6 ms·

I was in high school during the beginning of tpb. I leaned towards the Pirate Bay’s ideas and philosophy of what- digital good was and where ownership exists.

• tjr225 5y ago
  Something awful, 4chan, and Ogrish were all started 2003 or earlier.
  • dannyw 5y ago
    don't let the n words fool you; 4ch is very actively moderated; both by janitors but also it's users. It's politically incorrect, but not as bad as Facebook in terms of damage to society.
    • anon9001 5y ago
      4chan is like a focus group for unacceptable ideas.
      • belorn 5y ago
        I have always seen 4chan to be more like a youth center than a focus group, with the associated criminal aspects. In both cases the suggested universal solution tend to be an increase in supervision.
    • sweetbitter 5y ago
      At least on anonymous imageboards or even pseudonymous forums you can learn your lesson of how foolish/incorrect you are about something with no future repercussions, no embarrassment, no one to use it against you in the future- you can just up and change your entire perception at the drop of a hat frictionlessly, without paying a personal cost to do it.
• emerged 5y ago
  The difference IMO is the scale of individual social networks. It used to be relatively smaller independent forums which had all their own particular rules and populations. Things were more truly distributed in an organic way. Now we have these massive scale social networks who attract all the absolute worst scum of the earth, botnets, etc. The companies running these networks are super massive and formed connections to political parties and financial interests. The saddest thing is we could all just decide to get off these massive networks and use the smaller ones again, but the genie is out of the bottle and a critical mass of people can’t be convinced to leave the new networks.
  • WatchDog 5y ago
    I think another aspect of the early internet culture, is the demographics. The participants were much more tech inclined, I imagine the autism quotient of the early internet user population, would have been much higher than it is today.
  • jd115 5y ago
    No, the difference is that social media has been very successfully weaponised, by the nation-state/mafia syndicates which communism gave birth to. So successfully, in fact, that it has made traditional warfare practically obsolete. The social networks of today are to the world what the "Pravda" newspaper was to the Eastern Bloc in the 20th century. A weapon of mass subversion. (Oh the magnitude of trolling and shade in the name of that newspaper... Nothing in the past 100 years has surpassed that!)
    • anon9001 5y ago
      This is the right take. Also, every hacker online pre-facebook realized that it wouldn't take that much effort to do social engineering on a mass scale, but there was a brief period before any large organizations actually got involved and started doing it. I think we got a glimpse of something special in the early internet, and I think we can build toward that again.
      • codezero 5y ago
• zionic 5y ago
  The Qanon psyop was primarily targeted towards neocon and right wing boomers, not teenagers. You wouldn’t be at risk of “falling” for it today as a high schooler. It’s also been dead since 2019 or so. I say psyop because it was essentially boomer catnip. “Good guys are in control” “sit back and do nothing, we have them right where we want them” “it’s all going according to plan” etc etc. As far as psyops go it was wildly successful, posting cryptic messages anyone following the news heavily would know then “reveal” them later as proof. This manufactured false credibility as an insider, then their “instructions” were to essentially sit back and do nothing while the deep state was taken town for you. They also sprinkled in religious references to further appeal to evangelical boomers, again playing off the “X will save me, I don’t need to get off my butt and do anything” angle. I say all this because the overwhelming consensus among the crowd most associate with Q (center right to far right) is that Trump was a traitor and Q was a tool to keep his more radical fans from doing anything during his term.
  • throwoutway 5y ago
    I’ve never followed this. Are you saying that Q was a psyop by left-wing against right-wing to convince them not to vote?
    • tjr225 5y ago
      I think likely the idea is that destabilization is good, and the more destabilization- regardless of left or right- the better. Though for some reason I suspect you already know this.