Most of the people live in the world they invented, where they are the protagonist, naturally young girls want to talk to the protagonist, even when he's 70. You'd have to dismantle their whole worldview to disabuse them of the protagonist idea, but by 70 it's often too far gone and requires facing a million mistakes they have conveniently swept under the rug with the fairytale they've told themselves.
At that age a lot of people literally don't have the intellectual capacity to deal with this. Their brain is biologically atrophied due to illness, not exercising it anymore, not seeing or hearing well anymore (this has a huge impact), being socially isolated, etc.
They're not inventing a new world, they're not "conveniently" and consciously sweeping anything under the rug, they're not telling themselves a fairy tale. They're just losing much of the world they were living in and have to deal with what's left, holes and all. Why do you think old people are such easy targets for scams and fraud in general? Do you think only the body degrades with age?
If you're young enough to not have seen this in action ever, you'd be excused for not understanding at all what happens and for building such bad faith scenarios. Common sense and some light reading on the topic would have prevented that nonetheless.
I recently saw a screenshot from Facebook of a mattress ad presented inline in a page load that had two conventionally attractive normal looking (fully clothed, not immodest at all) women on a mattress. Below it was somebody's grandpa writing a message basically to the effect of "hello sexy ladies I am (name) please chat with me".
It possibly could have been a bot, but I don't think bots commonly use profile pictures of dishevelled looking 75 year old men. Maybe for commenting on political agitprop, they do...
This reminded me of something that happened to me maybe 15 years ago. I was helping my Grandpa get his first smart phone. The saleswoman was maybe mid twenties and had a kinda hoarse voice. I was a little bit younger than her and I thought it was cute in its own way but of course I wasn't gonna say anything. She apologized for being hard to understand and my grandpa said no, it was fine, her voice was sexy.
Naturally I was mortified.
But I wonder how much of it is just "Fuck it, I'm an old man, I'm gonna let my creep flag fly."
Well, it's hard to convey, but he gave off a strong sense of "hitting on her" and she gave off a strong sense of "I'm in customer service and cannot tell him to stop".
But, I was in my latest teens, earliest twenties; I could have been misreading the situation. All I can say for certain is I was uncomfortable.
Seriously, the only time I see people talking about "common sense" is to criticise its perceived absence. Every example people have given of "common sense", not just to me in my life but historical examples reproduced and passed down over the millennia, has been false in some important way where treating it as true held humans back for ages.
Pre Microsoft Skype was malware-grade good. I still remember sysadmins imploding in impotent rage as it near effortlessly evaded their firewalling attempts.
I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.
Well that and people seem to really enjoy (or at least feel compelled to use) social networks.
Social networks tend to be pretty difficult in p2p systems since the amount of traffic usually scales exponentially with network size (as posts get published to followers and shared over and over by the users of the network), which you’d want to maximize
Say I have 100 followers and each of them have 100 followers.
Then say I make a post and all of my followers repost it.
That’s an explosion of updates that need to be sent around for 101 interactions.
These major social media platforms handle millions of interactions per second with accounts that have millions of followers and posts that get hundreds of thousands of reposts.
When there’s a centralized system, it’s easier to make sure everyone gets all their posts. Very little need to propagate every single update across every node in your whole network. From a user standpoint it’s seamless as well
It’s nothing unsolvable, but it’s much harder than a centralized social media platform while providing no visible benefit for the average, non technical, user.
I think that NAT is a major reason why P2P and self hosting failed to take off in any significant way. I think that the internet would have been a wildly different place were IPv6 widespread in the early '00s.
I wonder why NAT hole punching techniques never took off much with P2P, it seems like with enough work getting around NAT most of the time would be possible.
Good, reliable ways to do hole punching were not available until relatively late (STUN, ICE) and were somewhat finicky for a long time, especially on crappy routers.
Also, multiple levels of nat are unfortunately common and make STUN unreliable
