21 ms·

Being Raised by the Internet

837 points by DamonHD 2y ago

DamonHD 2y ago
Hey, it seems that we helped! B^>
zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
I grew up in a rural part of the United States. First got online in 1996 when I was 8 years old. The best thing that the Internet gave me was a way to talk to strangers from around the world and make friends with people who I would have never had a chance to interact with in person. In my 20s, it lead to real life friendships with people I had met online, which is really cool. I have used Couch Surfing to make friends in places I was traveling through. Lived in Australia for a while with a group of friends I met online.
- stavros 2y ago
  20 years later, some of my closest friends are those I met in 97 in a MUD. I have other friends, of course, but it's notable that friendships have endured entirely online for twenty years. Some of those friends I've talked to every day, or every few days, for decades, but I've only seen once or twice IRL.
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    Online friendships can be more durable than in-person ones. They aren't affected by physical changes and moves.
    - stavros 2y ago
      Yeah, they kind of start in the worst failure mode a friendship can have.
      - deleted 2y ago
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      - deleted 2y ago
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  - therein 2y ago
    I played non-Steam CS in early 2000s and made friends there in a foreign country. Years later added to Steam, and continued staying in close contact. A decade later we both ended up at the West Coast and still chat daily to this day. We even worked on projects and started some companies along the way.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Hell yeah, I still chat regularly with a couple friends I met online in like 1999. One of them I talk with almost daily. Surprisingly the whole "extremely online" approach has meant some really solid long-lasting connections. :)
- matsemann 2y ago
  I also grew up in a rural town, in Norway. I think internet made me more of a "world citizen", empathic to all kinds of people, than I would have been without. A small town can be quite unwelcome to those not like us. But I wonder if some of that is lost now to those being "raised on the internet"? That things are too big. There were small forums, behave, as you know the avatars of everyone and they become your friends in a way. But on reddit, everyone is just faceless, I will never chat with the same person there again. So no sense of community, don't learn to feel empathy for others in the same way. I also wonder how my choice of games affected this. Playing WoW, you had to behave, get friends, join a guild, and spent time with those. I got friends I've visited in other countries, and learned much about life elsewhere through this. But my irl friends playing FPS shooting games on xbox live? Mostly swearing and trash talk, never to see the players again after getting a new random pairing.
  - zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
    Good point. I also made friends on an RPG, Phantasy Star Online, and was active on a fan board. The message boards I posted on were in the thousands of users, so everyone knew everyone and I didn't want a poor reputation.
  - photonthug 2y ago
    > things are too big Yes. Leaving a small town IRL to visit a more appropriate small digital town where people share interests but might be from anywhere was exactly what everyone I knew on early internet bbs/irc/mud was doing, basically. Presumably if you were in a larger city, you could already find people IRL with your interests somehow, even if the interests were obscure. Identity was anonymous but persistent and it was still a small town, so you couldn’t just be an ass all the time or you’d be ostracized.
nuancebydefault 2y ago
The writer of the article was poor when young but at some point got internet working on an old computer and suddenly they would have access to learn a lot about information technology, thanks to mostly freely shared info. What I wonder... would they have reached out back then not just for computer info but also for psychological support and a way out of poverty, would that have worked? And why didn't they?
- dbalatero 2y ago
  It sounds like computers were an outlet away from the hardship - something the author could sink into. I didn't get the sense he was in practical problem solving mode, but more coping and survival mode. Lucky him that this particular form of coping led to greener pastures.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    He seemed indeed in survival mode. It's indeed unfortunate that in such situations, people, especially minors, cannot find to reach out for a practical solution for, for example, cheap food (leftovers in shops?) or good advice in such situation.
    - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
      Here in the Netherlands we have the Kindertelefoon (Children’s Telephone), a free hotline for children to call and talk about anything. [1] I never called when I was young, but I think it’s great that such an initiative exists. Even for adults, there are such initiatives, such as the Luisterlijn [2] and MIND Korrelatie [3]. [1] https://www.kindertelefoon.nl/ https://www.kindertelefoon.nl/ [2] https://www.deluisterlijn.nl/ https://www.deluisterlijn.nl/ [3] https://mindkorrelatie.nl/ https://mindkorrelatie.nl/
      - nuancebydefault 2y ago
        I really can't imagine these kind of initiatives not to exist on the other side of the ocean. From all i read here, i must assume so though.
anthk 2y ago
Kinda like me modulo the internet, I relied on Debian Sarge docs at 17-18, self taught. The DVD and the accompanying book/magazine was more than enough to deeping your knowledge. Also, no project it's pointless. A Gopher/Gemini client in JimTCL with a basic cli interface a la cgo/gplaces? Go for it. A simple IRC client with a simple thread in the backgroup looking up for PING messages from the server ? The same. It wont be a killer application, but it wll be fun and you will learn a lot.
dyauspitr 2y ago
This is not being raised by the internet. Being raised by the internet is getting all your mores and morals from the internet. Learning how to do everything you know through YouTube videos. Learning appropriate responses to situations through forums etc. A lot of us are raised by the internet.
- arp242 2y ago
  This is being needlessly pedantic over a somewhat poetic usage of "raised" in the title.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Indeed, I'd thought the title was deliberately ambiguous between raised ("upbringing") and raised ("uplifted").
throwanem 2y ago
The author seems about a decade younger than me and "raised" isn't the word I would use for myself, but I doubt I would have made it if not for the friends I made and the things I learned that way. The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity. If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.
- ehnto 2y ago
  Well said, something I had not yet put to words. It came up on HN recently, about how work is a place where it can be best to leave some things unsaid, because it invites assumptions about your character and capabilities that might not be true, or positive.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Any quasi-public forum it's probably best to leave controversial and nuanced opinions on things unsaid especially under your real name. (But even under a supposedly anonymous handle, it's probably worth asking if you really need to post this.)
  - throwanem 2y ago
    That isn't even unreasonable as a cultural norm, although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work." The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      I once heard, in a different century, that the "modal restaurant script" differed between the US and the UK in that in the former, the waitstaff asks the diners a bunch of (to a cultural outsider) overly prying questions, while in the latter, the diners ask them of the waitstaff. Still true? Never was?
29athrowaway 2y ago
[flagged]
- ta1243 2y ago
  Back in the 80s kids were left for hours in front of a TV watching cartoons. I suspect this was the case even earlier that that too.
  - earnesti 2y ago
    Some kids were, some kids weren't. I don't know how I ended up hacking with Linux and programming, while many others spent their time watching series and playing Nintendo. Not to say it is somehow a bad thing.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    80s cartoons were better than regular YouTube on autoplay. Which is a Russian roulette of inappropiate content. YouTube Kids is better in this respect, but more recent.
- earnesti 2y ago
  To be fair this viewpoint should be included as well talking about being raised by the internet. People can have so very different experiences with the computers.
- aantix 2y ago
  My kids get a fair share of unsupervised tablet time. And they seem to know 10x of what I did at their same age. My son is 9, watching endless Geometry Dash tutorials, and making his own levels. He loves it, and he loves to show me his work. Tablet time will become an extension of your home life. If you have good discussions - encouraging curiosity, fostering creativity, challenging their approach "Why did you design it this way?" - the kid and the algorithms will follow that lead.
  - 29athrowaway 2y ago
    Kids know more pokemons than the animals they are based on. They can to take care of Talking Tom or some other virtual pet but ignore their own pets.
dhempsy 2y ago
It's fascinating how someone can feel like they've been "raised by the internet," almost as if it’s a parent in this digital age. I'm curious to learn more about how that experience shapes a person!
- kiba 2y ago
  The internet is important in my formative year, taught me a lot, including how to program. You could say that my intellect is formed by the internet firehose. I would like to say that my experience is largely positive, but it's hard to say that without the internet, I would actually be more capable. There are many things that the internet does well, but building young adults able to deftly navigate the real world is not one of them. That said, the internet once again is now a source of information on how to be a responsible adults. However, there's no doubt that the internet is also a source of toxic information without good judgement and ruthless filtering.
- mid-kid 2y ago
  It's said in the same way as how the environment you grow up in shapes who you become, the internet being (one of) your primary environment(s) due to escapism or just amount of time spent in it.
- deleted 2y ago
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- t-3 2y ago
  I had way more conversations with random people on internet forums, IRC, etc. than my parents while growing up, and learned orders of magnitude more from those interactions... but they didn't feed, clothe, or house me so I would never claim I was raised by the 'net.
- tinix 2y ago
  This is a fascinating train of thought, I'll bite! Makes me think of intellectualization... > In psychology, intellectualization (intellectualisation) is a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress – where thinking is used to avoid feeling. > Like rationalisation, intellectualization can thus provide a bridge between immature and mature mechanisms both in the process of growing up and in adult life.[14] > Donald Winnicott, however, considered that erratic childhood care could lead to over-dependence on intellectuality as a substitute for mothering;[15] and saw over-preoccupation with knowledge as an emotional impoverishment aimed at self-mothering via the mind.[16] It's certainly a form of dissociation, but I think in the case of the author, and others with a similar sentiment here, it's more conscious and intentional, than unconscious. Surely a conscious choice to escape into intellectualism/information at a young age could lead to training of your thought processes/patterns such that it does become an unconscious act. Regardless of choice, I think it's an interesting parallel to draw, still...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
HPsquared 2y ago
We are going to see a lot of children (and adults) raised by chatbots. Asking them for advice, confiding in them where real people don't seem safe, etc. Through the looking glass! Still, definitely better than asking Reddit for relationship advice
- doubled112 2y ago
  Red flags galore. You should divorce immediately. Not the asshole. I do fear, in the long term, what happens to those chat logs? Surely they will be used for training later on, and being anonymous doesn't always work out. Will the viewer be more AI bots? Human employees? Law enforcement? A dump on 4chan?
  - kragen 2y ago
    not just training; they'll be used for background checks and targeted assassinations
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    You should divorce them as your husband is a man, and I like women.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    One of the things that bit me is one of those anti-system videos where they tell you not to speak to police or whatever. Turns out it's better just to say "hi officer, yes officer, no officer" than spending the night in jail for absolutely no reason other than "the internet taught me how to react to police answering questions." A more harmless example is when I read that the best way to clean cooking oil spills was to add salt to absorb the oil. Didn't work, leaves more of a mess.
    - sethammons 2y ago
      I fear you missed something in the don't talk to cops speech. https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?si=fhqbLEK3jypnK-k0 https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?si=fhqbLEK3jypnK-k0 Human nature may be to help. It is always a risk to talk to officers. If you are being obstinate, prepare for someone with an authority complex to sit on you. Be also ready for that same person to sit on you for no reason and twist anything you say into a problem. Just don't give them ammo against you.
sanchezxo 2y ago
[flagged]
benreesman 2y ago
I faced nothing like the hardships the author did, but I'm nonetheless deeply indebted to people who took a young Linux nerd with an upbringing that was "no fun" under their wing and ignited a lifelong passion that became a very interesting career and a very interesting life. So I'd like to add my gratitude to that of the OP to the wonderful mentors I've had over the years. I don't see eye-to-eye with all of them in 2024, but that in no way diminishes the tremendous debt of gratitude. This is the kind of debt that's paid forward: when and where I can I try to pass some of this treasure along to younger hackers. Thank you for a moving personal story @jimmyhmiller.
tightbookkeeper 2y ago
Of course nothing on the internet is new, it just assumes a default culture and philosophy which is less prominent in real life. It would be interesting to pin early internet to a particular demographic. Is it 90s stem graduate students primarily in the US? Middle class engineers?
- throwanem 2y ago
  I would instead say, as many have, that the entire wonder of the young Internet was that it couldn't be tied to just one demographic.
  - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
    I just don’t think that’s true. The sampling of early internet users and writers is not the general population.
    - throwanem 2y ago
      Nor did I say that it was. You've assumed an equation between "not just one demographic" and "the general population" where none exists. There are histories in my bookshelf downstairs that I can recommend here. If I don't happen by before the edit window closes on this comment, I'll mention some titles in a reply.
      - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
        And with this black and white thinking you won’t find any trends or patterns anywhere in real life. To rephrase the question, who was influential on the internet? What biases and ideals were on the internet due to those selection effects. For example, the internet was very secular and perhaps nihilistic. Where does that come from.
        throwanem 2y ago
        It is a remarkable reading of my comment, in which I identify where black-and-white thinking has led your analysis into error, that can mistake that criticism for the error it describes. It really isn't a simple question you're asking, is the problem. If I thought it needed less than a book to answer, why would I be about to recommend books?
topaz0 2y ago
ndiswrapper was a big learning moment for me as well
Fokamul 2y ago
[flagged]
kragen 2y ago
> I am certain they never intended to inspire a 12 year-old kid to find a better life. i can't speak for everyone, but as one of the people writing tutorials and faqs and helping people learn to do things with free software during the period miller is talking about, that is absolutely what i intended to do. and, from the number of people i knew who were excited to work on olpc, conectar igualdad, and huayra linux, i think it was actually a pretty common motivation as a kid on bbses, fidonet, and the internet, i benefited to an unimaginable degree from other people's generosity in sharing their learning and their inventions (which is what software is). how could i not want to do the same? underwritten by the nsf, the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are
- lukan 2y ago
  "the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are" But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.
  - fsflover 2y ago
    > It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit. Here is the corresponding search engine for that: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      Also: https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu
    - malfist 2y ago
      Kagi has a small web thing too. But very few of those places are a community
pityJuke 2y ago
I’m glad this author had an endearing experience. I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills. I can say my life took a significant upturn once I extricated myself from that community. I’d say the thing is that the internet is filled with a lot of negative places, filled with people who literally can’t operate IRL. If as a kid you’re sucked into them, it can be detrimental.
- toastau 2y ago
  There are online communities for all kinds of addictive activities. They offer perfect validation, and it's easy to lose track of how little you're actually doing in the real world or how few people you're interacting with face-to-face. Some people stop trying to meet others locally once they find their intellectual and emotional peers online. This can go on for years, and it's not something I'd recommend. I interpreted this piece as focusing on how information is being made more accessible. People are taking complex textbooks and university-level knowledge and turning them into understandable tutorials and examples. Anyone who can break down and share complicated information has a valuable skill that really helps others.
- theshackleford 2y ago
  > I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills. I had an experience far more in line with the article. I grew up in extreme poverty, incredible isolation and within a very abusive family. So abusive that a big chunk of my childhood was spent in dealing with courts and police with eventually an apprehended violence order being taken out on my behalf against my parents to try and bring an end to the abuse. Extracted from the abuse but not the isolation I was headed to a very dark place. The interent was world changing for me once given access. It opened the door to another world, to the ability to socialise without stigma, learn and grow with people that in comparison to what I had experienced, were quite normal and well adjusted though of course, not perfect by any means. My time on it as a youth opened the door to a world that would later become my ladder out of that life and the foundation of my success as an adult. A ladder I would never had access to without the internet. I credit it for effectively having saved my life. I would be in a very different place now were it not for that exposure and experience. Where most of the people I knew as a youth are today, which is not at all a pleasant place. Todays internet is not the same I feel, and that is also not to say that it could not instead have been a detrimental place or experience for some even then. Perhaps if you have a more normal upbringing, one in which you do not face such extremes than it may only bring negatives instead of positives, but for many, it's a hatch to exposure of things you may otherwise never get to experience as others do.
zero-sharp 2y ago
Yea it was a similar situation for me. I definitely wasn't in poverty, but my family was a mess. I mostly hung out in my room on the internet and got away from it.
maxlin 2y ago
Expected something a lot more dark. But this sounds like the best thing that would be written under that heading. Probably because not too current-day
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  The part about why it happened seemed plenty dark.
  - maxlin 2y ago
    Frugality isn't dark. But the story instead having been of tiktok-esque upbringing and possibly going on a worse path in life would have been.
AzzyHN 2y ago
For better or worse, I too was raised by the internet and found kindness in random strangers. I try and return the favor today, in Discord servers and what not
yapyap 2y ago
cute article, whenever I hear about someone “raised by the internet” I usually think of a negative result but glad to hear this is a positive one
- joshdavham 2y ago
  Agreed. I was expecting to read an article on something "ipad kids", but instead found a very inspiring and heart-warming article
- synicalx 2y ago
  I was fully prepared for a list of image board and ogrish/liveleak related trauma but this was relatively wholesome.
  - amatecha 2y ago
    I guess I could say I found ogrish or liveleaks traumatizing but it wasn't the site, it was human beings. I felt I had a responsibility to understand what humanity was capable of, because I only had vanishingly-minor hints of it growing up in a nice conflict-free region of the world. Honestly, being exposed to the stuff on those sites gave me a better understanding of what people might do to each other (or to other life forms). It was rough to see some stuff, but I am actually thankful I was able to access that kind of stuff at that age and learn more about what humans are. I don't know if many people relate to that mindset, but I never once had a sense of "I wish I didn't watch that". Each was a learning experience.
fermigier 2y ago
I wasn't raised (as a technologist) by the internet, but by cassettes, floppies, magazines and books. But we share at least one experience: the horrors of ndiswrapper. 20 years later, I recently tried to install Ubuntu on an old Intel MacBook Pro that I got somehow, and I realized that in 2024 you still can't install Linux on a laptop (at least, on laptop of a certain popular make) without jumping through hoops, due to, IIRC, lack of support for the particular Wifi chipset this computer uses.
- kiwijamo 2y ago
  I find it has improved heaps in recent years. Even Debian (a fairly conservative Linux distro) supports Intel wireless chips right out of the box and I understand it has support for other wireless chips as well. It's gotten to the point sometimes Linux has better support out of the box than Windows does! Windows for example struggles with USB-C data but works perfectly on Linux.
- lemper 2y ago
  ay bro! my old man berated me because i installed linux on our desktop and couldn't connect to the internet via modem. today, i am only willing to install linux on thinkpad laptops and some well-known-to-work pc.
- olyjohn 2y ago
  There are so many laptops that Linux works great on right out of the box. I've used it on brand new models straight from Dell/Lenovo/HP etc and it's worked out of the box. It's weird to me that you call out Linux for not running on one proprietary machine and expanding that and saying you can't install Linux on any laptops. It's simply not true.
avg_dev 2y ago
a beautiful post. it's really nice when we get posts like this here, just personally i find it very meaningful. > But sometimes the employees there would give me the employee discount, I guess they realized I needed it. that is such a heart-warming thing. i would maybe argue the following point in the article: > People whose work was not aimed at me in the slightest. idk. i think that part of the point of being open is being open to possibilities. obviously no one can see the far-reaching consequences of their work when they set out to do it. but sometimes, people have hopes, i think, that their openness will create possibilities just like this article is describing. > resources like w3schools, i remember a long time back - maybe 15 years ago - i would occasionally read w3schools, and i had a coworker who would kind of turn up their nose at that site, they were kind of a snob about it. i knew enough then to realize it wasn't the best site for everything but out of insecurity after that person said that, i stopped reading it too. but it helped me, too. and i'm glad it helped you. i am starting to re-revise my opinion of that site.
- gradientsrneat 2y ago
  w3schools was how I first started learning programming and I still find it useful sometimes. I too saw the snobs.
ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Huh this could have been written by me. I am a kid of the internet. A place built on altruism.
LoganDark 2y ago
I was raised by the internet, too. I first started using computers at around the age of 5. A lot of my childhood years were spent in places that still exist today. My family was poor and computers were my only escape, just like the article says. I can't help but feel like I lost something through doing that, though. It certainly didn't help my ADHD to teach my brain that it's possible to live life through only instant gratification. And it certainly didn't help to always be connected to so many people that now I can't seem to do anything alone.
pushupentry1219 2y ago
As someone of the younger generation, I think "raised by the internet" these days is extremely toxic and non-productive not at all what the author here is talking about in this lovely post. When someone says "I was raised by the internet", I immediately think: social media addiction, 4chan and other online obscenities. But this is completely based on my own personal experience. My point here is not related to this lovely post at all, it's just that I always have associated "raised by the internet" with negative connotation.
- photonthug 2y ago
  In the long long ago before social media and amongst a certain type of people, the answer to “where are you from?” would be something like “the internet”, and the connotations were positive. It meant that you were from a small shitty place that nobody ever heard of, but you had transcended those humble origins to become a being of pure information, sharing thoughts, philosophy and maybe code with other similar beings, and that physical location was irrelevant and really the whole idea of it was quite vulgar. I suppose we are still sharing thoughts now, but times change, and the real struggle is transcending the vulgarity of the internet and going back to meatspace. Hmm. These days if you don’t like discussing where you’re from, there’s no equivalent answer that immediately reveals interests, while pushing back on the presumption of getting a real answer. Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission, but urban people will think you are homeless, and rural people will think you are a weird librarian.
  - AlienRobot 2y ago
    I'm from the Internet :-) I think the problem is that there is a huge number of people now whose only contact with the Internet has been social media. For them, that is where the Internet begins and where it ends. They'll use Reddit and not call it a "website" but an "app," because they have "installed" Reddit on their smartphones. It doesn't help that most online forums have become subreddits, and that Google will show Reddit results over random forums. It makes sense because, understandably, Reddit can be assumed to be always safe, while a random forum might not be, but in the long run it it just gives Reddit an unfair advantage over smaller forums that could just as safe if not better than their subreddit equivalent, killing those forums in the process. Now things are getting even worse as subreddits become Discord channels. That's why I root for things like Neocities and Tumblr to succeed.
TZubiri 2y ago
https://xkcd.com/1311/ https://xkcd.com/1311/ "The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricty, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will left to do unaidad will be to make love." Mrs. John Lane, The fortnightly 1905
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ls612 2y ago
  She wasn't wrong at all though.
  - TZubiri 2y ago
    visionary
- rightbyte 2y ago
  I guess 'make love' was not a eupheism for sex in that time?
eek2121 2y ago
[flagged]
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  1 - the article was mentioning that amount per week, not per meal 2 - how much planning ahead and kitchen time per meal are you thinking here? For a 12 year old to do.
ndavis 2y ago
I was booting Linux while sleeping in a car, and in and out of motels, eating from food banks, with drug addicted parents, as a teenager. There was something to "the internet" back in the day as a way to cope when faced with that sort of situation. The author is not alone. We were blessed to have a computer through it all. I hope "kids these days" have the same opportunity with their phones.
- andersa 2y ago
  Spoiler: They don't. The phones are hostile to experimentation and the social media apps they will use to kill time are designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible.
  - xp84 2y ago
    ^ (+5, insightful) Yeah. This hurts how true it is. I’m an early-mid millennial, very modest social class so I got some access to dial-up at age 14 and broadband at about 16. We were just explorers back then. The sophistication aimed at us was no fancier than that of the Saturday morning cartoon ads. I’m sure the people at Yahoo and AOL wanted us to use their IM program and watch some of quaint banner ads. But most of the Internet then was exploring knowledge and fandoms, and connecting with those around the globe who spoke your language and also loved what you love. Most of the most fun social activity back then for young people spun out of places like music chat rooms and music/band forums, because 14-year olds believe their music taste is the deepest and most personal thing about them. Contrast to today: kids now, many from near birth, are test subjects in a million experiments every day, designed by hostile bots and even more hostile humans to addict them and feed obsessions all in service of revenue optimization. The biggest experiment of all is the meta one: what will happen to this generation raised in this unprecedented way?? Btw — nothing would make me happier than Gen Alpha being super successful. So I hope I’m Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud here.
  - Aachen 2y ago
    > designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible Wouldn't TV have been the equivalent in the era OP is talking about? Going on the internet and seeking out coding tutorials, as the article describes, is a choice most people didn't make back then; it's the most nerdy of kids doing this outside of school. While an addiction takes that choice away or makes it much harder, most kids are not addicted (~90% aren't in UK, ~55% aren't in India, for 11- to 14-year-olds per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Pre...) If you have a credible source on phones in 2024 providing fewer learning opportunities than computers in the <2000s, either anecdotal (kids who you observe are otherwise curious but don't seek out non-entertainment content) or by looking at a large enough sample to have some measurable difference in the population, I'm interested. It sounds like an assumption based on the (justified) negativity around social media as a concept rather than an actually observed effect
AI_beffr 2y ago
its interesting that martin scorsese and chris rock both claim that they were essentially raised by television sets. i would say that i was co-parented by a television at least. i would say that it contributed to a blunted, unrealistic understanding of the real world and human relationships. my world view now is that children shouldnt watch television or movies and that they should be immersed in real human relationships. especially those disney movies that have really dramatic, tear jerker scenes. i think that is way too much stimulation for children and that their heart strings should only be tugged by things that are real. those powerful emotions play a role in human development and you shouldnt mess around with that too much.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  What's a growing kid to do when they start encountering situations outside the training distribution? At least with movies and novels they'll have a few synthetic data points instead of just nothing.
  - AI_beffr 2y ago
    i would rather them have nothing and learn than fill in that gap with something really counterproductive. a fake personality.
stonethrowaway 2y ago
There was a time when the internet at large got behind projects like Ubuntu that stood a fighting chance of changing the world for the better.
mattsimpson 2y ago
Yep, same here. People sharing and me wanting to learn saved me too. It kept me (mostly) out of trouble, and ended up with me having a successful career in IT, software development, and hopefully soon, security.
lequanghai 2y ago
To Jimmy. I feel for you, man. No kids should went through time like you did. THank you for becoming a good citizen & contribute to the great time of computing.
zipping1549 2y ago
It's uncanny how much similar the author's experience to mine. I learned computer stuff fixing and tinkering with barely working computer.
- 71bw 2y ago
  >I learned computer stuff fixing and tinkering with barely working computer. Being relatively young (born after 2000), I wouldn't be here were it not for the Core 2 Duo HP machine I got in 2014-ish after my father fired some people from his company and was left with surplus machines. It ran a, at that point, 6? year old install of Vista with all the HP bloat, had 2 gigs of RAM, a 160GB HDD, no internet connection and came with a 5:4 display to match. Christ did I love that machine. I spent hours in front of it. Getting games to work. Getting pirated software off the web (downloaded on our "main" family PC that I still used to play Minecraft over the network with friends), onto a 2 gig pendrive, often in parts and copying it over. Learning how archives work in general. How to re-install Windows, partition a drive, modify the OS visually, install language packs, struggle heavily to get .net 3.5 on Windows 8 without the net... That's the exact moment I fell in love with computers. Well, I most likely fell into obesity at that point as well, but ignoring that it's all been positive. Then I got the Internet and it went down quickly.
yblu 2y ago
used to be one of the “sharers,” maintaining a fairly popular blog, writing tutorials on platforms like DZone and CodeProject, answering questions on StackOverflow, and creating open-source projects that collectively amassed millions of downloads. At one point, I decided to monetize one of my open-source projects by creating a commercial fork. That’s when a group of people, none of whom had contributed to the project in any way, started a witch hunt over a few super trivial lines of code they accused me of “stealing” from contributors. Despite having the full support of all actual contributors, the backlash from these outsiders left me drained and disillusioned. So I stopped sharing my work and contributing to open source altogether—and honestly, I’m happier for it. To all the Jimmy Millers who genuinely appreciate the goodwill of creators: be aware that there are people who will leech off it or even destroy it.
isoprophlex 2y ago
If OP was 12 today, in 2024, would he have gotten into Linux? Or would he have been sucked into watching endless MrBeast videos? It's easier than ever to get started understanding and building software... but at the same time it seems easier than ever to get distracted by the modern internet.
- bondarchuk 2y ago
  Since he didn't get sucked into watching endless TV back then either, I would guess no. Internet is still here.
niemandhier 2y ago
“When I look back and think about those times, I'm amazed but how much I owe to people who I never met” So much has changed: I read a post on a forum the other day, some kid asking questions about PyTorch. Rather than getting help, the poor soul was berated for not using “they/them”… We moved away from building our communities on shared interests, towards building them based on shared sentiment, which has to be proven by behavior. Unfortunately joining such a community is much more difficult.
- Aachen 2y ago
  I had plenty of experiences with similarly useless debates as a teenager on the internet twenty years ago. Think of providing code examples with indentation that the reader didn't like. At least being more inclusive is a more worthwhile goal than finding the perfect indentation, but yeah, neither answers the question at hand Could it be that you now recognise the uselessness of such a response whereas, when you were younger, you didn't know any better and took it as-is? Because I think that's almost certainly the case for me, rather than that it is an exclusive feature of modern times that some people berate others on minor-to-irrelevant points
stefanv 2y ago
As a self-taught developer who ended up making a living from this, I can only join the author in thanking all the people who shared their knowledge online during the 90s and 00s
keep_walking 2y ago
As a kid I was out of the house for 12 hours a day playing outside. Although my parents were both working and we had food on the table, we were a pretty poor family. They were both exhausted after work and I yearned for their attention but I guess I could see that they were tired and suppressed my own needs. I became very withdrawn never speaking about my emotions or myself. Then age 10 my mother died and father became withdrawn alcoholic, basically in one fell sweep I lost both my parents. Computers and the internet were my only refuge. Be it pirated movies I could watch or play games.. I was there. At some point I became a really good competitive gamer so that gave me an opportunity to socialize a bit. I moved to a different game and crushed it there and made more internet friends. I got diagnosed with a lifelong chronic illness at that time (Graves Disease) but I still kept surviving. I was alienated from most of my real life friends because I couldn't relate to them. I was in a constant physical and emotional struggle and they were in the seat of stability. I wasted a lot of time but slowly I learned. At some point I realized that games aren't going to be a good financial support so I started learning programming and here I am in my mid 30s with a few years of coding experience(without a job currently and struggling). I can boldly say the internet has saved me, other people where I live and had nothing succumbed to street gangs and drugs. I know that I'm behind many peers I have in terms of life achievements but I also know where I come from and take pride that I've been able to survive up until now. I have stopped walking before thinking it's over but every time I have the strength to sit back up and start walking again.
sam_goody 2y ago
I have spent most of my life (in years and percentage of the day) running a youth group, mostly targeting the underprivileged. Small [as in we officially mentor about 25 children a year], but powerful. The number one thing you can do for a youth is convince them that they are capable. Believe in them, and give them challenges that you know they can achieve. Give them time, empathy and encouragement. The worst thing you can do for them is pity them, discourage them, explain that because they are black / women / poor / etc they are destined to a life of being in second place. Glad you made it.
curiousguy 2y ago
Great post. I was also raised by the internet. I have loving parents, but grew up poor in a developing country, surrounded by people that only care about football and soap opera. If it wasn’t the internet and forums like slashdot or Hackers News, I would probably fall to conformity and the nerd in me would had died out. Instead, my computer hobby became a really profitable job and now I’m living in a first world country and working on some really interesting things.
WeylandYutani 2y ago
You can take this literally. I remember that for a while it was quite popular for families to live stream their life for that blog money. Always found that fad weird and creepy.
- Aachen 2y ago
  Could you quantify "quite popular"? I never heard of anyone doing that in my own circles, but know of such youtube vlog families, which makes me think it's probably around one in a hundred thousand (that would mean thousands of people from the USA or around a thousand in Germany, which would be like two orders of magnitude above how many people are successful doing it, which sounds about right)
lo_fye 2y ago
> they decided to openly and freely share their work. I LOVE this story. Thank you for sharing it. It's stuff like this that makes me crave the Web 1.0 (and early 2.0) days. This makes me want to support Mastodon, and Vivaldi, and other federated and open systems. I'm as guilty as anyone, allowing social apps like twitter & Facebook to take me away from writing on my hand-rolled blog. I need to get that puppy back up and running. I need to share more. Be the change I want to see in the Internet & Web. Information wants to be free. Hack the planet!

837 points by DamonHD 2y ago

Hey, it seems that we helped! B^>

I grew up in a rural part of the United States. First got online in 1996 when I was 8 years old. The best thing that the Internet gave me was a way to talk to strangers from around the world and make friends with people who I would have never had a chance to interact with in person. In my 20s, it lead to real life friendships with people I had met online, which is really cool. I have used Couch Surfing to make friends in places I was traveling through. Lived in Australia for a while with a group of friends I met online.

stavros 2y ago
20 years later, some of my closest friends are those I met in 97 in a MUD. I have other friends, of course, but it's notable that friendships have endured entirely online for twenty years. Some of those friends I've talked to every day, or every few days, for decades, but I've only seen once or twice IRL.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  Online friendships can be more durable than in-person ones. They aren't affected by physical changes and moves.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Yeah, they kind of start in the worst failure mode a friendship can have.
    - deleted 2y ago
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- therein 2y ago
  I played non-Steam CS in early 2000s and made friends there in a foreign country. Years later added to Steam, and continued staying in close contact. A decade later we both ended up at the West Coast and still chat daily to this day. We even worked on projects and started some companies along the way.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Hell yeah, I still chat regularly with a couple friends I met online in like 1999. One of them I talk with almost daily. Surprisingly the whole "extremely online" approach has meant some really solid long-lasting connections. :)
matsemann 2y ago
I also grew up in a rural town, in Norway. I think internet made me more of a "world citizen", empathic to all kinds of people, than I would have been without. A small town can be quite unwelcome to those not like us. But I wonder if some of that is lost now to those being "raised on the internet"? That things are too big. There were small forums, behave, as you know the avatars of everyone and they become your friends in a way. But on reddit, everyone is just faceless, I will never chat with the same person there again. So no sense of community, don't learn to feel empathy for others in the same way. I also wonder how my choice of games affected this. Playing WoW, you had to behave, get friends, join a guild, and spent time with those. I got friends I've visited in other countries, and learned much about life elsewhere through this. But my irl friends playing FPS shooting games on xbox live? Mostly swearing and trash talk, never to see the players again after getting a new random pairing.
- zoklet-enjoyer 2y ago
  Good point. I also made friends on an RPG, Phantasy Star Online, and was active on a fan board. The message boards I posted on were in the thousands of users, so everyone knew everyone and I didn't want a poor reputation.
- photonthug 2y ago
  > things are too big Yes. Leaving a small town IRL to visit a more appropriate small digital town where people share interests but might be from anywhere was exactly what everyone I knew on early internet bbs/irc/mud was doing, basically. Presumably if you were in a larger city, you could already find people IRL with your interests somehow, even if the interests were obscure. Identity was anonymous but persistent and it was still a small town, so you couldn’t just be an ass all the time or you’d be ostracized.

nuancebydefault 2y ago

The writer of the article was poor when young but at some point got internet working on an old computer and suddenly they would have access to learn a lot about information technology, thanks to mostly freely shared info. What I wonder... would they have reached out back then not just for computer info but also for psychological support and a way out of poverty, would that have worked? And why didn't they?

dbalatero 2y ago
It sounds like computers were an outlet away from the hardship - something the author could sink into. I didn't get the sense he was in practical problem solving mode, but more coping and survival mode. Lucky him that this particular form of coping led to greener pastures.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  He seemed indeed in survival mode. It's indeed unfortunate that in such situations, people, especially minors, cannot find to reach out for a practical solution for, for example, cheap food (leftovers in shops?) or good advice in such situation.
  - Tijdreiziger 2y ago
    Here in the Netherlands we have the Kindertelefoon (Children’s Telephone), a free hotline for children to call and talk about anything. [1] I never called when I was young, but I think it’s great that such an initiative exists. Even for adults, there are such initiatives, such as the Luisterlijn [2] and MIND Korrelatie [3]. [1] https://www.kindertelefoon.nl/ https://www.kindertelefoon.nl/ [2] https://www.deluisterlijn.nl/ https://www.deluisterlijn.nl/ [3] https://mindkorrelatie.nl/ https://mindkorrelatie.nl/
    - nuancebydefault 2y ago
      I really can't imagine these kind of initiatives not to exist on the other side of the ocean. From all i read here, i must assume so though.

anthk 2y ago

Kinda like me modulo the internet, I relied on Debian Sarge docs at 17-18, self taught. The DVD and the accompanying book/magazine was more than enough to deeping your knowledge. Also, no project it's pointless. A Gopher/Gemini client in JimTCL with a basic cli interface a la cgo/gplaces? Go for it. A simple IRC client with a simple thread in the backgroup looking up for PING messages from the server ? The same. It wont be a killer application, but it wll be fun and you will learn a lot.

dyauspitr 2y ago

This is not being raised by the internet. Being raised by the internet is getting all your mores and morals from the internet. Learning how to do everything you know through YouTube videos. Learning appropriate responses to situations through forums etc. A lot of us are raised by the internet.

arp242 2y ago
This is being needlessly pedantic over a somewhat poetic usage of "raised" in the title.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Indeed, I'd thought the title was deliberately ambiguous between raised ("upbringing") and raised ("uplifted").

throwanem 2y ago

The author seems about a decade younger than me and "raised" isn't the word I would use for myself, but I doubt I would have made it if not for the friends I made and the things I learned that way. The thing about pulling yourself up out of a bad situation is that you learn to be usually very deliberate in how you talk about it and what you talk about. People who've never really known anything but stability in their lives tend to make a lot of assumptions they're not equipped to recognize, so it's usually just better not to create the opportunity. If you feel you've noticed an odd ellipticality in accounts like these, the vague sense of something going unsaid, it's this. If that's all you've noticed, better not to pry.

ehnto 2y ago
Well said, something I had not yet put to words. It came up on HN recently, about how work is a place where it can be best to leave some things unsaid, because it invites assumptions about your character and capabilities that might not be true, or positive.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Any quasi-public forum it's probably best to leave controversial and nuanced opinions on things unsaid especially under your real name. (But even under a supposedly anonymous handle, it's probably worth asking if you really need to post this.)
- throwanem 2y ago
  That isn't even unreasonable as a cultural norm, although it is that those who most firmly enforce it also cherish silly habits like saying "bring your whole self to work." The expectation of not oversharing needs to be met by a commitment of not over-asking, but I suppose that's really too much to expect in an age so degraded that all the obligations across lines of social class are understood to run in only one direction.
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    I once heard, in a different century, that the "modal restaurant script" differed between the US and the UK in that in the former, the waitstaff asks the diners a bunch of (to a cultural outsider) overly prying questions, while in the latter, the diners ask them of the waitstaff. Still true? Never was?

29athrowaway 2y ago

[flagged]

ta1243 2y ago
Back in the 80s kids were left for hours in front of a TV watching cartoons. I suspect this was the case even earlier that that too.
- earnesti 2y ago
  Some kids were, some kids weren't. I don't know how I ended up hacking with Linux and programming, while many others spent their time watching series and playing Nintendo. Not to say it is somehow a bad thing.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  80s cartoons were better than regular YouTube on autoplay. Which is a Russian roulette of inappropiate content. YouTube Kids is better in this respect, but more recent.
earnesti 2y ago
To be fair this viewpoint should be included as well talking about being raised by the internet. People can have so very different experiences with the computers.
aantix 2y ago
My kids get a fair share of unsupervised tablet time. And they seem to know 10x of what I did at their same age. My son is 9, watching endless Geometry Dash tutorials, and making his own levels. He loves it, and he loves to show me his work. Tablet time will become an extension of your home life. If you have good discussions - encouraging curiosity, fostering creativity, challenging their approach "Why did you design it this way?" - the kid and the algorithms will follow that lead.
- 29athrowaway 2y ago
  Kids know more pokemons than the animals they are based on. They can to take care of Talking Tom or some other virtual pet but ignore their own pets.

dhempsy 2y ago

It's fascinating how someone can feel like they've been "raised by the internet," almost as if it’s a parent in this digital age. I'm curious to learn more about how that experience shapes a person!

kiba 2y ago
The internet is important in my formative year, taught me a lot, including how to program. You could say that my intellect is formed by the internet firehose. I would like to say that my experience is largely positive, but it's hard to say that without the internet, I would actually be more capable. There are many things that the internet does well, but building young adults able to deftly navigate the real world is not one of them. That said, the internet once again is now a source of information on how to be a responsible adults. However, there's no doubt that the internet is also a source of toxic information without good judgement and ruthless filtering.
mid-kid 2y ago
It's said in the same way as how the environment you grow up in shapes who you become, the internet being (one of) your primary environment(s) due to escapism or just amount of time spent in it.
deleted 2y ago
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t-3 2y ago
I had way more conversations with random people on internet forums, IRC, etc. than my parents while growing up, and learned orders of magnitude more from those interactions... but they didn't feed, clothe, or house me so I would never claim I was raised by the 'net.
tinix 2y ago
This is a fascinating train of thought, I'll bite! Makes me think of intellectualization... > In psychology, intellectualization (intellectualisation) is a defense mechanism by which reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress – where thinking is used to avoid feeling. > Like rationalisation, intellectualization can thus provide a bridge between immature and mature mechanisms both in the process of growing up and in adult life.[14] > Donald Winnicott, however, considered that erratic childhood care could lead to over-dependence on intellectuality as a substitute for mothering;[15] and saw over-preoccupation with knowledge as an emotional impoverishment aimed at self-mothering via the mind.[16] It's certainly a form of dissociation, but I think in the case of the author, and others with a similar sentiment here, it's more conscious and intentional, than unconscious. Surely a conscious choice to escape into intellectualism/information at a young age could lead to training of your thought processes/patterns such that it does become an unconscious act. Regardless of choice, I think it's an interesting parallel to draw, still...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

HPsquared 2y ago

We are going to see a lot of children (and adults) raised by chatbots. Asking them for advice, confiding in them where real people don't seem safe, etc. Through the looking glass! Still, definitely better than asking Reddit for relationship advice

doubled112 2y ago
Red flags galore. You should divorce immediately. Not the asshole. I do fear, in the long term, what happens to those chat logs? Surely they will be used for training later on, and being anonymous doesn't always work out. Will the viewer be more AI bots? Human employees? Law enforcement? A dump on 4chan?
- kragen 2y ago
  not just training; they'll be used for background checks and targeted assassinations
- TZubiri 2y ago
  You should divorce them as your husband is a man, and I like women.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  One of the things that bit me is one of those anti-system videos where they tell you not to speak to police or whatever. Turns out it's better just to say "hi officer, yes officer, no officer" than spending the night in jail for absolutely no reason other than "the internet taught me how to react to police answering questions." A more harmless example is when I read that the best way to clean cooking oil spills was to add salt to absorb the oil. Didn't work, leaves more of a mess.
  - sethammons 2y ago
    I fear you missed something in the don't talk to cops speech. https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?si=fhqbLEK3jypnK-k0 https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?si=fhqbLEK3jypnK-k0 Human nature may be to help. It is always a risk to talk to officers. If you are being obstinate, prepare for someone with an authority complex to sit on you. Be also ready for that same person to sit on you for no reason and twist anything you say into a problem. Just don't give them ammo against you.

sanchezxo 2y ago

[flagged]

benreesman 2y ago

I faced nothing like the hardships the author did, but I'm nonetheless deeply indebted to people who took a young Linux nerd with an upbringing that was "no fun" under their wing and ignited a lifelong passion that became a very interesting career and a very interesting life. So I'd like to add my gratitude to that of the OP to the wonderful mentors I've had over the years. I don't see eye-to-eye with all of them in 2024, but that in no way diminishes the tremendous debt of gratitude. This is the kind of debt that's paid forward: when and where I can I try to pass some of this treasure along to younger hackers. Thank you for a moving personal story @jimmyhmiller.

tightbookkeeper 2y ago

Of course nothing on the internet is new, it just assumes a default culture and philosophy which is less prominent in real life. It would be interesting to pin early internet to a particular demographic. Is it 90s stem graduate students primarily in the US? Middle class engineers?

throwanem 2y ago
I would instead say, as many have, that the entire wonder of the young Internet was that it couldn't be tied to just one demographic.
- tightbookkeeper 2y ago
  I just don’t think that’s true. The sampling of early internet users and writers is not the general population.
  - throwanem 2y ago
    Nor did I say that it was. You've assumed an equation between "not just one demographic" and "the general population" where none exists. There are histories in my bookshelf downstairs that I can recommend here. If I don't happen by before the edit window closes on this comment, I'll mention some titles in a reply.
    - tightbookkeeper 2y ago
      And with this black and white thinking you won’t find any trends or patterns anywhere in real life. To rephrase the question, who was influential on the internet? What biases and ideals were on the internet due to those selection effects. For example, the internet was very secular and perhaps nihilistic. Where does that come from.
      - throwanem 2y ago
        It is a remarkable reading of my comment, in which I identify where black-and-white thinking has led your analysis into error, that can mistake that criticism for the error it describes. It really isn't a simple question you're asking, is the problem. If I thought it needed less than a book to answer, why would I be about to recommend books?

topaz0 2y ago

ndiswrapper was a big learning moment for me as well

Fokamul 2y ago

[flagged]

kragen 2y ago

> I am certain they never intended to inspire a 12 year-old kid to find a better life. i can't speak for everyone, but as one of the people writing tutorials and faqs and helping people learn to do things with free software during the period miller is talking about, that is absolutely what i intended to do. and, from the number of people i knew who were excited to work on olpc, conectar igualdad, and huayra linux, i think it was actually a pretty common motivation as a kid on bbses, fidonet, and the internet, i benefited to an unimaginable degree from other people's generosity in sharing their learning and their inventions (which is what software is). how could i not want to do the same? underwritten by the nsf, the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are

lukan 2y ago
"the internet was a gift economy, like burning man: people giving away things of value to all comers because if you don't do that maybe it's because you can't. the good parts of it still are" But it feels like more and more are taken over by money from advertisement. It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit.
- fsflover 2y ago
  > It is allways a relieve to me, find a site in the old spirit. Here is the corresponding search engine for that: https://wiby.me https://wiby.me
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Also: https://search.marginalia.nu https://search.marginalia.nu
  - malfist 2y ago
    Kagi has a small web thing too. But very few of those places are a community

pityJuke 2y ago

I’m glad this author had an endearing experience. I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills. I can say my life took a significant upturn once I extricated myself from that community. I’d say the thing is that the internet is filled with a lot of negative places, filled with people who literally can’t operate IRL. If as a kid you’re sucked into them, it can be detrimental.

toastau 2y ago
There are online communities for all kinds of addictive activities. They offer perfect validation, and it's easy to lose track of how little you're actually doing in the real world or how few people you're interacting with face-to-face. Some people stop trying to meet others locally once they find their intellectual and emotional peers online. This can go on for years, and it's not something I'd recommend. I interpreted this piece as focusing on how information is being made more accessible. People are taking complex textbooks and university-level knowledge and turning them into understandable tutorials and examples. Anyone who can break down and share complicated information has a valuable skill that really helps others.
theshackleford 2y ago
> I can’t say that I did. I’d blame “being raised on the internet” as a consistent contributor to a lot of negatives in my life. Certainly, I picked up a lot of the rage from people in the IRC circles I ran with, and like a parrot exhibited it in my personal life. Beyond that, the general degradation of IRL social skills. I had an experience far more in line with the article. I grew up in extreme poverty, incredible isolation and within a very abusive family. So abusive that a big chunk of my childhood was spent in dealing with courts and police with eventually an apprehended violence order being taken out on my behalf against my parents to try and bring an end to the abuse. Extracted from the abuse but not the isolation I was headed to a very dark place. The interent was world changing for me once given access. It opened the door to another world, to the ability to socialise without stigma, learn and grow with people that in comparison to what I had experienced, were quite normal and well adjusted though of course, not perfect by any means. My time on it as a youth opened the door to a world that would later become my ladder out of that life and the foundation of my success as an adult. A ladder I would never had access to without the internet. I credit it for effectively having saved my life. I would be in a very different place now were it not for that exposure and experience. Where most of the people I knew as a youth are today, which is not at all a pleasant place. Todays internet is not the same I feel, and that is also not to say that it could not instead have been a detrimental place or experience for some even then. Perhaps if you have a more normal upbringing, one in which you do not face such extremes than it may only bring negatives instead of positives, but for many, it's a hatch to exposure of things you may otherwise never get to experience as others do.

zero-sharp 2y ago

Yea it was a similar situation for me. I definitely wasn't in poverty, but my family was a mess. I mostly hung out in my room on the internet and got away from it.

maxlin 2y ago

Expected something a lot more dark. But this sounds like the best thing that would be written under that heading. Probably because not too current-day

tbrownaw 2y ago
The part about why it happened seemed plenty dark.
- maxlin 2y ago
  Frugality isn't dark. But the story instead having been of tiktok-esque upbringing and possibly going on a worse path in life would have been.

AzzyHN 2y ago

For better or worse, I too was raised by the internet and found kindness in random strangers. I try and return the favor today, in Discord servers and what not

yapyap 2y ago

cute article, whenever I hear about someone “raised by the internet” I usually think of a negative result but glad to hear this is a positive one

joshdavham 2y ago
Agreed. I was expecting to read an article on something "ipad kids", but instead found a very inspiring and heart-warming article
synicalx 2y ago
I was fully prepared for a list of image board and ogrish/liveleak related trauma but this was relatively wholesome.
- amatecha 2y ago
  I guess I could say I found ogrish or liveleaks traumatizing but it wasn't the site, it was human beings. I felt I had a responsibility to understand what humanity was capable of, because I only had vanishingly-minor hints of it growing up in a nice conflict-free region of the world. Honestly, being exposed to the stuff on those sites gave me a better understanding of what people might do to each other (or to other life forms). It was rough to see some stuff, but I am actually thankful I was able to access that kind of stuff at that age and learn more about what humans are. I don't know if many people relate to that mindset, but I never once had a sense of "I wish I didn't watch that". Each was a learning experience.

fermigier 2y ago

I wasn't raised (as a technologist) by the internet, but by cassettes, floppies, magazines and books. But we share at least one experience: the horrors of ndiswrapper. 20 years later, I recently tried to install Ubuntu on an old Intel MacBook Pro that I got somehow, and I realized that in 2024 you still can't install Linux on a laptop (at least, on laptop of a certain popular make) without jumping through hoops, due to, IIRC, lack of support for the particular Wifi chipset this computer uses.

kiwijamo 2y ago
I find it has improved heaps in recent years. Even Debian (a fairly conservative Linux distro) supports Intel wireless chips right out of the box and I understand it has support for other wireless chips as well. It's gotten to the point sometimes Linux has better support out of the box than Windows does! Windows for example struggles with USB-C data but works perfectly on Linux.
lemper 2y ago
ay bro! my old man berated me because i installed linux on our desktop and couldn't connect to the internet via modem. today, i am only willing to install linux on thinkpad laptops and some well-known-to-work pc.
olyjohn 2y ago
There are so many laptops that Linux works great on right out of the box. I've used it on brand new models straight from Dell/Lenovo/HP etc and it's worked out of the box. It's weird to me that you call out Linux for not running on one proprietary machine and expanding that and saying you can't install Linux on any laptops. It's simply not true.

avg_dev 2y ago

a beautiful post. it's really nice when we get posts like this here, just personally i find it very meaningful. > But sometimes the employees there would give me the employee discount, I guess they realized I needed it. that is such a heart-warming thing. i would maybe argue the following point in the article: > People whose work was not aimed at me in the slightest. idk. i think that part of the point of being open is being open to possibilities. obviously no one can see the far-reaching consequences of their work when they set out to do it. but sometimes, people have hopes, i think, that their openness will create possibilities just like this article is describing. > resources like w3schools, i remember a long time back - maybe 15 years ago - i would occasionally read w3schools, and i had a coworker who would kind of turn up their nose at that site, they were kind of a snob about it. i knew enough then to realize it wasn't the best site for everything but out of insecurity after that person said that, i stopped reading it too. but it helped me, too. and i'm glad it helped you. i am starting to re-revise my opinion of that site.

gradientsrneat 2y ago
w3schools was how I first started learning programming and I still find it useful sometimes. I too saw the snobs.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago

Huh this could have been written by me. I am a kid of the internet. A place built on altruism.

LoganDark 2y ago

I was raised by the internet, too. I first started using computers at around the age of 5. A lot of my childhood years were spent in places that still exist today. My family was poor and computers were my only escape, just like the article says. I can't help but feel like I lost something through doing that, though. It certainly didn't help my ADHD to teach my brain that it's possible to live life through only instant gratification. And it certainly didn't help to always be connected to so many people that now I can't seem to do anything alone.

pushupentry1219 2y ago

As someone of the younger generation, I think "raised by the internet" these days is extremely toxic and non-productive not at all what the author here is talking about in this lovely post. When someone says "I was raised by the internet", I immediately think: social media addiction, 4chan and other online obscenities. But this is completely based on my own personal experience. My point here is not related to this lovely post at all, it's just that I always have associated "raised by the internet" with negative connotation.

photonthug 2y ago
In the long long ago before social media and amongst a certain type of people, the answer to “where are you from?” would be something like “the internet”, and the connotations were positive. It meant that you were from a small shitty place that nobody ever heard of, but you had transcended those humble origins to become a being of pure information, sharing thoughts, philosophy and maybe code with other similar beings, and that physical location was irrelevant and really the whole idea of it was quite vulgar. I suppose we are still sharing thoughts now, but times change, and the real struggle is transcending the vulgarity of the internet and going back to meatspace. Hmm. These days if you don’t like discussing where you’re from, there’s no equivalent answer that immediately reveals interests, while pushing back on the presumption of getting a real answer. Being from “the library” is maybe closest in spirit in terms of being infotropic and on an autodidactic mission, but urban people will think you are homeless, and rural people will think you are a weird librarian.
- AlienRobot 2y ago
  I'm from the Internet :-) I think the problem is that there is a huge number of people now whose only contact with the Internet has been social media. For them, that is where the Internet begins and where it ends. They'll use Reddit and not call it a "website" but an "app," because they have "installed" Reddit on their smartphones. It doesn't help that most online forums have become subreddits, and that Google will show Reddit results over random forums. It makes sense because, understandably, Reddit can be assumed to be always safe, while a random forum might not be, but in the long run it it just gives Reddit an unfair advantage over smaller forums that could just as safe if not better than their subreddit equivalent, killing those forums in the process. Now things are getting even worse as subreddits become Discord channels. That's why I root for things like Neocities and Tumblr to succeed.

TZubiri 2y ago

https://xkcd.com/1311/ https://xkcd.com/1311/ "The twenty-first century baby is destined to be rocked and cradled by electricty, warmed and coddled by electricity, perhaps fathered and mothered by electricity. Probably the only thing he will left to do unaidad will be to make love." Mrs. John Lane, The fortnightly 1905

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ls612 2y ago
She wasn't wrong at all though.
- TZubiri 2y ago
  visionary
rightbyte 2y ago
I guess 'make love' was not a eupheism for sex in that time?

eek2121 2y ago

[flagged]

tbrownaw 2y ago
1 - the article was mentioning that amount per week, not per meal 2 - how much planning ahead and kitchen time per meal are you thinking here? For a 12 year old to do.

ndavis 2y ago

I was booting Linux while sleeping in a car, and in and out of motels, eating from food banks, with drug addicted parents, as a teenager. There was something to "the internet" back in the day as a way to cope when faced with that sort of situation. The author is not alone. We were blessed to have a computer through it all. I hope "kids these days" have the same opportunity with their phones.

andersa 2y ago
Spoiler: They don't. The phones are hostile to experimentation and the social media apps they will use to kill time are designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible.
- xp84 2y ago
  ^ (+5, insightful) Yeah. This hurts how true it is. I’m an early-mid millennial, very modest social class so I got some access to dial-up at age 14 and broadband at about 16. We were just explorers back then. The sophistication aimed at us was no fancier than that of the Saturday morning cartoon ads. I’m sure the people at Yahoo and AOL wanted us to use their IM program and watch some of quaint banner ads. But most of the Internet then was exploring knowledge and fandoms, and connecting with those around the globe who spoke your language and also loved what you love. Most of the most fun social activity back then for young people spun out of places like music chat rooms and music/band forums, because 14-year olds believe their music taste is the deepest and most personal thing about them. Contrast to today: kids now, many from near birth, are test subjects in a million experiments every day, designed by hostile bots and even more hostile humans to addict them and feed obsessions all in service of revenue optimization. The biggest experiment of all is the meta one: what will happen to this generation raised in this unprecedented way?? Btw — nothing would make me happier than Gen Alpha being super successful. So I hope I’m Old Man Shakes Fist At Cloud here.
- Aachen 2y ago
  > designed to get them stuck in an infinite loop of watching pointless "content" and as many ads as possible Wouldn't TV have been the equivalent in the era OP is talking about? Going on the internet and seeking out coding tutorials, as the article describes, is a choice most people didn't make back then; it's the most nerdy of kids doing this outside of school. While an addiction takes that choice away or makes it much harder, most kids are not addicted (~90% aren't in UK, ~55% aren't in India, for 11- to 14-year-olds per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Prevalence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problematic_smartphone_use#Pre...) If you have a credible source on phones in 2024 providing fewer learning opportunities than computers in the <2000s, either anecdotal (kids who you observe are otherwise curious but don't seek out non-entertainment content) or by looking at a large enough sample to have some measurable difference in the population, I'm interested. It sounds like an assumption based on the (justified) negativity around social media as a concept rather than an actually observed effect

AI_beffr 2y ago

its interesting that martin scorsese and chris rock both claim that they were essentially raised by television sets. i would say that i was co-parented by a television at least. i would say that it contributed to a blunted, unrealistic understanding of the real world and human relationships. my world view now is that children shouldnt watch television or movies and that they should be immersed in real human relationships. especially those disney movies that have really dramatic, tear jerker scenes. i think that is way too much stimulation for children and that their heart strings should only be tugged by things that are real. those powerful emotions play a role in human development and you shouldnt mess around with that too much.

tbrownaw 2y ago
What's a growing kid to do when they start encountering situations outside the training distribution? At least with movies and novels they'll have a few synthetic data points instead of just nothing.
- AI_beffr 2y ago
  i would rather them have nothing and learn than fill in that gap with something really counterproductive. a fake personality.

stonethrowaway 2y ago

There was a time when the internet at large got behind projects like Ubuntu that stood a fighting chance of changing the world for the better.

mattsimpson 2y ago

Yep, same here. People sharing and me wanting to learn saved me too. It kept me (mostly) out of trouble, and ended up with me having a successful career in IT, software development, and hopefully soon, security.

lequanghai 2y ago

To Jimmy. I feel for you, man. No kids should went through time like you did. THank you for becoming a good citizen & contribute to the great time of computing.

zipping1549 2y ago

It's uncanny how much similar the author's experience to mine. I learned computer stuff fixing and tinkering with barely working computer.

71bw 2y ago
>I learned computer stuff fixing and tinkering with barely working computer. Being relatively young (born after 2000), I wouldn't be here were it not for the Core 2 Duo HP machine I got in 2014-ish after my father fired some people from his company and was left with surplus machines. It ran a, at that point, 6? year old install of Vista with all the HP bloat, had 2 gigs of RAM, a 160GB HDD, no internet connection and came with a 5:4 display to match. Christ did I love that machine. I spent hours in front of it. Getting games to work. Getting pirated software off the web (downloaded on our "main" family PC that I still used to play Minecraft over the network with friends), onto a 2 gig pendrive, often in parts and copying it over. Learning how archives work in general. How to re-install Windows, partition a drive, modify the OS visually, install language packs, struggle heavily to get .net 3.5 on Windows 8 without the net... That's the exact moment I fell in love with computers. Well, I most likely fell into obesity at that point as well, but ignoring that it's all been positive. Then I got the Internet and it went down quickly.

yblu 2y ago

used to be one of the “sharers,” maintaining a fairly popular blog, writing tutorials on platforms like DZone and CodeProject, answering questions on StackOverflow, and creating open-source projects that collectively amassed millions of downloads. At one point, I decided to monetize one of my open-source projects by creating a commercial fork. That’s when a group of people, none of whom had contributed to the project in any way, started a witch hunt over a few super trivial lines of code they accused me of “stealing” from contributors. Despite having the full support of all actual contributors, the backlash from these outsiders left me drained and disillusioned. So I stopped sharing my work and contributing to open source altogether—and honestly, I’m happier for it. To all the Jimmy Millers who genuinely appreciate the goodwill of creators: be aware that there are people who will leech off it or even destroy it.

isoprophlex 2y ago

If OP was 12 today, in 2024, would he have gotten into Linux? Or would he have been sucked into watching endless MrBeast videos? It's easier than ever to get started understanding and building software... but at the same time it seems easier than ever to get distracted by the modern internet.

bondarchuk 2y ago
Since he didn't get sucked into watching endless TV back then either, I would guess no. Internet is still here.

niemandhier 2y ago

“When I look back and think about those times, I'm amazed but how much I owe to people who I never met” So much has changed: I read a post on a forum the other day, some kid asking questions about PyTorch. Rather than getting help, the poor soul was berated for not using “they/them”… We moved away from building our communities on shared interests, towards building them based on shared sentiment, which has to be proven by behavior. Unfortunately joining such a community is much more difficult.

Aachen 2y ago
I had plenty of experiences with similarly useless debates as a teenager on the internet twenty years ago. Think of providing code examples with indentation that the reader didn't like. At least being more inclusive is a more worthwhile goal than finding the perfect indentation, but yeah, neither answers the question at hand Could it be that you now recognise the uselessness of such a response whereas, when you were younger, you didn't know any better and took it as-is? Because I think that's almost certainly the case for me, rather than that it is an exclusive feature of modern times that some people berate others on minor-to-irrelevant points

stefanv 2y ago

As a self-taught developer who ended up making a living from this, I can only join the author in thanking all the people who shared their knowledge online during the 90s and 00s

keep_walking 2y ago

As a kid I was out of the house for 12 hours a day playing outside. Although my parents were both working and we had food on the table, we were a pretty poor family. They were both exhausted after work and I yearned for their attention but I guess I could see that they were tired and suppressed my own needs. I became very withdrawn never speaking about my emotions or myself. Then age 10 my mother died and father became withdrawn alcoholic, basically in one fell sweep I lost both my parents. Computers and the internet were my only refuge. Be it pirated movies I could watch or play games.. I was there. At some point I became a really good competitive gamer so that gave me an opportunity to socialize a bit. I moved to a different game and crushed it there and made more internet friends. I got diagnosed with a lifelong chronic illness at that time (Graves Disease) but I still kept surviving. I was alienated from most of my real life friends because I couldn't relate to them. I was in a constant physical and emotional struggle and they were in the seat of stability. I wasted a lot of time but slowly I learned. At some point I realized that games aren't going to be a good financial support so I started learning programming and here I am in my mid 30s with a few years of coding experience(without a job currently and struggling). I can boldly say the internet has saved me, other people where I live and had nothing succumbed to street gangs and drugs. I know that I'm behind many peers I have in terms of life achievements but I also know where I come from and take pride that I've been able to survive up until now. I have stopped walking before thinking it's over but every time I have the strength to sit back up and start walking again.

sam_goody 2y ago

I have spent most of my life (in years and percentage of the day) running a youth group, mostly targeting the underprivileged. Small [as in we officially mentor about 25 children a year], but powerful. The number one thing you can do for a youth is convince them that they are capable. Believe in them, and give them challenges that you know they can achieve. Give them time, empathy and encouragement. The worst thing you can do for them is pity them, discourage them, explain that because they are black / women / poor / etc they are destined to a life of being in second place. Glad you made it.

curiousguy 2y ago

Great post. I was also raised by the internet. I have loving parents, but grew up poor in a developing country, surrounded by people that only care about football and soap opera. If it wasn’t the internet and forums like slashdot or Hackers News, I would probably fall to conformity and the nerd in me would had died out. Instead, my computer hobby became a really profitable job and now I’m living in a first world country and working on some really interesting things.

WeylandYutani 2y ago

You can take this literally. I remember that for a while it was quite popular for families to live stream their life for that blog money. Always found that fad weird and creepy.

Aachen 2y ago
Could you quantify "quite popular"? I never heard of anyone doing that in my own circles, but know of such youtube vlog families, which makes me think it's probably around one in a hundred thousand (that would mean thousands of people from the USA or around a thousand in Germany, which would be like two orders of magnitude above how many people are successful doing it, which sounds about right)

lo_fye 2y ago

> they decided to openly and freely share their work. I LOVE this story. Thank you for sharing it. It's stuff like this that makes me crave the Web 1.0 (and early 2.0) days. This makes me want to support Mastodon, and Vivaldi, and other federated and open systems. I'm as guilty as anyone, allowing social apps like twitter & Facebook to take me away from writing on my hand-rolled blog. I need to get that puppy back up and running. I need to share more. Be the change I want to see in the Internet & Web. Information wants to be free. Hack the planet!