To give some general advice about online safety and your mind.

[iloveeverykindofcat]

Not a TAAT, but regarding a phenomenon in a now-deleted thread wherein someone made an oblique reference to a notorious website known to those immersed in online culture since the early 2000s and some user figured out how to get there for the first time. I possibly helped, by telling people that what they were referring to was a website.

Slight reveal here, but I'm a sociologist and my area of expertise is online culture. I've been obsessed with the internet since I was 13, before the spread of home broadband, and the internet was a much wilder place. I've seen a lot - from the dark web (go there all the time) to 4chan (literally studied it) back to the days when shock and gore sites really were shock and gore, and parental supervision wasn't a thing.

I have some advice: guard your mind. Hypocritical coming from me, but this is a do as I say, not do as I do thread. Plus, its my career now, so there you go. Curiosity is a powerful thing, but what's seen cannot be unseen, and the media we engage with does interact with our brains (it doesn't cause us to do anything, that's nonsense, but our brains are very plastic, and the interaction is real). I studied 4chan for a year and got a nice career-boosting book chapter out of it, but it literally made me more depressed, anxious, and pessimistic.

That said, people are curious, and I can't make you take my advice. So pragmatically speaking, if you're new to this sort of thing, and you're hell-bent on going poking around in the subterranean corners of the internet:

• make sure you have top-notch virus protection. Not just whatever came with your computer
• Use an onion browser. Private mode is not enough.
• Delete every trace of your history
• Use encrypted payments online for everything (you should be doing this anyway).

Overall, remember, you have limited time in life. In some ways, its 'too late for me' - I'm joking, I actually love my work, but it can be very draining at times. Some of us are naturally drawn to dark and serious topics. But how much time do you actually want to spend thinking about them, and going back to those places on the internet? Because you will. Once you start, you will.

(Here endeth the sermon)

Like you OP I’ve witnessed the growth and evolution of the web since the early days of Netscape Navigator and Yahoo! But I’ve never approached the depths you’ve mentioned and don’t intend to for the reasons you give!

What I do wonder is how can people protect themselves against the more commonly used sites?

Twitter as a timeline is great for me to connect with select people, but I absolutely detest the Explore section and have wished I could unsee a lot of the stuff on there. Yes there are other Twitter apps that could do this, but Twitter have been very clever (toxic) with their API so you can’t use it as meaningfully as the official app.

@BobSacamono To an extent - you can't. There is a price to be paid for using any and every app, and it ultimately comes down to your time and attention. Website designers for major corporates (like Twitter) are as clever as the designers of addictive food - they know you're going back to that Explore page. There's only so much 'nudging' we can resist. You have to weight it up - am I going to use the main app, get all the benefits, and pay the mental price in time and attention - or am I going to use a limited version and pay less? Overall, I find Twitter to be worth it, but that's partly because I run a professional account on behalf of an organization I really believe in, and use that much more than my personal one. Also the obvious stuff - curate your feed as much as possible, block like hell, and try really hard to resist clicking on the trending bullshit.

By the way, the absolute worst mainstream app IMO is TikTok. That's not to say people can't use it for good things, but in terms of its design, its the worst kind of addictive junk non-food.

That’s a good angle and I think it’s what keeps me on there - the value found in the connections both on Twitter and Instagram are what keep me there and outweigh the effects of the noise. I’m not sure how the devs could interfere with that but the day they destroy that for me is the day I quit!

Agreed re TikTok - it’s by far the most sinister app to date in my opinion.

I was going to say sinister, then decided that might be going to far. But you're right - by design, it is sinister, particularly for children's developing brains. I genuinely urge parents to keep their children away from TikTok if they possibly can. I know, I know, kids will do it anyway. But at least try, because it truly is the worst mainstream app out there.

My personal balance is
Worth it:

Twitter (personal and professional)
Facebook (limited use)
Reddit.

Not worth it:

Instagram
Tumblr
TikTok

The other thing to bear in mind is that nothing you post online is truly anonymous, ever. I mean it sort of is at the time you write it, but it's almost certainly traceable to you. I'm not a criminologist, so most of what I study is legal (though some is borderline/grey area). But I know criminal sociologists who look at, for example, terrorist recruitment. They have to do this on a particular computer in a locked lab at a particular university. The Home Office is aware of this computer and its use.