Ask HN: What are some ways the internet is being used for good?

I have been in a rut hyper-focusing on ways the internet is used for bad (disinformation, harvesting info, bullying). It would be lovely to hear some ways the internet is being used for good. From general things like rapid knowledge sharing to more obscure or specific!

Things I can think of:

- you can now video call to the other side of the world. This makes it possible for example, old people to be able to see and interact with their grandkids without traveling.

- Disabled people can live a social life. You can for example watch the ibelin documentary on Netflix if you want to see a touching side of this [1]

- Remote work as an viable career. Claudia Goldin identified that one contributing factor to pay disparity between gender is inflexible work schedule. This disproportionately affect mothers, having to juggle child rearing and inflexible job. The fact that remote work is possible, can (and is) contributing to more equality being possible.

- dramatically lowering the cost, and increasing the access to learning material. Eager but poor and unlucky kids have never had the opportunity they have now when it comes to learning.

- "equality of opportunity driven better meritocratic filtering". My own pet theory, but the raise of internet have increased inequality by giving equal opportunities. Kids from poor family, but raised with good values and curiosity, discipline can now excel in life. Meanwhile, average kids from background of good wealth only sustained by generational factors have it a bit trickier now; they'll get stuck on the useless attention attrition side of internet (TikTok, reddit, etc) and get dragged down. By no means perfect, but you can find many "lifted by equal opportunity presented by internet" life stories on HN/tech world.

- Efficient data transfer. I don't have the numbers but I'd imagine physically sending CDs and books probably wouldn't be as efficient as sending data.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/disability-47064773

7 months agoby NalNezumi

Youtube is fantastic for troubleshooting. Appliances, cars, etc. It's my first stop when I can't figure out how to fiddle with something mechanical to make it work.

We couldn't buy groceries online without the internet and that saves my family an hour a week.

7 months agoby mooreds

Torrenting for downloading books on Science, Math or Philosophy.

Bitcoin as pithekanthropus-free payment system.

Buying and especially selling some second-hand items.

Talking to foreign friends via video with totally zero cost.

Upgrading my free and open-source software with no CD/DVD.

Web2 forums and private text-only chats with strong cryptography.

I don't recommend this to everybody, but listening to youtube all day long, the catch is in dealing with Algorythm to prevent bad recommendations.

I don't recommend this to everybody, but reading political news without fakes was impossible in paper era, now it has simplified to just a very hard.

That's a full list, every else use case of Internet by me is forced to me without any my appreciation.

7 months agoby eimrine

I'm commenting on Hacker News, and I believe that getting access to a community of engineers, programmers, whatever, successful people, has been a net positive for me. So many good ideas get shared here.

Hobbies that you want to discover more in, but no one in your immediate friend group knows. You want to go deep in programming, basketball, golf, whatever. There's multiple Youtube videos, subreddits, etc. for it.

Video calling? Chatting with a person from literally thousands of miles away? My grandpa used to literally write a letter on paper to his brother who was in the States. Now I can just call my parents with video calls.

7 months agoby daryllxd

I'm working remotely using Signal to collaborate, listening to MIT radio (wmbr.org) on-line. From my laptop I operate machines in AWS. Occasionaly I upload code to gitlab.

I like to think I'm working for good.

7 months agoby mac3n

Mitopencourseware, language learning courses, open source books, I can go on if you need more.

7 months agoby bawis

Back in ye olde days, people would travel by ship to talk to a smart guy, memorize everything they said then return back to their lands with the memory, and spread it amongst their tribe.

Then we invented writing. People would still travel to a library to copy a book down and then bring it back to their libraries. There would be less errors too.

Then the printing press. It was easy to make lots of books. Even less errors because books would be identical, word for word. We lost quite a bit of art here, but it was worth.

Then the internet. Copying a book was simply CMD+A, CMD+C, CMD+V.

Then Web 2 like FB and Twitter. You didn't even need books. You could just @ any celebrity in the world.

But the cheaper information is, the cheaper misinformation became. The will to produce information is often much greater than producing misinformation. I think friction is too low on some places; the classic forums were probably information at its ideal.

7 months agoby muzani

>I have been in a rut hyper-focusing on ways the internet is used for bad (disinformation, harvesting info, bullying).

i dont see those as bad. Bad would be compromising, ransomeware, etc. Bullying online isnt a thing that's causing mass $ damages. disinformation based on who's definitions?

> It would be lovely to hear some ways the internet is being used for good.

How many of us essentially learn skills off the internet and havent done a class, school, or certification in basically forever? We have supercharged rapid education for the entire globe.

We have just barely started to realize the impact of supercharged education. This goes way beyond watching a youtube video to change a part in a car. The next generation of workers who are struggling to get a job right now are going to be really smart.

But then factor in chatAI and the generation after them will be even better.

My generation is more like stackoverflow, reddit, github. Which you can immediately tell why that was terrible.

The amazing thing about supercharged education, it feeds into literally everything else.

7 months agoby incomingpain

What are some ways the internet is being used for good?

Free exchange of ideas, knowledge, experience. There was a time one could only get this from the library, peers and mentors. Books are great but the ability to search and grep through data in them is limited by physical access and ones own free time. Now people can drink from the fire-hose of information if they so choose. Peers and mentors need sleep. The internet never sleeps.

disinformation, harvesting info, bullying

While the internet has brought misinformation and other forms of manipulation that has existed since time immemorial including but not limited to books, newspapers and public news broadcast radio and television. The internet just increased the numbers of manipulators, manipulatees and number of agendas which is more overwhelming and obvious than when there were 3 television channels and 2 radios stations that all parroted the same narratives. Now each group from each nation have to compete for ones time, attention and beliefs.

7 months agoby Bender