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When we was teenagers we had unrestricted broadband access to the internet but what was missing was the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is caus

by spxneo 3y ago

When we was teenagers we had unrestricted broadband access to the internet but what was missing was the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. WaReZ, KaZaA, Ogrish, CD-Keys, drugs, weapon making tutorials, Mail-order-drugs. This was the wild west days of the internet. You could literally put up anything you could sell anything and everything. Classmates were downloading roms, porn, warez, emulators and selling it on CDs. One kid would hack for hire. A black market of sorts was born out of the basketball court. No verification and adults didnt know how to handle it other than installing spyware which we quickly knew how to disable at school. We would play basketball after middle school and talk about all the crazy stuff we found on the internet. The most disturbing memories were of my classmates talking about snuff films coming out of the second Chechen War (1999), beheadings, crazy stuff . We would always try to out do one another. Some of us even successfully manipulated our parents to watch porn ("dad i think i like boys i think i need to watch straight porn") I turned out just fi

idle_zealot 3y ago
What you're describing sounds more socially healthy than modern usage. It was kids exploring the world digitally. Now that's been captured by digital fiefdoms actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement by any means necessary.
- spxneo 3y ago
  Internet before 9/11 and after 9/11 basically. What the Patriot Act did was eat at the foundations of freedom that American founders set out to create and the internet became public enemy #1 overnight, something that had to be controlled, regulated, and monopolized by American corporations in the form of social media, search engines, youtube etc. Like the rebellious soviet youths finding itself through Viktor Tsoi, the pre-911 internet offered us Western kids a brief moment of true freedom, we didn't need heroes, because our minds were free from algorithms designed to sap every bit of happiness.
- drkleiner 3y ago
  Internet used to be a village, with nice cozy places and communities but also shady weird individuals and houses you're not supposed to enter Now it is a shopping mall, sanitized, organized, brands and ads plastered all around, not really for socializing and community but more for products and marketing, you can still find a bookstore or a cafe but in the end, shopping mall is there to make you shop
  - brazzy 3y ago
    And it's a shopping mall that has a bunch of big stores that openly sell meth, and advertize for it aggressively.
  - idle_zealot 3y ago
    This interpretation is funny considering the other post in this thread bemoaning the loss of the shopping malls of their youth. As a metaphor it's on the right track, but the way the internet has been commercialized is even more extreme than a shopping mall, in the sense that experience is individually curated for each visitor and every tap, moment of hesitation, and utterance between friends is catalogued by the "store owner".
- Cub3 3y ago
  > actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement Which is the root issue here, why don't we ban online advertising as a business model or significantly tax it to create a cost of x engagement
Aurornis 3y ago
> the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with. Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit. I think it’s an uncomfortable truth for techies who grew up with Reddit while sneering at photo sharing social media, but the content on Reddit is extraordinarily cynical and depressing.
- zigman1 3y ago
  I think that the first lesson anyone whos signing on Reddit should be, to approach each post with a belief it is fake and is trying to see if it can deceive you. I know that for the hn crowd this sounds as obvious as the everyday weather, but not for kids with tech-illiterate parents.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Whatever there is to say about 4chan at least I think at one point it directly told this message.
- still_grokking 3y ago
  > extraordinarily cynical and depressing You mean, like the reality humans created for themself to suffer in?
- tick_tock_tick 3y ago
  Reddit now is not even vaguely close to the site it used to be. Doomerism is popular on Reddit because the power users are Reddit are basically everyone who failed life. Can't get a job, can't find a partner, no friend, and normally for reasons their own fault. Those people used to be social shunned and live on the edge of town but now their voice gets amplified 1000x because they are willing to live online 24/7 and take control of discourse.
  - 3y ago
luzojeda 3y ago
We didn't have a portable pocket computer with access to all the practically infinite multimedia refined (to be increasingly addictive) content either... Sounds a bit cliché but those days we used internet to escape the real world. Now it's backwards. But the real world is getting worse. Those days with internet 1.0 that was a wonderful digital world for lots of us.
batushka3 3y ago
Internet would be like this 80% if you used PC and avoid social media scrollholes. The infinite scroll of phone app is the adictive cancer. Internet usage with PC is like slow food.
yifanl 3y ago
The difference between the internet of the 2000s and the 2010s is how profitable it was to push things. No one got paid to get me to click on lemonparty, they did it because it was (to them) funny. Nowadays, there are industries that exist solely to get me to click on garbage, and it turns out profit is a much more powerful motive than comedy. I can ignore/laugh with/block/modreport That One Guy, I can't do anything about an infinite number of marketers.
- spxneo 3y ago
  just a testament to how much freedom of speech and expression we had then vs now hai2u has strangely been scrubbed from the internet while lemonparty, meatspin, 2girls1cup lives on the person in hai2u was actually jailed for the content he produced in American court
throwawayq3423 3y ago
> I turned out just fi whoops

by spxneo 3y ago

idle_zealot 3y ago

What you're describing sounds more socially healthy than modern usage. It was kids exploring the world digitally. Now that's been captured by digital fiefdoms actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement by any means necessary.

spxneo 3y ago
Internet before 9/11 and after 9/11 basically. What the Patriot Act did was eat at the foundations of freedom that American founders set out to create and the internet became public enemy #1 overnight, something that had to be controlled, regulated, and monopolized by American corporations in the form of social media, search engines, youtube etc. Like the rebellious soviet youths finding itself through Viktor Tsoi, the pre-911 internet offered us Western kids a brief moment of true freedom, we didn't need heroes, because our minds were free from algorithms designed to sap every bit of happiness.
drkleiner 3y ago
Internet used to be a village, with nice cozy places and communities but also shady weird individuals and houses you're not supposed to enter Now it is a shopping mall, sanitized, organized, brands and ads plastered all around, not really for socializing and community but more for products and marketing, you can still find a bookstore or a cafe but in the end, shopping mall is there to make you shop
- brazzy 3y ago
  And it's a shopping mall that has a bunch of big stores that openly sell meth, and advertize for it aggressively.
- idle_zealot 3y ago
  This interpretation is funny considering the other post in this thread bemoaning the loss of the shopping malls of their youth. As a metaphor it's on the right track, but the way the internet has been commercialized is even more extreme than a shopping mall, in the sense that experience is individually curated for each visitor and every tap, moment of hesitation, and utterance between friends is catalogued by the "store owner".
Cub3 3y ago
> actively manipulating their users into unhealthy levels of engagement Which is the root issue here, why don't we ban online advertising as a business model or significantly tax it to create a cost of x engagement

Aurornis 3y ago

> the constant comparison hellhole like Instagram that is causing mental illness. Anecdotally, Instagram ranks much lower than Reddit for causing problems among the young kids I’ve worked with. Reddit is an absolutely cesspool of misinformation, fake stories, propaganda, and rampant doomerism. Scrolling Instagram can’t hold a candle to the militant doomerism that seethes from sites like Reddit. I think it’s an uncomfortable truth for techies who grew up with Reddit while sneering at photo sharing social media, but the content on Reddit is extraordinarily cynical and depressing.

zigman1 3y ago
I think that the first lesson anyone whos signing on Reddit should be, to approach each post with a belief it is fake and is trying to see if it can deceive you. I know that for the hn crowd this sounds as obvious as the everyday weather, but not for kids with tech-illiterate parents.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  Whatever there is to say about 4chan at least I think at one point it directly told this message.
still_grokking 3y ago
> extraordinarily cynical and depressing You mean, like the reality humans created for themself to suffer in?
tick_tock_tick 3y ago
Reddit now is not even vaguely close to the site it used to be. Doomerism is popular on Reddit because the power users are Reddit are basically everyone who failed life. Can't get a job, can't find a partner, no friend, and normally for reasons their own fault. Those people used to be social shunned and live on the edge of town but now their voice gets amplified 1000x because they are willing to live online 24/7 and take control of discourse.
- 3y ago

luzojeda 3y ago

We didn't have a portable pocket computer with access to all the practically infinite multimedia refined (to be increasingly addictive) content either... Sounds a bit cliché but those days we used internet to escape the real world. Now it's backwards. But the real world is getting worse. Those days with internet 1.0 that was a wonderful digital world for lots of us.

batushka3 3y ago

Internet would be like this 80% if you used PC and avoid social media scrollholes. The infinite scroll of phone app is the adictive cancer. Internet usage with PC is like slow food.

yifanl 3y ago

The difference between the internet of the 2000s and the 2010s is how profitable it was to push things. No one got paid to get me to click on lemonparty, they did it because it was (to them) funny. Nowadays, there are industries that exist solely to get me to click on garbage, and it turns out profit is a much more powerful motive than comedy. I can ignore/laugh with/block/modreport That One Guy, I can't do anything about an infinite number of marketers.

spxneo 3y ago
just a testament to how much freedom of speech and expression we had then vs now hai2u has strangely been scrubbed from the internet while lemonparty, meatspin, 2girls1cup lives on the person in hai2u was actually jailed for the content he produced in American court

throwawayq3423 3y ago

> I turned out just fi whoops