4 ms·

I can't speak for Usenet, but the internet already had more than its fair share of influential shitholes by the early 2000s. 4chan, ebaumsworld, TOTSE, LiveLeak

I can't speak for Usenet, but the internet already had more than its fair share of influential shitholes by the early 2000s. 4chan, ebaumsworld, TOTSE, LiveLeak, etc. existed at their very worst at that time, and even websites that are widely considered toxic/unruly today (namely Twitter and Reddit) are quite tame compared to what was going on then. You are definitely better off for having missed them, but that doesn't mean the behavior didn't exist.

SamReidHughes 6y ago
Maybe. Nowadays I’ve been invited to a discord in some mainstream topic of interest to me, and in its #off-topic channel, well, my monocle dropped to the floor from the hard n-word dropping casual racism, not some attempt to land a joke or be ironic, and that was not an anonymous message board. I think in the early 2000’s 4chan didn’t exist yet, the internet hadn’t really penetrated into life as much, console games were still not networked, and getting kids exposed to such behavior was not the default situation.
- newen 6y ago
  It was pretty common by mid 2000s when Xbox Live came out. And it was pretty common IRL in early 2000s too. I’ve seen plenty of n-word dropping and casual racism IRL as a kid in the early 2000s.
  - SamReidHughes 6y ago
    I didn't get the same vibe on, I don't know, Slashdot back in the early 2000's. Misconduct took the form of Goatseing and GNAA posting and such. In video games and sports it's different. Making a sport of trash-talking in a video game (or, the NFL line of scrimmage) is a different thing than making lame posts on reddit. But with such behavior in video games, with teenagers playing them, combined with other online activity, it seems to have percolated. I don't know, it could just be blinders. But I had a YouTube video go fairly viral in 2006, and it didn't have the bad "omg the YouTube comments" experience that people started talking about some years later. (On the other hand I could complain it got comments on my clothing, comments about my race, and offers of marriage, except, well, I enjoyed all of them.)
    - newen 6y ago
      I think it's more demographics shift in reddit and other social media users than percolation of behavior. As in the video game and sports people started using reddit more instead of the old programmer dominated crowd in reddit.
      - SamReidHughes 6y ago
        You could be right. It was ProgrammingHumor specifically in this case.

SamReidHughes 6y ago

Maybe. Nowadays I’ve been invited to a discord in some mainstream topic of interest to me, and in its #off-topic channel, well, my monocle dropped to the floor from the hard n-word dropping casual racism, not some attempt to land a joke or be ironic, and that was not an anonymous message board. I think in the early 2000’s 4chan didn’t exist yet, the internet hadn’t really penetrated into life as much, console games were still not networked, and getting kids exposed to such behavior was not the default situation.

newen 6y ago
It was pretty common by mid 2000s when Xbox Live came out. And it was pretty common IRL in early 2000s too. I’ve seen plenty of n-word dropping and casual racism IRL as a kid in the early 2000s.
- SamReidHughes 6y ago
  I didn't get the same vibe on, I don't know, Slashdot back in the early 2000's. Misconduct took the form of Goatseing and GNAA posting and such. In video games and sports it's different. Making a sport of trash-talking in a video game (or, the NFL line of scrimmage) is a different thing than making lame posts on reddit. But with such behavior in video games, with teenagers playing them, combined with other online activity, it seems to have percolated. I don't know, it could just be blinders. But I had a YouTube video go fairly viral in 2006, and it didn't have the bad "omg the YouTube comments" experience that people started talking about some years later. (On the other hand I could complain it got comments on my clothing, comments about my race, and offers of marriage, except, well, I enjoyed all of them.)
  - newen 6y ago
    I think it's more demographics shift in reddit and other social media users than percolation of behavior. As in the video game and sports people started using reddit more instead of the old programmer dominated crowd in reddit.
    - SamReidHughes 6y ago
      You could be right. It was ProgrammingHumor specifically in this case.