10 ms·

It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously. What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pr

It feels like the web grew up into an bitter old fart who takes everything way to seriously. What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name and people did not give that much care to their long term reputations and the fall from that more or less started with facebooks real name policy, or rather when facebook stopped being an glorified phonebook and started being an content platform. That culture of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" gave rise to an atmosphere of fun that seems to be entirely missing today as everyone is too focused on the hustle of monetization and avoiding controversy to just do silly things. Add to that that for some reason every large enterprise organization seems to have forgotten how to actually manage and use their own websites preferring instead to blast out using the new "everything for everyone" platforms.

notatoad 3y ago
the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat) without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.
yreg 3y ago
> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.
- Vicinity9635 3y ago
  [dead]
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals". People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
  - krapp 3y ago
    Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely deserved.
    - bheadmaster 3y ago
      Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely undeserved. See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.
      - krapp 3y ago
        Yes, that's all you've been doing. But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees. But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
        bheadmaster 3y ago
        > Yes, that's all you've been doing. No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead. > But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them. Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states: You will not post any of the following outside /b/: [...] b. Racism [...] > But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here. Please refrain from personal insults. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
- Stranger43 3y ago
  But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform. There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days. It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    >It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc). This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
    - aethertron 3y ago
      Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there: 1. National law 2. Facebook TOS 3. Group rules But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    >for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then. At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected. That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere. Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.
- assimpleaspossi 3y ago
  In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been. Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves. And that's never going away.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    From 2006 when I joined until maybe just after Obama (2009 or 2010, not sure? maybe as late as 2011) it was the best ever. Like HN on roids. Better than Slashdot that came before it, which was already a junk site by that point, larger than K5. Then it ate every internet forum ever, and turned into this weird authoritarian pervert Myspace thing. Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.
    - herdrick 3y ago
      https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
    - trealira 3y ago
      If you have a Reddit account, you can opt out of the New Reddit design, so Old Reddit is displayed without the link needing to be prefixed with "old.*".
- pksebben 3y ago
  This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them. I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).
bluetomcat 3y ago
The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform. It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social media users are building their "personal brand" and value proposition to their next employer/business partner.
- piva00 3y ago
  I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own land to extract rent from. It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility. It's just sad.
keiferski 3y ago
I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.
- ManuelKiessling 3y ago
  I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    It was dominated by an academic and intellectual elite somewhat detached from real world politics and economics, and was replaced by that political and economic elite.
  - flir 3y ago
    I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the social media crowd). Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      Where do the aol users fit? Part of the early app crowd?
      - flir 3y ago
        If I have to fit them to the model (which tbh I don't think bears close inspection) they're the vanguard of Generation 3. AOL was the first of the walled gardens. A proto-FaceGramTok.
pipeline_peak 3y ago
It’s like my options are go by an anonymous handle like CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin Bieber should die back in 2011… Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad
Juraph 3y ago
Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type). I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
  - sotix 3y ago
    Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve what I had searched for.
  - zelphirkalt 3y ago
    Perhaps there is some space for community projects that collect links to blogs and tag them and build a simple search for that. Does it perhaps exist?
    - mrkramer 3y ago
      Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but it is dead now. I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts. I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149
huijzer 3y ago
X/Twitter still supports anonymous accounts right?
- Vicinity9635 3y ago
  [dead]
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  If you provide your phone number for security and your credit card number for verification of humanity, sure.
tivert 3y ago
It's all fun until the parasites move in. One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it. I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake. Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool. The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well. Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
- pphysch 3y ago
  Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.
- CM30 3y ago
  I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general. Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
  - geraldwhen 3y ago
    Video game mod sites are highly political. You can’t get away with anything that would have been fine in the year 2007. There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.
    - account42 3y ago
      There are still "spicy" fourms.
      - Vicinity9635 3y ago
        [dead]
- unkeen 3y ago
  how do i get in there?
  - immibis 3y ago
    You don't. If you could, the FBI could. You would have to be introduced by a friend who's in it.
ghaff 3y ago
On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between this and people who participated under handles that weren't obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more associated with BBSs early on).
bufio 3y ago
Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.
- flyinghamster 3y ago
  Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling. IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping. Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.

notatoad 3y ago

the pseudo-anonymous amateur communties still exist. but they're private and invite-only, because a public community that allows anonymous posting becomes a cesspit of toxic behaviour, or else requires so much content moderation that the only feasible way to do it is automated recommendation algorithms. (invite-only phpbb forums of old still exist, but the modern equivalent invite-only community is the group chat) without the threat of "we'll kick you out and you'll never be able to get back in", these sort of communities don't work. there's just too many assholes on the internet now.

yreg 3y ago

> What's missing is the culture of "anonymity" where everyone was pretty much just a screen name It seems that the society at large wants this. 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. Reddit's reputation is improving hand in hand with the tightening of their content policies.

Vicinity9635 3y ago
[dead]
robertlagrant 3y ago
Their reputations are mediated by news sources, though. It's hard to know what's real and what's the result of 500 news articles gradually shading in emotional responses over these websites most people know little about.
bheadmaster 3y ago
> 4chan has a horrible reputation in the outside world. That's because without any particular individuals to point the finger to, they just blame the monolith of "anonymous individuals". People have always feared the unknown, and the obvious coping mechanism is to aggregate it into some tangible form, whether it's the Boogeyman, Baba Yaga, the Devil, Anonymous, or any other villain, to be used as a scapegoat.
- krapp 3y ago
  Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely deserved.
  - bheadmaster 3y ago
    Nah. 4chan's reputation is entirely undeserved. See? I can also make claims without any arguments whatsoever.
    - krapp 3y ago
      Yes, that's all you've been doing. But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) The Alfred E. Neuman shtick of disaffected bemusement was stale even when Mad was published on dead trees. But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here.
      - bheadmaster 3y ago
        > Yes, that's all you've been doing. No, in the comment you've originally replied to I have clearly stated a possible explanation of why 4chan has a bad reputation. Please refrain from pointless "no u" comments, and attack my arguments instead. > But 4chan wears its infamy on its sleeve with pride (usually white pride.) 4chan is not an entity onto itself - it is composed of many individuals, that was the whole point of my post. But because you don't know the identity of those individuals, you just consider them a monolith and put collective blame onto them. Additionaly, the official rule 3. of 4chan states: You will not post any of the following outside /b/: [...] b. Racism [...] > But go ahead and take the last laugh. You're being neither clever nor insightful here. Please refrain from personal insults. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Stranger43 3y ago
But those are platforms, for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds rather then people sharing spaces on a single platform. There was always an underground of filth(even in the pre-internet days) but unless you sought it out you werent actually exposed to it back in the pre-platform days. It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc).
- mrkramer 3y ago
  >It could be that the platformization is a consequence of people wanting censorship and handing over the curation power to large commercial entities lets people have that to an large enough degree. But it also leeds to a kind of blandification of content as everything have to fit into the model dictated by the platform taking away some venues of creativity(ie no crazy color schemes etc). This is so true; on every internet forum or community, there are different moderators, rules and values for the community and on the Facebook for example there is only Facebook and its TOS. You are in the mercy of the Facebook when it comes to the content moderation and setting rules and values for the community.
  - aethertron 3y ago
    Facebook has user-run groups, so there are at least 3 levels of moderation/rules there: 1. National law 2. Facebook TOS 3. Group rules But the legislative power, to to speak, at the group level is quite weak. They can further restrict according to some values, which is fine as it is. Freedom of association. They can't control the UI.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >for some reason this was not seen as a major problem back when we had websites and rss feeds Eh this kind of discounts how the entire world has changed between now and then. At one point online was something disconnected from who you were as in IRL identity. Really very few people posted back then (think tens of millions verses billions across the world). When you hung your modem up, that the online world and the real world were disconnected. That seperated world no longer exists for any number of reasons caused by any number of actors. The real world affects the internet and the internet affects the real world, these are no longer separate entities, but things that are intertwined by billions of connected devices and sensors almost everywhere. Quite often in the past middle sized sites got blasted by DOS attacks, and if your own small forum got a DOS/DDOS you could suffer some problems. Now, you don't even need an attacker to DOS most small sites, it's pretty damned easy to get search engines trying to index your site to take it off line, or for just random bots to be 99% of your traffic. People moved to big sites to avoid having to be said system administrators from all the crap that moved into the net.
assimpleaspossi 3y ago
In my eyes, reddit is the same trash it's always been. Yes, you can find decent specialized subs here and there but, even then, you have to weed through the trash to get a decent response and keep a thick skin from those who are only there to put you down to make them feel better about themselves. And that's never going away.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  From 2006 when I joined until maybe just after Obama (2009 or 2010, not sure? maybe as late as 2011) it was the best ever. Like HN on roids. Better than Slashdot that came before it, which was already a junk site by that point, larger than K5. Then it ate every internet forum ever, and turned into this weird authoritarian pervert Myspace thing. Now it's not even a website, but a phone app. I hesitate to click on reddit links unless they're old.* prefixed.
  - herdrick 3y ago
    https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirect/dneaehbmnbhcippjikoajpoabadpodje https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/old-reddit-redirec...
  - trealira 3y ago
    If you have a Reddit account, you can opt out of the New Reddit design, so Old Reddit is displayed without the link needing to be prefixed with "old.*".
pksebben 3y ago
This is an issue of connectivity. Some cultures cannot survive exposure to the world-at-large, and 4chan was one of them. I'm not sure I want to be part of "society at large", although I admit it doesn't seem optional. The establishment of the monoculture has gotten rid of a lot of good in the world (just try finding somewhere to visit without a mcdonalds).

bluetomcat 3y ago

The web of today has evolved to a product placement platform. It's optimised for finding quick up-to-date reviews of the next laptop you're considering buying. Old content becomes irrelevant and flows to the sewage pipe into oblivion. Social media users are building their "personal brand" and value proposition to their next employer/business partner.

piva00 3y ago
I've just finished reading Yanis Varoufakis' "Technofeudalism" and it was a much better read than I expected. I'm still unsure if his central thesis will materialise but he does make good points on how Big Tech basically transformed "Internet One" (the one we fondly remember from the 90s-early 2000s) into a internet of fiefdoms, where each Big Tech have tried to corner their own land to extract rent from. It's the exact feeling I get from the internet today, we have lost the interesting content being put out in a decentralised manner, the quirky websites, the passionate community ones for product reviews (like DPReview), everything has become commercialised, lots of blogs are just fronts for some brand/company/individual trying to peddle their own brand through visibility. It's just sad.

keiferski 3y ago

I think this is a consequence of elite takeover of the internet. The culture you describe still exists, but it's largely found in places considered unsavory and uncouth by mainstream organizations.

ManuelKiessling 3y ago
I‘ve always considered it to be exactly the other way round: in the old days of yore, the Internet was dominated by a certain kind of elite, and then the Endless September happened and commercialization followed.
- keiferski 3y ago
  It was dominated by an academic and intellectual elite somewhat detached from real world politics and economics, and was replaced by that political and economic elite.
- flir 3y ago
  I'd say there's been (at least) three overlapping generations: The academics (.edu email addresses), the geeky amateurs (dial-up internet), and the app users (the social media crowd). Not trying to denigrate the third generation there, it's just that for them it's a mature product, like a TV or a car. They feel no need to tinker with what BigCorp is selling them.
  - ipaddr 3y ago
    Where do the aol users fit? Part of the early app crowd?
    - flir 3y ago
      If I have to fit them to the model (which tbh I don't think bears close inspection) they're the vanguard of Generation 3. AOL was the first of the walled gardens. A proto-FaceGramTok.

pipeline_peak 3y ago

It’s like my options are go by an anonymous handle like CoolJeff9586 and be ignored or use my real name and risk cementing away any future prospects because I said Justin Bieber should die back in 2011… Who would’ve thought using legal fucking names online would be bad

Juraph 3y ago

Not so sure it's all doom and gloom for "old internet". I still find plenty of spaces that feel like they're created purely for the love it it, there is just many orders of magnitude more crap you need to sift through. The people writing about interesting things compete with people who write as a form of personal branding, and these people aggressively measure engagement (You know the type). I remember reading one of these blogs, and saw something like "You have an obligation to advertise your content to potential users", the very idea of which is genuinely insane. Imagine trying to run a banner ad linking to your blog. But, those are the people who will play the SEO game, and they're the people you'll find in the first 2 pages of search.

mrkramer 3y ago
I agree with you but the fact that there is no good blog search engine out there shows you the state of the web that we are in right now. Nobody cares anymore for blogs and personal websites, everything is commercialized to the point that SEO is name of the game of the web today.
- sotix 3y ago
  Kagi small web and Marginalia do a pretty good job. Even the regular Kagi search delivers smaller blogs in my results frequently that end up being very useful to resolve what I had searched for.
- zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Perhaps there is some space for community projects that collect links to blogs and tag them and build a simple search for that. Does it perhaps exist?
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    Last time I searched on Google for some decent blog search engine I couldn't find one. People say Google Custom Search is good, you can also see Marginalia and Kagi getting mentioned a lot. I didn't try neither of them, well except Marginalia but I think Marginalia prefers text only search results but modern blogs are not text only. There was good HN blog search project[0] but it is dead now. I think most probably blog search engine wouldn't be viable as a commercial product but some hobbyist can definitely pull it off. Good example is listennotes.com a hobbyist search engine for podcasts. I had a decent idea for a blog search engine, I will try to pull it off if time and health serve me. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30844149

huijzer 3y ago

X/Twitter still supports anonymous accounts right?

Vicinity9635 3y ago
[dead]
CatWChainsaw 3y ago
If you provide your phone number for security and your credit card number for verification of humanity, sure.

tivert 3y ago

It's all fun until the parasites move in. One of the magic bits of the earlier web(s) is that it was all new, participation involved an element of non-replicable self-selection, and the parasites hadn't had enough time to adapt and colonize it. I'm not even sure if it's will be possible to have a community of "pseudoanonymous amateurs" in the future. It'll probably get swamped with AI generated garbage, like the crochet groups posted about a week or so ago. The human participants will get overwhelmed trying to figure out what's fake. Honestly, like many kinds of forest, what the Web probably needs is a good burning, controlled or otherwise.

flyinghamster 3y ago
The same was true of Usenet, and of the internet in general before Eternal September. Usenet was absolutely glorious - until the spammers moved in. Then it became a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with killfiles, until the tide of spam turned it into a cesspool. The basic problem: make it easy and cheap to participate, and the scam artists will inevitably gravitate to it, and eventually choke the life out of it. Add enough friction to discourage the spammers, and you drive away real users as well. Older forums are still around, or the fediverse. If you're participating on them, you're part of the solution.
pphysch 3y ago
Yep -- early adopters saw it as just another way to communicate between humans, and didn't aggressively push the envelop on how much anonymity+reach could be abused. Gradually, that envelop got expanded and now we have well-capitalized influence operations (including advertisement) solely focused on exploiting the internet as much as possible for financial+political gain.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

One of the last remaining remnants of this is the pirating community. Their work on cracking, emulation, system hacking and anonymity is such a wonderful place to make friends, push technology and just have fun. They still have that old school humour which made the internet so cool.

CM30 3y ago
I'd say that video game modding and hacking communities have a similar vibe to them, as do fan created content sites and communities in general. Probably in all causes because being unable to legally make money from your activities scares away folks that just want to cash in on the latest grift, and don't care a single damn about quality.
- geraldwhen 3y ago
  Video game mod sites are highly political. You can’t get away with anything that would have been fine in the year 2007. There’s no debate any more, just banning and shadow banning. Forums used to be spicy! Now they are nothing but toxic positivity or bland nothingness.
  - account42 3y ago
    There are still "spicy" fourms.
    - Vicinity9635 3y ago
      [dead]
unkeen 3y ago
how do i get in there?
- immibis 3y ago
  You don't. If you could, the FBI could. You would have to be introduced by a friend who's in it.

ghaff 3y ago

On the other hand, in Usenet days, a lot of people were coming in from fairly elite institutions (whether academia or companies) and they were absolutely using their True Names and institutional associations. There was a bifurcation between this and people who participated under handles that weren't obviously linked to discoverable account (which was more associated with BBSs early on).

bufio 3y ago

Smartphones ruined the web and are ruining life in general.

flyinghamster 3y ago
Smartphones are what you put into them. You don't have to spend every waking minute scrolling. IMO, the unpleasantness of mobile web usage does a great job of discouraging me from walking around with my face buried in my phone. For me, the phone is more of a multi-purpose tool: camera, alarm clock, timer, calendar, weather radar, hotspot for my laptop, navigator, music player, etc. - and I don't care much to use it for random surfing. At most, I might look up something while I'm shopping. Still, that single phone replaces a whole slew of single-purpose devices. Does it replace them perfectly? No, not at all, but my pockets only have so much room.