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The Old Internet way, you knew people by their nicks. The only thing that mattered was what they are bringing to the table in terms of valuable input. Sex, race
by piokoch 5y ago
The Old Internet way, you knew people by their nicks. The only thing that mattered was what they are bringing to the table in terms of valuable input. Sex, race, nationality, education, believes, age, etc. were irrelevant.
Asking someone for a "true name" was consider to be impolite if not offensive.
- owlbynight 5y agoYeah, I miss it a lot.
- cblconfederate 5y agoAnd species (nobody knows i m a dog)
- emptyparadise 5y agoI'd trust a dog (or any other furry community member) on the internet over an international corporation any day of the week.
- andai 5y agotfw my dog is a member of the furry community
- bwindels 5y agoHackles [1], is that you? 1: http://www.hackles.org/ http://www.hackles.org/
- cblconfederate 5y agoWe are Legion
- TrispusAttucks 5y agoThe golden era. When the only identity that mattered was your username and behavior.
- Quarrelsome 5y agoI recently tried to join a discord that was tangentially relevant to the trans community and the amount of self-identification they wanted was troublesome to me (region, age, sexual preference, opinion on pronouns/pronouns, etc). EDIT: well fuck me for sharing, right? 2021 Hacker News karma scores are fucking cold.
- api 5y agoAny group like that is going to get a lot of trolls, so you probably experienced a kind of manual captcha.
- Quarrelsome 5y agosure, its a shame because I really like the content.
- google234123 5y agoYou can also enter fake data (for the things that aren't important: e.g. location), I do this all the time on the internet.
- fao_ 5y agoI mean, most spaces have those as roles that you can fill in, but don't have to. wrt pronoun roles, they are used for figuring out how to refer to you -- it is after all, a trans space where appearance and expectation won't match up with people's preferences, and where people are tired from the water-drip torture* that is constant implicit and explicit misgendering. * - that is to say, each individual instance (drip) wouldn't cause pain, but when you face it almost constantly, and you're already hyperaware of it, it can cause a lot of anguish.
- Quarrelsome 5y agoIn this case they were mandatory. I get that it represents an issue for that community but I'm merely describing a schism compared with earlier internet attitudes and some spaces today. I left the community because it just upset me to have to do that. a/s/l always broke my heart and it still does.
- SamBam 5y agoThere aren't even nicks, though.
- tyrust 5y agoYeah I think this person is just waxing poetic about something vaguely related to your original comment.
- GavinMcG 5y agoI think this somewhat romanticizes things. Those characteristics were irrelevant as long as one passed as male, but many women experienced a lot of harassment for participating online.
- dijit 5y agoI have anecdotes both for and against this from women who were on the internet before anything that could be considered a “women in tech” movement existed. I can’t say from a male perspective. But I think it’s not as black and white as you paint it. The (consistent) impression I was given was that if you didn’t try to constantly talk about being a girl/woman the majority of people just didn’t really care. There is, however, a sad truth of the internet: that people are free to try to antagonise anyone they want without major repercussions; being a woman is something to bring up if you are one of those. But those people would find another reason anyway, I truly don’t believe it’s “because” a person is female. So “male passing”, on IRC, about technical topics, is “human passing” in most cases, and when it’s not, nobody seems to really care, or that’s what I’ve been told.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y agoMost people not caring isn't the problem though, because it doesn't take that many people to constantly harass someone.
- falcolas 5y agoA lot of times, announcing that you're a woman on the internet was (is still?) seen as a request to be treated differently. This is how "Tits or GTFO" came about. i.e. denigrating yourself is the only way to be treated differently from everyone else. I'm not entirely sure if we've progressed or regressed from that.
- duckfang 5y agoWeirdly enough, "Tits or GTFO" was primarily a 4chan-ism. Everybody was "anonymous", so if someone claimed to be a woman, she needed to show tits. Thats not to say I've never seen discrimination of any sort on irc. It's usually troll behaviors I see there, and general hate.
- tyrust 5y agoThat's all fun and cool until you want to hold $handle accountable for forwarding all your messages to their favorite state power.
- unilynx 5y agoWe're talking about IRC, right? Joining a random channel in the 90's would pretty much have 'A/S/L?" as a standard greeting..
- TimTheTinker 5y agoI don't think hacker-oriented channels or IRC featured this greeting as often as general chat (ICQ/AIM).
- unilynx 5y agoThere was a time where the 'hackers' where in the minority for IRC, basically the time where IRC was replacing BBS-es, FIDO and phone/teletext based chat solutions but before ICQ was a thing, and AIM/AOL was never a real thing in western/northern europe Ie, think DALnet and the explosion of minor IRC networks in the 95-98s
- wrycoder 5y agoYeah, I was on irc in the 90’s and missed that one. I had to look it up on urbandictionary, which was entertaining.
- wgjordan 5y agoIn my experience (US mid-90s) this kind of greeting was common in random, mass-consumer chat channels (e.g., on AOL), but nowhere found (or ridiculed as mainstream) on technical/hacker-oriented BBS or IRC channels.
- kragen 5y agoNo, if someone did that on IRC in the 90s we would immediately peg them as a loser from AOL. There was a lot of sex (and sexual harassment) on IRC, but pseudonymity was the default.
- cout 5y agoI encountered the "a/s/l" question on numerous Undernet channels when I started using irc. We would joke about it in programming channels, but people really did use it in non-programming channels.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jrochkind1 5y agoAnd that is exactly what led to the current problem with freenode, right? I mean, I am not disagreeing that the "old internet way" has it's perks. But it is also the lack of any formal organization or legal rights that let one person who had enough money/power to do so destroy freenode by claiming he owned it. You want that not to happen again, you might want to do something different. And indeed the announcement acknowledges that, that's why there is "a non-profit association in Sweden, with all our staff holding equal stakes" in the first place. It would just be helpful for a bit more transparency around that too. I personally assume it will come, it's just an oversight (no pun intended).
- kodah 5y agoNo. Freenode was purchased by an entrepreneur and former Mt Gox employee supposedly to facilitate a conference called "Freenode Live". It had nothing to do with use of real names.
- jrochkind1 5y agoSomehow I think we're not having the same conversation. It's not that it had to do with use of real names on freenode. It's that it had to do with no formal legal structure for freenode (and a formal legal structure requires real names associated with it). The person that "sold" freenode didn't clearly have the authority to do so. The community disagrees on what they actually "bought". But baring a formal legal structure... they got away with it. The comment at the top of this thread was talking about how, if one wanted to try to reduce the chance of that sort of thing happening again before investing energy in this new thing, one would want to know more about the formal legal structure and who is behind it. The "old internet" way is "We're just some people cooperating, we don't need a legal structure or even to know each other's real names." That has plusses and minuses. One of the minuses is when someone decides they have the authority to sell the whole thing to someone else for personal profit, even though all the people informally cooperating didn't agree to it, and it turns out it's hard to stop them.
- kodah 5y ago
- okprod 5y agoVery different in 90s AOL. "a/s/l" was the norm and everyone had a profile
- runjake 5y agoI don't know what IRC you were using, but it isn't the IRC I knew. I would regularly change my IRC nick. For a period, I went by "cassandra" (Greek mythology, and no I'm not Michael Burry) and would get endlessly harassed and involuntarily flirted with. Worst was forgetting the nick thing and having someone strike up a genuine-seeming conversation only to turn around and ask for risque photos, once they ineptly believed they had established enough "rapport" to do so.
- wyclif 5y agoI have been on IRC for a long time (since 1995) and I can attest to the truth of this. The same thing was also true of Usenet. Back then tech was far, far less politicized than it is now and most users had connections and collaboration with people that had nothing to do with off-internet life. I remember one time that after having been in the same channel with a user and chatting to them almost every day for 10 years, they finally revealed that they were female not male. That was a real revelation. The same could be said for people who you assumed were from the Anglosphere but turned out to be Indian, African, or from other far-flung places. The point is, none of this mattered. What mattered was your intelligence, knowledge, problem-solving ability, and programming chops. In many respects, the Old Internet Way was better than the New Internet Way.
- scrollaway 5y agoNot just gender and race. Age as well. When I revealed my age to my friends/guildmates there was always shock (I was 12-16 at the time). Some of them I'd known for several years before I told them. The internet was the only place I was treated as an adult, an equal. As I got older I no longer felt the need to hide my age to be treated that way, but I really hope kids of today can find a similar place. People on the Old Internet assumed you were "like them". If they're a white, 25 year old american male, they're going to assume you are a white, 20-something american male by default. You can correct them, but… why would you care? Back then we didn't really try to paint a picture of who we are in real life. Like you said, all that mattered was what you would concretely bring to the table. Trying to emphasize your age, gender or nationality would be seen as rude in an "is that what you're bringing to the table?" kind of way (less of an issue in the case of nationality as RL meetups became more common, and especially less of an issue in europe-centric international groups where your location could in fact be something you're bringing to the table). There's a lot of valid criticism of the Old Internet and it wasn't a perfect place. Sexism was certainly rampant. So was ageism. But in a much more practical sense, it was way the fuck more egalitarian than what we have now.