The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)(maggieappleton.com)
maggieappleton.com
The dark forest and the cozy web (2020)
https://maggieappleton.com/cozy-web
55 comments
> Why open yourself up to real life consequences from a puritanical culture when you can limit discussions to those you know share similar views?
Or with people who may have wildly different views from you, but whom you trust to disagree amicably and remain tolerant of those views.
I started a private discussion board a few years ago for just this purpose: it became impossible to have a good-faith discussion of almost anything on the open web. Within the boundaries of a private community, you can have some expectation of safety that you can't have if the audience is the entire world, as it is on Twitter (or even HN). With that safety you can disagree more with less fear of consequences, which is how it should be (and was, before all this shit).
Or with people who may have wildly different views from you, but whom you trust to disagree amicably and remain tolerant of those views.
I started a private discussion board a few years ago for just this purpose: it became impossible to have a good-faith discussion of almost anything on the open web. Within the boundaries of a private community, you can have some expectation of safety that you can't have if the audience is the entire world, as it is on Twitter (or even HN). With that safety you can disagree more with less fear of consequences, which is how it should be (and was, before all this shit).
People are definitely scared about being "outed" in private communities too. Seems anything with searchable text creates fear.
Many niche communities now are entirely accepting of, and active participants in, knee-jerk feigned outrage and groupthink. I don't think fear of cancel culture is a big aspect, since a lot of them actively cheer it on. Remember, the well small places draw from isn't filled by other niche communities and tech people anymore -- it's Twitter, Reddit and Facebook.
In the case of places that are not self hosted, like Discord communities, closing off is often a means of survival against a mostly automated moderation system. I've seen several relatively large Discord communities be wiped out by small groups of obsessive and sad people going around and reporting out of context posts until one finally pops the server and gets it deleted.
In the case of places that are not self hosted, like Discord communities, closing off is often a means of survival against a mostly automated moderation system. I've seen several relatively large Discord communities be wiped out by small groups of obsessive and sad people going around and reporting out of context posts until one finally pops the server and gets it deleted.
I think the concept of things like facebook and twitter is fundamentally opposed to the way that humans normally interact.
When I was growing up, we sent out a christmas letter once a year to everyone we knew. That comprised of family (near and far), local friends (each parent had like 3, and I had a couple), and longterm close friends (each parent had two). Basically everyone in my whole family did this, and everyone I knew did this too. This is an analogy for what facebook is to most people, but twisted.
Twitter is more of a "stand on your soapbox and scream and the passersby". Both of these services are something that, before the open internet of 2010-now, people did once or twice a year and maybe 5 times in their life (respectively) unless they are activists or politicians.
Meanwhile, gossiping with your friends at a lunchtable at school or work is as old as time, and the "cozy web" feels like this.
TLDR facebook and twitter are communication methods that are unnatural for the standard human to use more than once or twice a year.
When I was growing up, we sent out a christmas letter once a year to everyone we knew. That comprised of family (near and far), local friends (each parent had like 3, and I had a couple), and longterm close friends (each parent had two). Basically everyone in my whole family did this, and everyone I knew did this too. This is an analogy for what facebook is to most people, but twisted.
Twitter is more of a "stand on your soapbox and scream and the passersby". Both of these services are something that, before the open internet of 2010-now, people did once or twice a year and maybe 5 times in their life (respectively) unless they are activists or politicians.
Meanwhile, gossiping with your friends at a lunchtable at school or work is as old as time, and the "cozy web" feels like this.
TLDR facebook and twitter are communication methods that are unnatural for the standard human to use more than once or twice a year.
That diagram doesn't make a lot of sense to me, hierarchy wise. At the top the diagram contains, "inhabited by [...] trolls", and at the bottom "the only way into 8chan".
If the hierarchy is "public visibility", then I believe the dark net to be more visible than a private WhatsApp group.
If the hierarchy is "public visibility", then I believe the dark net to be more visible than a private WhatsApp group.
It's not intended to be a data graphic with clear X and Y axes, it's visual poetry. It's meant to communicate a feeling about the concepts far more so than it is to be a navigable map.
But it /has/ a clear vertical axis and separate layers. Why make that artistic choice if it doesn't mean anything?
What does it mean that the forest has surface trees, a shallow surface-dweller layer, and deeper decay and bedrock layers?
Is there something meaningful (in terms of linear continuity) on the y-axis of a forest? Or are you looking for a continuous function to apply where the metaphor isn't asking for one?
Is there something meaningful (in terms of linear continuity) on the y-axis of a forest? Or are you looking for a continuous function to apply where the metaphor isn't asking for one?
Each layer on the y-axis of a forest has logical and physical relationships to those above and below it.
“Visual poetry” is an excellent phrase.
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It really is an arbitrary diagram. Any regular user of any of these levels can confidently say all levels have "decomposed morals". All levels have videos of animal abuse, posts for teen prostitution, et cetera.
And there really is nothing cozy about data-hoarding closed mega-corp software like Discord and Snapchat. As convenient as they are, 'cozy' is not the word.
The writer likely just thinks "LinkedIn and Facebook == Bad!" and "My two Discord servers with my friends == Good!" and just made huge generalizations from there.
And there really is nothing cozy about data-hoarding closed mega-corp software like Discord and Snapchat. As convenient as they are, 'cozy' is not the word.
The writer likely just thinks "LinkedIn and Facebook == Bad!" and "My two Discord servers with my friends == Good!" and just made huge generalizations from there.
The second paragraph quotes them as being "slum-like spaces" so I'm not sure where you derive cause for reducing the author's viewpoint to naive idealism like that. If anything this seems like a pretty conventional viewpoint these days, that the web has shifted from broadcasting to smaller peer-to-peer interactions. It doesn't seem particularly controversial.
Sometimes a decomposing carcass ends up resting on the forest floor instead of buried or scavenged.
... but not for long, and it's not the expected common-case continuously-observed scenario when one walks in the woods. The point is that such a thing is a transient, unstable configuration at one layer and the expected configuration at another layer.
... but not for long, and it's not the expected common-case continuously-observed scenario when one walks in the woods. The point is that such a thing is a transient, unstable configuration at one layer and the expected configuration at another layer.
> At the top the diagram contains, "inhabited by [...] trolls", and at the bottom "the only way into 8chan"
Your comment seemed sensible to me, until I realized that it's likely because we are both old and think about trolls as being on 8chan.
But if you look at pretty much any time since about 2015, the most notable trolls have been large public figures with an extremely wide reach, saying the same sort of things that get a rise out of people on 8chan and Reddit. To take the most recent example, Elon Musk's upending of Reddit can be seen at least partially as an instance of a large public trolling. On a more distributed plane, phrases like "own the libs" are common enough in the public consciousness to be used by angry 45-year old commenters on Facebook who have never been to 4/8chan.
That is why trolls are at the top of the diagram, because it's a diagram as of 2023 -- whereas you're thinking of trolling from 2013 or maybe even 2003.
Your comment seemed sensible to me, until I realized that it's likely because we are both old and think about trolls as being on 8chan.
But if you look at pretty much any time since about 2015, the most notable trolls have been large public figures with an extremely wide reach, saying the same sort of things that get a rise out of people on 8chan and Reddit. To take the most recent example, Elon Musk's upending of Reddit can be seen at least partially as an instance of a large public trolling. On a more distributed plane, phrases like "own the libs" are common enough in the public consciousness to be used by angry 45-year old commenters on Facebook who have never been to 4/8chan.
That is why trolls are at the top of the diagram, because it's a diagram as of 2023 -- whereas you're thinking of trolling from 2013 or maybe even 2003.
The "Digital garden" part also makes very little sense. Notes on personal wikis. What? How is this part of the social web?
She's got a whole article explaining what she means by "digital garden"—it's a public personal wiki.
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history
I don't see any rhyme or reason to the top down hierarchy. Perhaps the author's subjective sense of public utility.
Not to mention it has "trolls" at the top, but I'm pretty sure the whole idea of the cosy web started on 4chan.
The whole thing seems incredibly wrong and strikes me as being made by somebody very unaware of the ecosystem around them.
I might be old school but I still think about the web in terms of the OSI model.
The only thing that changes are the hammers to solve the same problems. Everyone wants to be a monopolist and squeeze in somewhere in between, combining several functions under one solution, which force more functions to handle there functions. They are simply something else, depending on how you want to sell it - maybe as a base for further things? Bypassing the above, everything works the same.
Non-techies like me haven't a clue what "OSI" stands for.
If you google "OSI model" you'll find tons of resources of varying levels of technical difficulty. Pick the one that suits you best!
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> hopefully one day evolving "from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable, interlinked clips"
No thanks. "Personal" and "Blockchain" don't belong in the same idea. I want to be able to delete my things. And I don't want to have to run (or pay to run) nodes to do...whatever it is that proof of stake needs to avoid a 51% attack on my "personal Blockchain".
And before someone says it, no, I don't want anything I do stored immutably on Ethereum or any other chain. Keep crypto away from my social.
No thanks. "Personal" and "Blockchain" don't belong in the same idea. I want to be able to delete my things. And I don't want to have to run (or pay to run) nodes to do...whatever it is that proof of stake needs to avoid a 51% attack on my "personal Blockchain".
And before someone says it, no, I don't want anything I do stored immutably on Ethereum or any other chain. Keep crypto away from my social.
You're commenting on one of the few sites on the internet that doesn't give you the freedom to delete your own content.
It's the main reason I don't take my participation here very seriously and can only treat it as anonymous throwaway content.
It's the main reason I don't take my participation here very seriously and can only treat it as anonymous throwaway content.
And because of that, I mind my words. I don't reveal a ton about myself.
A permanent record of every social interaction in my life is both a huge privacy risk (an advertiser's dream!) and completely unnecessary. I don't want to censor myself when talking with my closest friends because I'm worried about everything I say and have ever said becoming irrevocably part of the public record. I want to choose a technology where that isn't the default.
A permanent record of every social interaction in my life is both a huge privacy risk (an advertiser's dream!) and completely unnecessary. I don't want to censor myself when talking with my closest friends because I'm worried about everything I say and have ever said becoming irrevocably part of the public record. I want to choose a technology where that isn't the default.
One great thing about being old (75 in June) is that you don't care at all about privacy/public record/what's deletable or not...
Not everyone is in a safe situation to not care what's public. Being LGBT can be unsafe in many parts of the world and can have serious consequences if made public, like losing housing or facing violence.
I understand. My comment was solely about the joy of being a geezer.
Not entirely true: you can edit/delete your posts and comments for a while (I don't know the exact length of time) after you post them.
I wonder if substituting blockchain with "standardized way of referencing a personal database" would solve most of your gripes.
I do feel the annoyance of people trying to shoehorn "crypto" terminology into personal stuff, but I think there's probably a reasonable non-cryptobullshit way (like WebMentions, which are used on the author's site) to get what the author actually wants, which is a way for me to control the data I want to make available to the wider internet, and to delete them and leave gaps when I chose to do so.
I do feel the annoyance of people trying to shoehorn "crypto" terminology into personal stuff, but I think there's probably a reasonable non-cryptobullshit way (like WebMentions, which are used on the author's site) to get what the author actually wants, which is a way for me to control the data I want to make available to the wider internet, and to delete them and leave gaps when I chose to do so.
Speaking of Ethereum, related:
Ethereum is a Dark Forest (2020): https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
Ethereum is a Dark Forest (2020): https://www.paradigm.xyz/2020/08/ethereum-is-a-dark-forest
HN would seem to be part of the Cozy Web as long as dang keeps his hand in
dang does a great job, but I don't think it's enough to qualify (anymore).
HN's indexed, registration is open, and its size/influence have grown enough that I regularly see people here trying to grind ideological axes. I've found myself retreating from it along with the others.
HN's indexed, registration is open, and its size/influence have grown enough that I regularly see people here trying to grind ideological axes. I've found myself retreating from it along with the others.
Yes. From time to time I pull back from an exchange here when it becomes clear my interlocutor would sooner die than concede they're wrong.
As they say, "Not gonna die on that hill."
As they say, "Not gonna die on that hill."
"Never ask a woman her age, a man his salary, or a HN poster what they think we should do about the homeless in SF, Seattle, and Portland"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34243709 previous submission of a similar article from the same author. love her illustration!
10/10 to the creator of the site, it's such a lovely site. It feels so fast.
From the Colophon in the footer, here it is on GitHub:
https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/maggieappleton.com-V2
https://github.com/MaggieAppleton/maggieappleton.com-V2
Gatsby.
Couldn't read this because Dark Reader did not manage to make it dark.
Talk about dark and cozy.
Talk about dark and cozy.
Does this work?: https://archive.ph/MIkgN
Yes! Except the image...
try this: https://www.swiss-miss.com/2023/04/the-cozy-web.html
I'm determined to get you there
I'm determined to get you there
Privacy is something of an illusion - any 'private discussion' on a supposedly safe back-channel can easily get leaked to the wider web by any number of mechanisms, such as nation-state monitoring or a member of the privileged membership club leaving their keys lying around.
In this context, it should be kept in mind that the desired outcome of a panoptic monitoring system controlled by an authoritarian power, be it socialist or capitalist in nature, is self-censorship by the target population and its retreat into hidey-holes (which the authorities still have access to) which either provide a false sense of security or limit the spread of objectionable ideas and knowledge. Going along with this program is unwise: give the authoritarian power structure an inch and it'll take a mile, and then you end up having to deal with the Gestapo/STASI system.
Additionally, the psychological pressures imposed by such a system lead to widespread mental illness in human beings. Relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/137/
In this context, it should be kept in mind that the desired outcome of a panoptic monitoring system controlled by an authoritarian power, be it socialist or capitalist in nature, is self-censorship by the target population and its retreat into hidey-holes (which the authorities still have access to) which either provide a false sense of security or limit the spread of objectionable ideas and knowledge. Going along with this program is unwise: give the authoritarian power structure an inch and it'll take a mile, and then you end up having to deal with the Gestapo/STASI system.
Additionally, the psychological pressures imposed by such a system lead to widespread mental illness in human beings. Relevant xkcd:
https://xkcd.com/137/
I can't speak for everyone, but I landed here because the word "cozy" resonated with me right now—I'm in the mood for some good vibes. While it would be very HN for a thread about "the cozy web" to tangent into a high-stakes, hugh-strung discussion of authoritarianism... could we, for once, let a conversation about cozy things have its day?
FunFact: "The Americans favour the spelling cozy, while the British prefer cosy."
People are fooled by marketing and sales pitches. Cloud services are on the Internet. A fact that everyone twists themselves into knots to try to ignore. No matter how many times a service’s marketing materials say “private” and “secure” and “trust”, at the end of the day, when you use that service, you are sending data to the Internet. Don’t send anything to the internet you wouldn’t want published one the New York Times or sent to your worst enemy.
Look at cloud services in this light and of course you’ll be more careful about what you post! You will also not be surprised at the fallout of data breaches. “Millions of social security numbers leaked!” Well of course: you sent yours to the internet when you signed up for that credit card. “My nude photos are getting passed around!” Of course they are: you sent them to iCloud (the internet). “My private DMs got anonymously sent to my ex-wife!” You sent them to the Internet.
Look at cloud services in this light and of course you’ll be more careful about what you post! You will also not be surprised at the fallout of data breaches. “Millions of social security numbers leaked!” Well of course: you sent yours to the internet when you signed up for that credit card. “My nude photos are getting passed around!” Of course they are: you sent them to iCloud (the internet). “My private DMs got anonymously sent to my ex-wife!” You sent them to the Internet.
I think there's a small but significant difference between putting things "in public" vs. "on the cozy web" in that (with not a lot of effort) the cozy web is practically safe enough for most folk.
We've reached a point now where the average person feels some anxiety about their future employer seeing an unsanitized public blog, but future employers aren't poking into a Discord and de-pseudonymizing usernames. Nor is my worst enemy; he's a meathead and lacks the savvy to do that, nor the competency to hire someone to do it for him (yeah, I said it, and you know what you did so don't act like it ain't true, name redacted!).
We've gone past the generation that thought if we lived with our private lives in public everyone would realize that everyone is human and be chill about that and we've built the infrastructure to have public selves and pseudonymous selves that (for most people) won't get cracked because it's not worth the hassle. Sure, nation-states and criminal syndicates still have the resources and incentives to do that kind of cracking, but we can only hide from them by staying all the way off the Internet, and we've definitely reached the point where that leaves one with a massively de-enriched lived experience.
We've reached a point now where the average person feels some anxiety about their future employer seeing an unsanitized public blog, but future employers aren't poking into a Discord and de-pseudonymizing usernames. Nor is my worst enemy; he's a meathead and lacks the savvy to do that, nor the competency to hire someone to do it for him (yeah, I said it, and you know what you did so don't act like it ain't true, name redacted!).
We've gone past the generation that thought if we lived with our private lives in public everyone would realize that everyone is human and be chill about that and we've built the infrastructure to have public selves and pseudonymous selves that (for most people) won't get cracked because it's not worth the hassle. Sure, nation-states and criminal syndicates still have the resources and incentives to do that kind of cracking, but we can only hide from them by staying all the way off the Internet, and we've definitely reached the point where that leaves one with a massively de-enriched lived experience.
The cozy web relies on "(human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams", hopefully one day changing "from cut-and-paste to a personal blockchain of context-permissioned, addressable, searchable, interlinked clips"
1. I wonder how much of this is also driven by 'cancel culture', invasive media coverage, etc? After seeing stuff like how Scott Alexander's life got upended a bit after the New York Times covered Slate Star Codex, I wouldn't be surprised if many niche communities decided that making their discussions and ideas publicly viewable wasn't worth it.
Why open yourself up to real life consequences from a puritanical culture when you can limit discussions to those you know share similar views?
2. I also suspect the feeling that third parties were profiting from said information without really crediting the source may have had an impact too. I know a few communities that didn't share info until one of their own members had covered it on YouTube because they were sick of large channels and websites repackaging the info and getting credited as the 'source'.