<story><title>7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?</title><url>https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americans-dont-use-the-internet-who-are-they/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xkeysc0re</author><text>Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet.&lt;p&gt;I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it&amp;#x27;s obvious there&amp;#x27;s something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. &amp;quot;Being online&amp;quot; entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Lammy</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve lost a few very good friends due to this. In-person and online interactions with the same person would vary wildly in tone and emotional intensity, like speaking to two entirely different people. The online interactions always pushed us apart, and the in-person interactions never failed to mend things, but of course those stopped happening over the previous year. I have to assume it&amp;#x27;s the same way with me toward others.&lt;p&gt;If I may entertain an idea without necessarily believing it, I would not be surprised if many of the accounts on major social-media sites like Reddit, Twitter, etc are non-human persons tasked with pushing one narrative or another (no specific implication intended&amp;#x2F;assumed). The &amp;quot;subreddit simulator&amp;quot; powered by GPT-2 bots has more than enough realistic-seeming conversations to make me not immediately reject the idea, since we&amp;#x27;ve all seen how much better GPT-3 is and I assume private entities have even better language models than that: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;SubSimulatorGPT2&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;old.reddit.com&amp;#x2F;r&amp;#x2F;SubSimulatorGPT2&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;My additional total-speculation is that all the NSA&amp;#x2F;FVEY surveillance of our everyday online conversations and interactions would be an excellent training set for such a hypothetical language model.</text></comment>
<story><title>7% of Americans don’t use the internet. Who are they?</title><url>https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/02/7-of-americans-dont-use-the-internet-who-are-they/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xkeysc0re</author><text>Honestly, I wish I could stop using the internet.&lt;p&gt;I make a lot of things and enjoy sharing them because other people might find them useful. It has often led to wonderful and inspiring conversations. Yet it&amp;#x27;s obvious there&amp;#x27;s something very very wrong happening with American culture that began around the time of social media platform consolidation. &amp;quot;Being online&amp;quot; entails a distinct mindset and attitude that is incompatible with in-person socialization, but the two spaces are nonetheless continually mashed together and propagated by various forces in government and media. You have to ask yourself why.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure of the answer but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>after_care</author><text>Being on social media is only a subset of being online.  Plenty of people are not on social media but still watch tv, bank, and get gps directions online.</text></comment>