Comment by spaceribs
9 days ago
There isn't, because human trust can barely scale past 100 people, much less the entire internet. I think humans will recede into the tribes we were always built to understand and be a part of. Private group chats are far more popular and ubiquitous than we give them credit for, and I only see that accelerating in this climate.
Private chats which effectively become echo chambers further dividing an already divided society is what I foresee.
"Echo chambers" have been the default for almost all of human civilization right up until about 10-20 years ago. You communicated with your immediate circle of friends and coworkers rather than arguing politics with LLM bots on Twitter.
No, this is different. A local bubble populated with a normal-ish distribution of people is different from a distributed bubble populated with people who became grouped either voluntarily or algorithmically.
For example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
At some level there is always a private mode. Think family and friends. Do you not have any issue with everything being public? I think the parent suggests we’re not made for very large groups and I kind of agree. I can’t name 100 people I know or known in my life. Maybe I can (barely) but with great effort.
on the contrary.
Good fences make for good neighbors.
Its not a coincidence that the printing press brought devastating war to europe in the form of the wars of reformation [1] .
The internet is another real tool for knocking down fences for free, by anyone. Its only a matter of time when there's pushback by angry fence-owners.
We absolutely need less friction and more of minding our own business and focusing on our own back yard instead of chiming in on someone thousands of miles away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% for the free flow of information, but what people (HN crowd?) don't understand is that a significant subgroup of humans cannot tolerate relentless change or challenges to their worldview for too long.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion#Defi...
See also the importing of millions of people whose worldviews we cannot reconcile with ours.
It’s not just the HN crowd.
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Im not sure all private chat groups are really private. Maybe some are but can’t help thinking the industry isn’t at least running AI on private chats and summarize what people are talking about.
That’s orthogonal to the point though, which is about the social value of private chats etc. Not whether they’re truly technologically “private”.
Private in the sense of admittance, not observation.