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I disagree about your assessment of the early internet. It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Certainly diversity was out there but it was

• giraffe_lady 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • nkozyra 3y ago
    > hahaha seriously. this is the internet they want to go back to. Well there were obviously good and bad things about it. Some people think there's a way to be inclusive unlike the way it was once very exclusive while still embracing the general ethos of the original Internet - which was people connected directly via the infrastructure rather than through third party corporations. We can have an inclusive internet - digital democracy, as it was once called - without walled gardens.
    • giraffe_lady 3y ago
      Can we though? That comment demonstrates very clearly that it wasn't as democratic as people are remembering. You had a chance to make an inclusive internet, and you made an encyclopedia that was blind to the largest most significant art & cultural movement in generations. What are you going to do differently this time?
      • nkozyra 3y ago
        I find "we didn't, therefore we can't" a kind of defeatist and unrealistic reaction. The internet has been shaped and reshaped a few times, in a lot of ways for the better, I don't see why it couldn't continue to be refined.
        • giraffe_lady 3y ago
          I'm not taking that position, quite. But I'm not seeing much contrition for it being that way the first time around, or sophisticated evaluation of why it was, or a plan for how to improve it in the future. Without those I think the hope that it'll improve in these ways is simply naive.
          • nkozyra 3y ago
            What I'm arguing is that we're taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back rather than a linear path of improvement. In this case one of the steps backward being the walled gardens, steps forward including the democratization of the internet as a whole.
      • ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
        I enjoyed the tweet above as a glimpse into the past, but it's far too cherry-picked for you to use it as an indictment of the early internet. The article for 'Gangsta Rap' (May '01) predates 'Country Music' (Oct '01), 'English Language' (Nov '01) and 'Mayonnaise' (Jul '02), but you wouldn't think very highly of me if I used that to make an opposite claim. I don't think the 'Hip Hop Music' (Apr '03) cherry-pick even holds up on its own. The creation edit says it's being taken from an already-existing page called 'Hip hop', whose history I'm unable to find.
        • ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
          I tracked it down, the 'Hip hop' page is from June 2001.
  • bt4u 3y ago
    [dead]
  • cbozeman 3y ago
    No, although I understand why such a simplistic and easily-digestible idea would be appealing to a group of people who increasingly want simple answers. We want to go back to the Internet of thick-skinned people who rarely even blocked others, much less actively tried to get them banned. We want to go back to the Internet where you can say wild shit and people are smart / savvy enough to know you're just being edgy and not an actual hateful person. We want to go back to the Internet that wasn't controlled by gigantic megacorporations who have incredibly outsized influence on what people do and do not see. In short, a lot of older Netizens want 1999 back. And for good reason.
    • mavhc 3y ago
      [flagged]
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        ha thank you this got to the heart of it much more concisely than I could.
      • 4ggr0 3y ago
        And what a shame that we can't really call people the f-word anymore, can't even use LGBT slurs, angrily shakes fist at the sky. Seriously, I don't get the people who miss these things. I admit that it was funny to the 14 year old version of me to call my friends the n-word while playing Call of Duty, but rather sooner than later we understood that some things aren't edgy, just offensive, unnecessary and hurtful. And it's not as if edgyness went away completely. Reddit has it's corners, there's plenty of *chan sites, if you search around on YouTube you'll encounter "eDgY" content (edgy in that context == "racist, anti-lgbt, mysoginistic etc.") Netflix and YT have stand-up specials from edgy comedians. I saw more than one "edgy" Discord server, with "edgy" memes and jokes. Also typical that a bit furter up in this comment thread, the one thing which is deemed to be wrong with Mastodon is that Anti-LGBT speech is not allowed, which somehow means that you loose diversity. Because what I want when talking to diverse people is hearing them hate gay people for absolutely no reason at all. Anti-LGBT takes are not opinions to me. I label myself as a tolerating, open-minded person, which doesn't mean that I accept or want intolerant and closed-minded people near me, and I refuse to accept that this somehow makes me intolerant or anti-diversity. /rant
• sph 3y ago
  The Early Internet was white and middle class because they could afford it. But there were no recommendation algorithms or content siloes, so even if it was less diverse, it was potentially much more diverse and free than whatever we have today. Today we have most of the world online, but they live on 5 websites, so even though it feels like there's more diversity and breadth, it has become a much more homogeneous culture. There must be a name for this scientific phenomenon (variable increases between two spans of time, but the relative effect of it on the entire system has decreased)
• OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  By 1995 I was regularly interacting on the internet with Japanese, people in the former USSR (who wouldn't necessarily be considered "white"), Romanians, etc. What was special is that when those people had political and social views that may have differed from one's own, but were representative of their countries, they could air those views. And the result was that a user of the nascent internet could learn about the world's diversity of societies and views. Mastodon's federation policies, which require mod instances to police anti-LGBT speech for example, expressly excludes that. If you spend any time on the Nigerian internet, for instance, you see this is a matter that ordinary people are strident about, but they would be unwelcome in the fediverse except for those few, often westernized+hipsterized people whose views conform to what the Mastodon founding generation is comfortable with. Don't people in, say, sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East, or (Great Firewall aside) China have the right to join this ecosystem and still be the ordinary representatives of their societies that they are?
  • afavour 3y ago
    I think “political and social views” covers a very wide range of thought. For instance, an avowed Nazi would not have been welcome in a holocaust survivors newsgroup in the early internet. Someone who is “anti-LGBT” to the extent that they wish those people dead have a similarly extreme view and I’m not surprised that they are policed. > they would be unwelcome on the Fediverse I think part of the problem here is central identities. Someone with anti-LGBT views would be entirely welcome in, say, a Lemmy community dedicated to software engineering… because they wouldn’t be discussing LGBT issues and no one would know. But because we have this notion of identity that persists between communities they may find themselves censored because of statements they made somewhere else.
    • soundnote 3y ago
      You don't need to be very anti rainbow ideology (which should be distinguished from simply being gay, for example: "Listen to gay people" never means Douglas Murray or the Gays Against Groomers organization, for example, because they may be gay but they have the wrong politics) to be tossed from most spaces rainbow activist types moderate.
• ekianjo 3y ago
  > It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Nerdy = Educated, because most people joining at that time were academics or people who really wanted to use the internet despite the difficulty to get there at the time. As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. There were a lot of people from different continents even in the early days, while of course the majority was from the US. And as far as I know, diversity of thought is not tied to the type of melanin you have in your skin.
  • RationalDino 3y ago
    > As for the "white" part, that's a very racist thing to say. I'm sorry, but you're taking offence at reality here. When I got to Usenet in the early 1990s, it was clear that most users were from North America and involved with college. This group was overwhelmingly white. Furthermore at many institutions, access required learning enough Unix to run rn. A barrier to entry that favored people who were nerdy relative to the general population. Email had similar demographics at the time, for similar reasons. Therefore it is historically accurate to say that more than 50% of users were white and nerdy, even relative to other educated people. You're right that the other users included a lot of diversity. But afavour is absolutely right about the majority. On diversity of thought. It is absolutely true that we had diverse thinking on Usenet at that point. However it is like clustering in some high dimensional space. The existence of diversity along some dimensions of thought within some dimensions doesn't change the fact that along some other dimensions there is more diversity of thought when you include people from different backgrounds and cultures.
• elpocko 3y ago
  > It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. What did you expect? It was invented and operated by "white nerds".
• throw555chip 3y ago
  > It was extremely white and nerdy when looked at on average. Many of us in the world chatted and conversed (VoIP was a thing already) with people around the world in the mid-1990's.
• wiseowise 3y ago
  [flagged]
  • DeIlliad 3y ago
    People of a similar background tend to have similar thoughts. If you grew up white in America or black in Africa you will have at least a few experiences that most people of your background share. Expand the amount of people with diverse background and you will get a wider range of thoughts.
    • wiseowise 3y ago
      Whatever fits your agenda.
• PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  diversity doesn't imply race and anyone who thinks so is a racist. Just as minorities are not defined by their skin color, neither are whites.
  • seattle_spring 3y ago
    I always find it deeply hilarious when people online expand on their definition of "diversity of thought." Mostly because it always means more of exactly one single type of "thought".
    • PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
      As I'm fond of saying, I'll always defend your right to make such statements, but that never implies it's valid or true.
• lisper 3y ago
  > It was extremely white and nerdy and male.
• cameronh90 3y ago
  I suspect GP was referring to the diversity of thought as well as the diversity of race. However, I would also expect the average isn't a useful metric in this context. The early internet didn't attempt to silo you as it had no real technical capacity for it. Maybe only (for argument's sake) ~2% of the internet back then was non-US/Europe, but that meant ~2% of the messages I read came from non-US/Europe. Nowadays, Xitter, Reddit, TikTok, etc. all have algorithms that try to fit me into a bucket with similar people, so even if now 50% of the internet is non-US/Europe, what I'm actually experiencing is far closer to 0% than it used to be. The internet I experience now is far less diverse even than just walking down my local high street. Looking at that mastodon link, for example, is so unbelievably unrepresentative of the kind of diversity (by all axes) I experience just by going outside.
• ToValueFunfetti 3y ago
  It took a bit of digging, but the page 'Hip hop' was created in June 2001. 'Hip Hop (Music)' was mostly a retitle of that page in April 2003, and what was left eventually became 'Hip Hop (culture)' by way of 'Hip hop culture'. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_culture&oldid=256477 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hip_hop_culture&o...