagine that (I don't recall any 24-hour radio news back then). Everybody talked to everybody else--neighbors over their fences, on porches, in the diners, while shopping. Not a single person would be staring into their palms scrolling through Zergnet or Outbrain clickbait.
I don't recall **** being an issue (back then, news organizations would just leave stuff out of their reporting to suit their audience). The yelling took place in the opinion pages between professional types who'd earned the right have an opinion. Now that right belongs to anyone with an internet connection.
Guess I was feeling a little nostalgic there and got a little off topic...
I was in Miami at the time, but I was in college. The Cuban Missile Crisis was, of course, the hot topic of conversation, and being college students, a lot of folks were getting in what they felt were their last parties. We were pretty well convinced those missiles would be hitting us and we'd be dead.
We watched Huntley and Brinkley, got The Miami Herald, Time and Newsweek.
Come to think of it, my college years were pretty eventful. The Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Johnson/Goldwater election, the Beatles coming to America (yes, I was at the airport when they arrived in Miami).
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Come to think of it, my college years were pretty eventful. The Missile Crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the Johnson/Goldwater election, the Beatles coming to America (yes, I was at the airport when they arrived in Miami).
I think they were on the Ed Sullivan show the week before. My sister ran through a screen door getting to the TV.
My school was 100 yards from the railway (Deerfield Beach). During the Cuban crisis, trains passed all day long hauling tanks and other military equipment on flatbeds (never figured out what use the tanks would be since Cuba was 70 miles across the water). It was a big deal at the time.