9 ms·

The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago

172 points by geox 2y ago

goalieca 2y ago
The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.
- AshamedCaptain 2y ago
  The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation. I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included: 1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.) 2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs. 3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake". 4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras. This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
      I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back alleys.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
      What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
      - matthewdgreen 2y ago
        If my teenage friends had been faceless alien monsters with no humanity whatsoever, it would have been pretty similar I guess. My friends were mostly just stoners and kids who liked to drink a little too much.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client. It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
    - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
      Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems. And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era. And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
      - lmm 2y ago
        > You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems. Nah. MSN tolerated Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin and what have you; breaking changes were once-a-year at most. Skype was the first to really seriously block out third party clients, and it was a sea change. > definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". In theory, but not so much in practice. There were high-quality multi-protocol IM clients available for every platform. You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. I guess you couldn't do a cross-network group chat, but that wasn't something that ever really came up.
        AshamedCaptain 2y ago
        No, that is a rose colored glasses view of the period. There are people today who still do multi network clients and Jabber transports and suffer the same issues that they suffered during the MSN era . Heck, the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year. Skype was nowhere near to be the first. > You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. Hahaha. Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap. Third party clients exist for both and they suck as much as they used to do in the past (unreliableness and lack of whatever new fancy useless feature the 1st party clients had just introduced but suddenly became indispensable for people on the network).
- m3047 2y ago
  > not federated and centralized That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.
- Eumenes 2y ago
  Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.
readthenotes1 2y ago
"The internet hasn’t made us bad, we were already like that" Is merely an application of "Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals" -Robert Caro
dijit 2y ago
Rose-tinted glasses are definitely a thing, as is nostalgia, and before I get into topics like the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0] back then, I'd like to take a moment to step back and consider what the author is actually implying. Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation. I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner. The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff. Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community. Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community. That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of: * more focused, human and often better moderation; * a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and; * an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog". Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now. The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom. [0]: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...
- mentos 2y ago
  I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator. "You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
RobotToaster 2y ago
cookiewall free archive https://archive.ph/aVwAv https://archive.ph/aVwAv
alganet 2y ago
> hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them) Well, talk for yourself, sir. As a teenager, I had hundreds of IM contacts across ICQ and MSN from all over the world, not only classmates. > eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares) A friend recommends a song, you can get it with a 2h download and you both can enjoy talking about it. There was _nothing_ like it at the time. It's not about wanting to go back. We can't go back, even if everyone wanted to. It was something awesome that happened once and we don't know the formulae for it.
- herbst 2y ago
  Today the few file sharing networks left are full of high quality sound, well organized and take less than a minute per song. I didn't know until recently either, but that literally got way better.
seneca 2y ago
I know it's an old man comment, but there really was a time the internet was friendly. It just wasn't 20 years ago. It was before the general public got online, and the internet was a refuge for specialists and early adopters. In the early 90s, the internet felt like a magical undiscovered wilderness. 90% of the people you met were excited to be there and eager to share. That was long gone 20 years ago.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Yup a random guy taught me guitar online in 2006 even, painfully drawing tabs by hand.
  - cisrockandroll 2y ago
    In 2006-2007 someone walked me through step by atep how to assemble a computer in a newegg.com chatroom with the parts I had already purchased. That person changed my life. Thanks human.
macNchz 2y ago
The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.
  - ReptileMan 2y ago
    I have the opposite problem. Not sure which genius of youtube thought of it - but no matter how many times I reload it is always the same videos on the home page. Not taking any chances. yes there is a new for you, but if I haven't watched some videos for the last X hours, maybe the algorithm should take a chance with something random.
    - SoftTalker 2y ago
      I agree, if it's shown you something a few times, and you haven't watched it, replace that suggestion with something else.
    - johnny22 2y ago
      Every few weeks I end up with a new video card with button that takes the place of the video and it asks if i want to see something other than what it usually recommends. It's not quite as out there as I'd like, but it did shake things up a bit.
    - willywanker 2y ago
pessimizer 2y ago
The idea that the internet used to be less "hateful" 20 years ago has to be from people who weren't online 20 years ago, or people lying about their own behavior 20 years ago. There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse. Every subject you talked about resulted in a discussion about who and what you were, and why it disqualified you from being in the conversation. If it wasn't just a direct insult. Twitter is nicer than the internet back then, and when you see a racial slur or rape threat, that's the old internet leaking in. I was a phone phreak and BBSer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was just as bad, if not worse. The nostalgia about a place without hate is the same as nostalgia for the segregated neighborhood you grew up in. "Everybody got along." Everybody got along because you belonged to a HOA with racial covenants, and your grandparents burned out half the old residents. The propaganda about a better time in the past, now coming from the nonprofit sector, is a device to make their new speech and behavior codes sound conservative rather than revolutionary. What they've taken from us is unmediated, unsurveilled speech. And they've united with the traditional forces of suppression in order to make sure that people can't speak directly to each other without being corrected, whether it's about their opinions about black people, or their opinions about the CIA, or their opinions about Pfizer, or their opinions about UnitedHealth. They're buttbuttinating the world. Any other nostalgia for the old internet should be because it was smarter. But the fact that it's dumber is part of a process: the world has become more literate since the internet started. People who wouldn't normally write now write. They're also reading. The political fulmination of the current age is due to this, and is going to result in a better educated electorate in general. The reason they hate government is because they've become more informed about it, not less. Nostalgia about your own corner of the internet? Sorry, Eternal September, Evaporative Cooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665). If you want to create a community that appeals to you, pay for it and gatekeep. If you want to keep a good community together, use classic democratic means (start with Robert's Rules and figure out where you want to go from there), have a dues paying membership, and gatekeep. The open internet is the enemy of corporations, moral police, and governments. They just want you to say good things about products, cultural or otherwise, all day and all night. They want you to produce for free and pay to consume. That's it.
- 2y ago
raytopia 2y ago
Speaking of exploring the friendly a friendly web for a fun little project I made a qt based browser that blocks 500 of the world's most popular websites. It's a lot of fun to be able to explore the web without any fomo caused by the giant sites.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe. Not exactly true of course. Bad people are a constant, and there was some epically bad stuff happening throughout the last century all over the place. The food was mostly bland and boring (at least my part of the world), and did not have a lot of variation. And while I have some appreciation for music of each of the last six decades. I like that I can have all of that now, which is much better, IMHO. Also modern music seems to borrow from, and often imitate all of that. There's a wider variety of music now. And there is still a lot of bland, cringe worthy pop music that people seem to like as well. Average tastes being a bit shit is a constant too. Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. Many people didn't really see the point of it all. They think of that as the time where they didn't have to use computers and phones and are feeling nostalgic about that. But there were some nice people you could get in touch with and do stuff with online. Not a lot. Mostly sending emails and reading each other's rants on nntp, irc, slashdot, online gaming, and what not. Or watching that hit counter on your website not increment much at all. Download some stuff you shouldn't be downloading. Napster, emule, kazaa, and all the rest. Been there done that. The world changes all the time. Old people don't keep up and feel detached from it and whine about that. People get families and stop doing the crazy shit they were doing when they were young, including talking to each other. That's just life. The thing that's not as good as it used to be is you, not the world. There are still nice people. And you can still get in connect with them. Just not the way you did thirty years ago. New people, new ways of interacting with them. It's easier than ever actually. There are apps for that! And you can't blame young people for not being that eager to engage with a bunch of old whiny people using old crappy tools. Mostly they do their own thing that they will be all nostalgic about in twenty years. In exactly the same way we are right here.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe. Not exactly true of course. In many cases very much true. The trope that "people always complain for things missing from the past, so they're always wrong" needs to die. They're wrong or not depending on a case by case basis (depending on the thing), and based on the standards they put forward: If you hate corporate culture and like DIY and individual expession, the 90s internet was 100x better. If you like the "bazaar" style FOSS communities and FOSS idealism, the late 90s was very much better. >Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. I was already loving it, you don't have to sell it to me so hard!
curtisblaine 2y ago
So this is essentially a list of things that were bad in the old Internet from the point of view of... a feminist collective? It looks like the writer is trying to universalize an essentially biased point of view, calling my point of view a mistake and suggesting that that point of view is actually an artefact of the passing of time. I'm sorry but that's not true. I'd take the old Internet any day, defects and all, very sorry for the feminist collective they interviewed.
coldtea 2y ago
What mistake would that be? Reference points are necessary to understand a crappy present.
m3047 2y ago
The "friendly online world" was a reflection of people's willingness to meet in meat space in a civil fashion, even if it was uncomfortable at times. Purely anecdata, but a recent personal experience which seems pretty unremarkable: I have a 1991 pickup truck; good truck, I still drive it and use it as a truck. The two local mechanics I would have taken it to for some needed work both sold out in the past few years and the new owners don't want to work on anything more than 20 years old. (Their reasons belying their inexperience, but I digress.) There used to be auto and bike clubs around here, where motorheads got together to wrench and talk about their vehicles, and share personal experiences with mechanics, machine shops, etc. Now the clubs are (still) focused on the (same) 1930s-1960s cars and they've been upscaled into a high-roller venue and fundraising channel. I'm not the only person driving 25-50 year old metal around here. I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a suitable group or birds of a feather to form one; I got six responses. I put my phone number in the ad, and there's no escaping Craigslist's anonymous remailer. No phone calls. Two of the responses were duds, leaving four people who demonstrated that they wanted to have conversations using CL's anonymous remailer: that doesn't scale. Sent a boilerplate response to all four once again providing my phone number, and also my real email address; offering to drive my truck to some local public place if they drove theirs. No takers. 20+ years ago, online communities existed to complement other means of communication whether that was private chat / email / telephone calls, or meatspace meetups.
- DontchaKnowit 2y ago
  Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them
  - m3047 2y ago
    That's the 30s-60s car people primarily. They charge admission "for a good cause". Show me a picture from your local car show with a 1985-1995 working pickup truck in it; honestly I'd like to see it, and know Santa Claus lives somewhere. But we're off the track. So about this car show: does it have an internet presence, or is it AOL^H^H^HFacebook? A mailing list? IRC? Slack? What's it got? Is it actually "alive"? Calling (phone calls, not internet) around, it became apparent that there is more interest around vehicles like this in "farm country": if I'd wanted to drive 50+ miles I'd have several mechanics to choose from.
MarkusWandel 2y ago
I do miss it though. 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable. 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked. 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did. 20 years ago, you could go on Facebook, and see what your friends were up to. Sure, many things didn't exist back then. But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses > You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable. You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then. > 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked. Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today? The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new. > 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did. This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently. > But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place. I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.
jappgar 2y ago
It was better simply because normies weren't on the internet yet. Like so many things, the more popular it becomes, the worse it gets.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- cgh 2y ago
  Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.
thsag 2y ago
The article focuses way too much on the "fear of technology". El Pais, formerly the Spanish paper of record, succumbs to mainstream techno optimism.
ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
I do not remember the Internet of 20 years ago, as being "friendly." I was one of the "unfriendly" ones, and I liked it. These days, I'm trying to atone for that.
johnea 2y ago
So, it's a mistake to wish things aren't as fucked up as they are?
idlewords 2y ago
I find that nostalgia for the early web is inversely correlated with the number of IE 6 bugs one had to work around back in the day.
- layer8 2y ago
  IE 6 was already more than half past the “early” web, IMO.
- freehorse 2y ago
  It was not the only thing one had to work around. We had to work around getting access to the internet in the first place (for those of use without the money to just afford being connected at home), hiding our identity online, not getting infected every second website we would visit. But somehow we put the effort to get around all these problems because internet had something important to offer, because it was a window to something.
dismalaf 2y ago
The only thing I miss about the internet from 25 years ago is people took themselves less seriously. "Don't feed the trolls" was a thing. But it also wasn't that great either. People weren't nicer. The tech was limited. Things are objectively better now.
Arubis 2y ago
It was such a different world. I still remember a pithy description of IRC from the early aughts: “Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.”
heraldgeezer 2y ago
But I was not the victim so I do miss it.
GeekyBear 2y ago
One thing I loved on the early internet was finding online communities for people who shared a niche interest or hobby with you. For instance, I was interested in plant propagation as part of a gardening hobby, but didn't know anyone else experimenting with it. Before the internet, you could find information in bookstores or libraries, but making new friends with common niche interests was much less likely.
weitendorf 2y ago
A thought I had recently was that someone should try making a social media/forum platform that only allows non-mobile usage. My theory (which is definitely not originally mine) is that mobile devices have driven a huge shift in usage patterns towards low-effort content consumption. Smartphones are everybody's go-to when they're temporarily bored, so social media on the phone is less of a deliberate destination and more of an idle snack to alive someone's boredom. Even when people do engage, because they're often doing so on-the-go in short bursts and don't have access to a real keyboard, the engagement is typically very low effort. TikTok is a perfect testament to this shift IMO. I'm thinking that desktop-only requirements would lead to less engagement over all, but higher quality engagement when it does occur. If there were a ranking system or some other kind of algorithmic content serving, it would be less skewed towards content that you can fully engage with in two seconds. And the userbase would skew towards more intentional enthusiasts who deliberately seek out the site, rather than someone looking for a quick distraction while they're bored for 15 seconds. Hacker news does probably the best job at this without actively trying to prevent phone usage, but it doesn't exactly do much in the way of fostering a community like old-school forums.
- tines 2y ago
  This is an amazing idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about how smart devices have changed the way we think and interact, reading books like Alone Together and other things from Sherry Turkle’s oeuvre, and remembering how I used to use my computer so differently when I didn’t have instantaneous access to low quality crap 24/7. I think making things desktop-only could be a heuristic that gets us back a lot of the things we lost in the transition to smartphones… definitely deserves more thought.
  - elwebmaster 2y ago
    But how will people find out about it? Part of what we lost is the Google of back then when content was king. Can you rank a desktop-only website nowadays?
    - weitendorf 2y ago
havaloc 2y ago
What I miss from those days is that the money was easy on the web. You could throw up some Google Adsense code on a site, show a single unobtrusive banner, and make enough to cover your costs and then some.
climb_stealth 2y ago
I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums. But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.
- MarcelOlsz 2y ago
  I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong. Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.
  - ajoseps 2y ago
    every now and then I read a comment that sounds so familiar and I realize it's an ex-coworker
- dmonitor 2y ago
  There's a handful of users on the reddit gaming pages where I can distinguish their writing style and bad opinions well enough from other users that I recognize them. The site culture is opposed to referencing someone's post history, though. The pseudononymous nature of the website was originally one of its selling points, being a nice inbetween of 4chan's anon chaos and Facebook's "your boss and grandmother are reading your posts" stiltedness. Nowadays, I'd rather have the personalization back. The new UI lets people upload avatars for their comments, which probably helps, but they'll have to pry the old UI from my cold, dead hands
brianstorms 2y ago
20 years ago? Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on the PLATO system.
swayvil 2y ago
In the past when you went to a community for a particular kind of enthusiast, that's what you'd find there. Now everybody is there. Enthusiasts, nonenthusiasts, people posing as enthusiasts, people trying to sell stuff to enthusiasts. So yes, the noise is much greater.
freehorse 2y ago
I do not think internet was more friendly per se back then, and I am not sure this is the general argument or feeling on being nostalgic about that era either. If it is, then it is definitely wrong, but that does not mean that there are no reasons to miss the old internet. I think what made internet interesting back then was that it was much less monetised, more liberating as in providing opportunities and giving access to stuff that were just inaccessible before. Piracy was in its prime, and to a big extent it felt it was about pushing against or breaking whatever rules the world was trying to impose on people. It was not friendly, paedophiles were praying on kids on IRCs, there was definitely sexism, people would get harassed online, you had to be careful as to what kind of information you were putting online, never put one's real name there and definitely not photos or bank info or anything that nowadays is common place. One had to know how to protect oneself online. It was not free as in cheap or easily accessible either, it was actually quite expensive, but again somehow one found ways to get around stuff like that, through computers in public libraries, breaking through some neighbour's wifi, gathering at a friend whose father had internet for work reasons, getting access to a university's wifi and going around with a laptop to find a place with good signal or staying in internet cafes overnight when it was cheaper. The point is that one would make all this effort needed to get access to it and go around these issues because it was a window to the world, esp for more introvert nerds. I definitely appreciate having such easy access to it nowadays and the internet being, generally speaking, safer. I just wish it felt less of a prison to escape from/fight against an algorithm or tightly controlled "platforms" that want to hook you up to show you more ads, and more as a means of liberation and it used to feel like.
- torginus 2y ago
  History has shown that friendliness is a terrible goal to aim for in of itself - the modern approach to achieving 'friendliness' on Reddit for example, is to brutally crush any dissent by downvoting, removing content and banning users who go against the grain in any given subreddit. The resulting discussions look like to outsiders like a happy community of friendly people who generally agree on most stuff, yet when you try to actualy participate in these discussions you'll find out just how crappily they are run. Most people leave at this point and the only ones who stay are those whose desire for validation is greater than the desire to express their own opinions.
skeeter2020 2y ago
I'll say it; the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites. To paraphrase Matt Damon from a show only enjoyed by the true internet acolytes "the walking mozzarella sticks who think a three hundred android phone and a verizon contract give them the right to connect to every piece of information in the world..."
- x-complexity 2y ago
  > the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites. ...While I agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the end logic: The sentence implies a top-down administration determining who gets access to the internet, which is something that I will always hate with a passion. Personally, I'm more in favor with a self-segregation model, where I can have a private intranet with myself & anyone else I choose to share with. I already do so with Tailscale's private domains.
  - dyauspitr 2y ago
    I’ve made a complete 180 on the subject. I don’t think you can build and maintain a solid online community without gatekeepers.
    - owebmaster 2y ago
      That's true but the internet should be the place where ever human being is allowed. Then it segregates into multiple well-protected communities.
      - dyauspitr 2y ago
        Every human yes, every thought would be no in my opinion.
  - cobertos 2y ago
    I agree, having a little private intranet is great, it's where I'm at. But losing the interactions that lead to finding those people to share an intranet with that happened more often on early internet makes finding people so time consuming, or not possible. Where have you met the people you share your intranet with?
BonoboIO 2y ago
Funny how the internet turned what used to be the “village fool” — the guy everyone ignored when he rambled about nonsense and conspiracies — into a global phenomenon. Now, instead of fading into the background, they find each other online, amplify the noise, and suddenly the whole world has to deal with it. The same tools that connected people for good also made it easier to spread misinformation at scale.
Deprogrammer9 2y ago
I've been online since 89. Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved. Most people are cool some are fucked up & now a lot are puppet accounts trying to control the narrative of whatever the current zeitgeist is at the time. But thats whats so great about the global networks it can't be controlled. The best "they" (agents) can do is to get a large amount of people to believe bullshit PR spin. Shit like the internet isn't a friendly place. It's whatever you want it to be, it's all in how you engage with people & groups online. The same applies as when you walk out your door.
- raincole 2y ago
  > Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.
  - DoodahMan 2y ago
    i don't think even that changed really tbh. 25 years ago spam was still terribly profitable, not to mention much easier to do than today. it was wide open. ah... now i'm feeling nostalgic :)
    - hn_acc1 2y ago
      I mean.. 25 years ago (give or take), my brother-in-law asked me about the "Bill Gates will send you $$ if you forward this email" scam. Even if he HAD fallen for it - what would have been the harm? Some extra forwarded email / spam.. Now? "Bill Gates and George Soros are going to destroy the world, and the solution is to vote for <super-far-right-wing-extremist> - and he and various people in my/his family are doing just that..". 25 years ago, those people would have never made it to be a candidate in elections..
- Groxx 2y ago
  Yea, I lean this way too. The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior. The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc. If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant. Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes. (as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)
steve_taylor 2y ago
> this nostalgia is preventing us from focusing on finding solutions We're gatekeeping nostalgia now. How sad and pathetic.
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
  How is that gatekeeping? Isn't it an observation?
  - steve_taylor 2y ago
    It's saying that people shouldn't be nostalgic about the early internet because it stops them solving the perceived problems with today's internet. It's also implying that people's nostalgia is for sexism and racism.
protocolture 2y ago
Why would we possibly yearn for small forums and channels populated with only our friends and people we want to connect with instead of massive social networks full of every conceivable idiot with algorithms designed to push their idiocy in my face. Yeah sometimes we were meanies. Damn. You got us.
wiseowise 2y ago
Yes, internet was better before. All the bad stuff author describes was confined to fringe spaces like Omegle and 4Chan, where anonymity was the selling point. On private forums, however, you’d quickly get banned for this shit.
bmitc 2y ago
I'd wager a guess that the friendliness, or at least the perception of such, came from not very many people using it, people being segregated into niche enthusiast groups, and people still intelligent and non-addicted enough to not merge it with their identity. However, the Internet was always destined to connect us in the worst ways.
torginus 2y ago
Well, however presumably unfriendly that world was, it definitely didn't have nagware content walls that wanted me to log in and subscribe to god knows what website.
veltas 2y ago
There's a great comment on a breakcore video that says something like "remember that decade between 1999 and 2000". Maybe that decade is yet to happen.
SllX 2y ago
Back around the most recent election I dug up Digg’s front page and some of the comments from it’s earliest appearance in the Internet Archive and jumped around reading the comments sections on news items related to the 2004 and 2008 elections. I walked away feeling much like I did after reading some Ancient Roman Graffiti left in Pompeii: people are just people. What’s different now isn’t the web, it’s just there’s more people, we’re more connected across State and International borders, you can actually find people you know online and the people that were kids back then are in their 30s while a lot of people you once knew online are dead. But there’s still kids, there’s still people who remember the world before the ARPAnet and UNIX and CP/M and Apple and DOS. Hacker News will be 18 this year. All the kids born in 2007 are turning 18 this year. Twitter passed that milestone a year ago and Facebook a couple of years before that.
- ratg13 2y ago
  The type of people are different. Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not. Now anyone that can afford a cheap phone can access the internet, and the user landscape has changed. Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world. Those days are over and the internet is a much more hostile place.
  - SllX 2y ago
    > The type of people are different. That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries. By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web. > Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005. > Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world. Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.
soygem 2y ago
Internet is a proper noun, with a capital I. The Internet was a better place, would it only be for the fact that kids didn't have access to it. And less offendable people.
floppiplopp 2y ago
Meh, the internet today is mostly boring. Everything's looking the same, sounding the same, all in service to impressions for ads and probably follower count. Additionally AI slop fills everything with more of the same corpo garbage and algorithm optimizations that makes number go up. What the internet back then had was a charming weirdness which has become rare. It wasn't better back then, but it was more interesting and strange in a not so kaputt way as today.
circlefavshape 2y ago
I've been hanging out on the same forum pretty much daily since 1998. Looking back through threads from 20+ years ago is a great antidote to nostalgia - just a crowd of immature know-it-alls spouting utter shite (and very often being very unfriendly to one another)
imaginationra 2y ago
Back then it felt like people were trying to be useful and to make things/places that were useful in some way to other people. Now it feels like people are making things/places mostly to use other people- they stopped viewing people online as "people"- now people are "data" to be "monetized" The various art forms/entertainment has also become "content" to be "monetized" All of this has made the modern internet very cold and boring- everything has been corporatized. * It's a tiny and obscure thing but jumping into and chatting with people in Hyperfy(https://hyperfy.io/ https://hyperfy.io/) worlds feels very much like early internet as you often chat with the builder of the world who is into some non-normie thing. * Hyperfy v2 is now open source btw https://github.com/hyperfy-xyz/hyperfy https://github.com/hyperfy-xyz/hyperfy
deleted 2y ago
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Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
What we didn't have 20 years ago was interaction bait/rage bait. I mean, I guess rage bait still existed, but it was FAR less common. Don't feed the trolls, we used to say. Now, everyone with a room temperature IQ and a massive ego can't help but correct people. So many videos of people deliberately doing things wrong that they HAVE to comment. Or poorly worded questions that make people argue over the correct answer when they can't even agree on what's being asked. Not to mention that social media has given a bullhorn to every moron conspiracy theorist, and now we have a greater number of Flat Earthers than any time in recent history, not to mention political issues.
vondur 2y ago
I remember the web was full of trolls (just look at old Slashdot posts), and newsgroups could be pretty toxic back then. Just the web was more niche back then and not as many people were exposed to it.
kazinator 2y ago
This article is blindly equivocating on "friendly"! People were the same assholes in forums twenty years ago. The platforms as such were more friendly. They were not enshittified toward extracting value from the user, and attracting new users at the expense of becoming less usable for the current ones. Or not as much.
exabrial 2y ago
I'm curious how old the writer is?
TwoNineFive 2y ago
I was there. I helped build it. It was better.
PoppinFreshDo 2y ago
The good old days you could ping of death those win9x lusers!
n00b_heal 2y ago
Doubt that author really lived in that era for multiple reasons. And if you don't like corp AI slop, maybe you should leave the silo'd internet?
rurban 2y ago
In the old days a user was forced to block hostile actors, whilst now evverone urges some admin to block the hostile actor. Platforms are gardens, before they were open spaces, with lots of spam. Censorship and deplatforming demands are now all over, esp. by the traditional press, and the left. Esp. worrying are the continuous demands in the press to censor hatespeech or lies. Young Gen-Z folks are crying loud when I call them weak. Next they call HR. Stalin rears his ugly head again. And academic freedom is gone. They even let in police now.

172 points by geox 2y ago

The online world of 20 years ago was not federated and centralized into one of four large social media sites. There was no political machine trying to censor and control. We were left alone and no one care to control us.

AshamedCaptain 2y ago
The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation. I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Head over to Instagram and pick a random reel. Now scroll down and let the algorithm pick out suggestions for you. (Not your main timeline, mind you -- this gets you actual algorithmic suggestions.) The first few will be normal, but it gets incredibly disturbing very quickly. I did this last night and it was about 90% AI videos. They included: 1. Beautiful cakes and muffins that squirmed and then turned into puppies. (This sounds cute but is actually kind of disturbing.) 2. Rats. Big ass rats. And some cockroaches. A sandwich full of bugs. 3. Pretty women having their heads sliced up with sharp knives, which then demonstrated that they were actually made of "cake". 4. Monsters in what appear to be backyard surveillance cameras. This was interspersed with random content that I actually look at, plus a few thirst traps. The closest description I have for it was "this is what a bad trip is like." The Internet in 2025 is nothing like MSN.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
    I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back alleys.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      If my teenage friends had been faceless alien monsters with no humanity whatsoever, it would have been pretty similar I guess. My friends were mostly just stoners and kids who liked to drink a little too much.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  MSN Messenger allowed me to login with any number of clients. I used Trillian back in the day, with MSN, Yahoo, AIM and IRC all from one chat client. It was free as in beer, at least, and "lock in" and "walled gardens" were never a concern.
  - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
    Sorry, bullshit. You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems. And definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". MSN Messenger was the second "walled garden" service I've escaped ever since Internet was a thing. I literally remember the pain as it if was today. I would even claim the raison-d'etre for Jabber is precisely the IM walled gardens of this era. And Jabber was then (ab)used (by Whatsapp, Google Talk, etc.) to create more centralized services..
    - lmm 2y ago
      > You can also login today to $FAVORITE_IM_SERVICE with "unauthorized" 3rd party clients (or even often forgotten Jabber transports). Like today, there was a cat and mouse game between the server and the 3rd party clients, so they would not last long, and you'd run into many problems. Nah. MSN tolerated Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin and what have you; breaking changes were once-a-year at most. Skype was the first to really seriously block out third party clients, and it was a sea change. > definitely there was "lock in" and "walled gardens". In theory, but not so much in practice. There were high-quality multi-protocol IM clients available for every platform. You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. I guess you couldn't do a cross-network group chat, but that wasn't something that ever really came up.
      - AshamedCaptain 2y ago
        No, that is a rose colored glasses view of the period. There are people today who still do multi network clients and Jabber transports and suffer the same issues that they suffered during the MSN era . Heck, the cat and mouse game from the AIM days (much older) is well known and epic, and they were breaking (and suing) each other much more frequently than once per year. Skype was nowhere near to be the first. > You could talk to all your friends no matter which network they were on. Hahaha. Let me know how could you talk wih people on MSN without going through a MSN account. It is exactly the same situation (or even worse) than you have today, where you definitely need a Whatscrap account to talk to people on Whatscrap. Third party clients exist for both and they suck as much as they used to do in the past (unreliableness and lack of whatever new fancy useless feature the 1st party clients had just introduced but suddenly became indispensable for people on the network).
m3047 2y ago
> not federated and centralized That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.
Eumenes 2y ago
Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.

readthenotes1 2y ago

"The internet hasn’t made us bad, we were already like that" Is merely an application of "Power doesn't corrupt, it reveals" -Robert Caro

dijit 2y ago

Rose-tinted glasses are definitely a thing, as is nostalgia, and before I get into topics like the fact that UI/UX was actually scientifically better[0] back then, I'd like to take a moment to step back and consider what the author is actually implying. Yes, the world was centralised, and profit motives did exist. There was a time where it looked like AOL would legitimately kill the open web, and MSN was trying too at the same time. However; the early 00's were blessed with technological limitation. I distinctly remember the fact that IRC and the primitive forum systems we designed such that an identity tied to a real person was not something people felt the need to have. To even care what a community thinks because ultimately there's quite literally another one just around the corner. The golden era of community creation was 2002-2004 (incidentally this is when my own IRC network formed). Because heavy handed moderation, power trips and so-on caused market pressures on moderation staff. Too heavy handed and authoritarian: you might kill your community. Not willing to stamp out toxic elements: you might kill your community. That's why we're nostalgic, because simpler times was a combination of: * more focused, human and often better moderation; * a deluge of communities where you could find a place; even if you were weird, like me - and; * an understanding that your identity was not important. "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog". Yes, there were companies and profit seeking, the web itself was mired in proprietary plugins and jank standards. But there was an ease of hosting communities that is totally lost now. The best many of us can hope for these days, is a little carved out niche as a serf in a fiefdom. [0]: https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Microsoft_WindowsGuidelines.pdf https://ics.uci.edu/~kobsa/courses/ICS104/course-notes/Micro...

mentos 2y ago
I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator. "You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

RobotToaster 2y ago

cookiewall free archive https://archive.ph/aVwAv https://archive.ph/aVwAv

alganet 2y ago

> hours spent chatting on MSN Messenger (they weren’t all that exciting: you used to talk to your classmates right after you’d been with them) Well, talk for yourself, sir. As a teenager, I had hundreds of IM contacts across ICQ and MSN from all over the world, not only classmates. > eMule (they often sounded bad and the noise of the computer, running all night, caused nightmares) A friend recommends a song, you can get it with a 2h download and you both can enjoy talking about it. There was _nothing_ like it at the time. It's not about wanting to go back. We can't go back, even if everyone wanted to. It was something awesome that happened once and we don't know the formulae for it.

herbst 2y ago
Today the few file sharing networks left are full of high quality sound, well organized and take less than a minute per song. I didn't know until recently either, but that literally got way better.

seneca 2y ago

I know it's an old man comment, but there really was a time the internet was friendly. It just wasn't 20 years ago. It was before the general public got online, and the internet was a refuge for specialists and early adopters. In the early 90s, the internet felt like a magical undiscovered wilderness. 90% of the people you met were excited to be there and eager to share. That was long gone 20 years ago.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Yup a random guy taught me guitar online in 2006 even, painfully drawing tabs by hand.
- cisrockandroll 2y ago
  In 2006-2007 someone walked me through step by atep how to assemble a computer in a newegg.com chatroom with the parts I had already purchased. That person changed my life. Thanks human.

macNchz 2y ago

The most fundamental difference 20 years ago was that online activity was diffused across many different sites, and there was no algorithmic content feed recommending an endless stream of new things. Finding a rabbithole or dark corner required some degree of chance or intentionality, whereas now they are formed around you automatically as one toe in the waters of a given topic prompts the machine to deliver it more frequently and more intensely to keep your attention and draw you deeper in. This is, I think, absolutely foundational to so many sociocultural issues of the present.

SoftTalker 2y ago
It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.
- ReptileMan 2y ago
  I have the opposite problem. Not sure which genius of youtube thought of it - but no matter how many times I reload it is always the same videos on the home page. Not taking any chances. yes there is a new for you, but if I haven't watched some videos for the last X hours, maybe the algorithm should take a chance with something random.
  - SoftTalker 2y ago
    I agree, if it's shown you something a few times, and you haven't watched it, replace that suggestion with something else.
  - johnny22 2y ago
    Every few weeks I end up with a new video card with button that takes the place of the video and it asks if i want to see something other than what it usually recommends. It's not quite as out there as I'd like, but it did shake things up a bit.
  - willywanker 2y ago

pessimizer 2y ago

The idea that the internet used to be less "hateful" 20 years ago has to be from people who weren't online 20 years ago, or people lying about their own behavior 20 years ago. There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse. Every subject you talked about resulted in a discussion about who and what you were, and why it disqualified you from being in the conversation. If it wasn't just a direct insult. Twitter is nicer than the internet back then, and when you see a racial slur or rape threat, that's the old internet leaking in. I was a phone phreak and BBSer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was just as bad, if not worse. The nostalgia about a place without hate is the same as nostalgia for the segregated neighborhood you grew up in. "Everybody got along." Everybody got along because you belonged to a HOA with racial covenants, and your grandparents burned out half the old residents. The propaganda about a better time in the past, now coming from the nonprofit sector, is a device to make their new speech and behavior codes sound conservative rather than revolutionary. What they've taken from us is unmediated, unsurveilled speech. And they've united with the traditional forces of suppression in order to make sure that people can't speak directly to each other without being corrected, whether it's about their opinions about black people, or their opinions about the CIA, or their opinions about Pfizer, or their opinions about UnitedHealth. They're buttbuttinating the world. Any other nostalgia for the old internet should be because it was smarter. But the fact that it's dumber is part of a process: the world has become more literate since the internet started. People who wouldn't normally write now write. They're also reading. The political fulmination of the current age is due to this, and is going to result in a better educated electorate in general. The reason they hate government is because they've become more informed about it, not less. Nostalgia about your own corner of the internet? Sorry, Eternal September, Evaporative Cooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665). If you want to create a community that appeals to you, pay for it and gatekeep. If you want to keep a good community together, use classic democratic means (start with Robert's Rules and figure out where you want to go from there), have a dues paying membership, and gatekeep. The open internet is the enemy of corporations, moral police, and governments. They just want you to say good things about products, cultural or otherwise, all day and all night. They want you to produce for free and pay to consume. That's it.

2y ago

raytopia 2y ago

Speaking of exploring the friendly a friendly web for a fun little project I made a qt based browser that blocks 500 of the world's most popular websites. It's a lot of fun to be able to explore the web without any fomo caused by the giant sites.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe. Not exactly true of course. Bad people are a constant, and there was some epically bad stuff happening throughout the last century all over the place. The food was mostly bland and boring (at least my part of the world), and did not have a lot of variation. And while I have some appreciation for music of each of the last six decades. I like that I can have all of that now, which is much better, IMHO. Also modern music seems to borrow from, and often imitate all of that. There's a wider variety of music now. And there is still a lot of bland, cringe worthy pop music that people seem to like as well. Average tastes being a bit shit is a constant too. Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. Many people didn't really see the point of it all. They think of that as the time where they didn't have to use computers and phones and are feeling nostalgic about that. But there were some nice people you could get in touch with and do stuff with online. Not a lot. Mostly sending emails and reading each other's rants on nntp, irc, slashdot, online gaming, and what not. Or watching that hit counter on your website not increment much at all. Download some stuff you shouldn't be downloading. Napster, emule, kazaa, and all the rest. Been there done that. The world changes all the time. Old people don't keep up and feel detached from it and whine about that. People get families and stop doing the crazy shit they were doing when they were young, including talking to each other. That's just life. The thing that's not as good as it used to be is you, not the world. There are still nice people. And you can still get in connect with them. Just not the way you did thirty years ago. New people, new ways of interacting with them. It's easier than ever actually. There are apps for that! And you can't blame young people for not being that eager to engage with a bunch of old whiny people using old crappy tools. Mostly they do their own thing that they will be all nostalgic about in twenty years. In exactly the same way we are right here.

coldtea 2y ago
>People complaining about things they had when they were young and no longer have is nothing new. Happens to most generations. The music was better, the food was great, people were friendlier, etc. Or so people believe. Not exactly true of course. In many cases very much true. The trope that "people always complain for things missing from the past, so they're always wrong" needs to die. They're wrong or not depending on a case by case basis (depending on the thing), and based on the standards they put forward: If you hate corporate culture and like DIY and individual expession, the 90s internet was 100x better. If you like the "bazaar" style FOSS communities and FOSS idealism, the late 90s was very much better. >Objectively, the internet thirty years ago was kind of shit. It was exciting (I was there) but also pretty bad. Things were slow, lame, ugly, amateurish, hopelessly insecure, etc. I was already loving it, you don't have to sell it to me so hard!

curtisblaine 2y ago

So this is essentially a list of things that were bad in the old Internet from the point of view of... a feminist collective? It looks like the writer is trying to universalize an essentially biased point of view, calling my point of view a mistake and suggesting that that point of view is actually an artefact of the passing of time. I'm sorry but that's not true. I'd take the old Internet any day, defects and all, very sorry for the feminist collective they interviewed.

coldtea 2y ago

What mistake would that be? Reference points are necessary to understand a crappy present.

m3047 2y ago

The "friendly online world" was a reflection of people's willingness to meet in meat space in a civil fashion, even if it was uncomfortable at times. Purely anecdata, but a recent personal experience which seems pretty unremarkable: I have a 1991 pickup truck; good truck, I still drive it and use it as a truck. The two local mechanics I would have taken it to for some needed work both sold out in the past few years and the new owners don't want to work on anything more than 20 years old. (Their reasons belying their inexperience, but I digress.) There used to be auto and bike clubs around here, where motorheads got together to wrench and talk about their vehicles, and share personal experiences with mechanics, machine shops, etc. Now the clubs are (still) focused on the (same) 1930s-1960s cars and they've been upscaled into a high-roller venue and fundraising channel. I'm not the only person driving 25-50 year old metal around here. I put an ad on Craigslist seeking a suitable group or birds of a feather to form one; I got six responses. I put my phone number in the ad, and there's no escaping Craigslist's anonymous remailer. No phone calls. Two of the responses were duds, leaving four people who demonstrated that they wanted to have conversations using CL's anonymous remailer: that doesn't scale. Sent a boilerplate response to all four once again providing my phone number, and also my real email address; offering to drive my truck to some local public place if they drove theirs. No takers. 20+ years ago, online communities existed to complement other means of communication whether that was private chat / email / telephone calls, or meatspace meetups.

DontchaKnowit 2y ago
Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them
- m3047 2y ago
  That's the 30s-60s car people primarily. They charge admission "for a good cause". Show me a picture from your local car show with a 1985-1995 working pickup truck in it; honestly I'd like to see it, and know Santa Claus lives somewhere. But we're off the track. So about this car show: does it have an internet presence, or is it AOL^H^H^HFacebook? A mailing list? IRC? Slack? What's it got? Is it actually "alive"? Calling (phone calls, not internet) around, it became apparent that there is more interest around vehicles like this in "farm country": if I'd wanted to drive 50+ miles I'd have several mechanics to choose from.

MarkusWandel 2y ago

I do miss it though. 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable. 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked. 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did. 20 years ago, you could go on Facebook, and see what your friends were up to. Sure, many things didn't exist back then. But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.

Aurornis 2y ago
Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses > You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable. You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then. > 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked. Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today? The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new. > 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did. This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently. > But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place. I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.

jappgar 2y ago

It was better simply because normies weren't on the internet yet. Like so many things, the more popular it becomes, the worse it gets.

deleted 2y ago
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cgh 2y ago
Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.

thsag 2y ago

The article focuses way too much on the "fear of technology". El Pais, formerly the Spanish paper of record, succumbs to mainstream techno optimism.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago

I do not remember the Internet of 20 years ago, as being "friendly." I was one of the "unfriendly" ones, and I liked it. These days, I'm trying to atone for that.

johnea 2y ago

So, it's a mistake to wish things aren't as fucked up as they are?

idlewords 2y ago

I find that nostalgia for the early web is inversely correlated with the number of IE 6 bugs one had to work around back in the day.

layer8 2y ago
IE 6 was already more than half past the “early” web, IMO.
freehorse 2y ago
It was not the only thing one had to work around. We had to work around getting access to the internet in the first place (for those of use without the money to just afford being connected at home), hiding our identity online, not getting infected every second website we would visit. But somehow we put the effort to get around all these problems because internet had something important to offer, because it was a window to something.

dismalaf 2y ago

The only thing I miss about the internet from 25 years ago is people took themselves less seriously. "Don't feed the trolls" was a thing. But it also wasn't that great either. People weren't nicer. The tech was limited. Things are objectively better now.

Arubis 2y ago

It was such a different world. I still remember a pithy description of IRC from the early aughts: “Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are FBI agents.”

heraldgeezer 2y ago

But I was not the victim so I do miss it.

GeekyBear 2y ago

One thing I loved on the early internet was finding online communities for people who shared a niche interest or hobby with you. For instance, I was interested in plant propagation as part of a gardening hobby, but didn't know anyone else experimenting with it. Before the internet, you could find information in bookstores or libraries, but making new friends with common niche interests was much less likely.

weitendorf 2y ago

A thought I had recently was that someone should try making a social media/forum platform that only allows non-mobile usage. My theory (which is definitely not originally mine) is that mobile devices have driven a huge shift in usage patterns towards low-effort content consumption. Smartphones are everybody's go-to when they're temporarily bored, so social media on the phone is less of a deliberate destination and more of an idle snack to alive someone's boredom. Even when people do engage, because they're often doing so on-the-go in short bursts and don't have access to a real keyboard, the engagement is typically very low effort. TikTok is a perfect testament to this shift IMO. I'm thinking that desktop-only requirements would lead to less engagement over all, but higher quality engagement when it does occur. If there were a ranking system or some other kind of algorithmic content serving, it would be less skewed towards content that you can fully engage with in two seconds. And the userbase would skew towards more intentional enthusiasts who deliberately seek out the site, rather than someone looking for a quick distraction while they're bored for 15 seconds. Hacker news does probably the best job at this without actively trying to prevent phone usage, but it doesn't exactly do much in the way of fostering a community like old-school forums.

tines 2y ago
This is an amazing idea. I’ve been thinking a lot about how smart devices have changed the way we think and interact, reading books like Alone Together and other things from Sherry Turkle’s oeuvre, and remembering how I used to use my computer so differently when I didn’t have instantaneous access to low quality crap 24/7. I think making things desktop-only could be a heuristic that gets us back a lot of the things we lost in the transition to smartphones… definitely deserves more thought.
- elwebmaster 2y ago
  But how will people find out about it? Part of what we lost is the Google of back then when content was king. Can you rank a desktop-only website nowadays?
  - weitendorf 2y ago

havaloc 2y ago

What I miss from those days is that the money was easy on the web. You could throw up some Google Adsense code on a site, show a single unobtrusive banner, and make enough to cover your costs and then some.

climb_stealth 2y ago

I think the scale has changed. Hanging out in forums back in the day I used to know everyone. Not personally, but I'd have an association of who a given user is. You'd have your regular posters and new people join, but it was all fairly manageable. This is still the case in smaller forums. But for things like youtube, reddit and even hn, I don't even read the usernames anymore. There are just too many. It's all just completely unconnected comments. It really takes away from it feeling personal in any way.

MarcelOlsz 2y ago
I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong. Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.
- ajoseps 2y ago
  every now and then I read a comment that sounds so familiar and I realize it's an ex-coworker
dmonitor 2y ago
There's a handful of users on the reddit gaming pages where I can distinguish their writing style and bad opinions well enough from other users that I recognize them. The site culture is opposed to referencing someone's post history, though. The pseudononymous nature of the website was originally one of its selling points, being a nice inbetween of 4chan's anon chaos and Facebook's "your boss and grandmother are reading your posts" stiltedness. Nowadays, I'd rather have the personalization back. The new UI lets people upload avatars for their comments, which probably helps, but they'll have to pry the old UI from my cold, dead hands

brianstorms 2y ago

20 years ago? Nah, the golden era of online community was 40-50 years ago, on the PLATO system.

swayvil 2y ago

In the past when you went to a community for a particular kind of enthusiast, that's what you'd find there. Now everybody is there. Enthusiasts, nonenthusiasts, people posing as enthusiasts, people trying to sell stuff to enthusiasts. So yes, the noise is much greater.

freehorse 2y ago

I do not think internet was more friendly per se back then, and I am not sure this is the general argument or feeling on being nostalgic about that era either. If it is, then it is definitely wrong, but that does not mean that there are no reasons to miss the old internet. I think what made internet interesting back then was that it was much less monetised, more liberating as in providing opportunities and giving access to stuff that were just inaccessible before. Piracy was in its prime, and to a big extent it felt it was about pushing against or breaking whatever rules the world was trying to impose on people. It was not friendly, paedophiles were praying on kids on IRCs, there was definitely sexism, people would get harassed online, you had to be careful as to what kind of information you were putting online, never put one's real name there and definitely not photos or bank info or anything that nowadays is common place. One had to know how to protect oneself online. It was not free as in cheap or easily accessible either, it was actually quite expensive, but again somehow one found ways to get around stuff like that, through computers in public libraries, breaking through some neighbour's wifi, gathering at a friend whose father had internet for work reasons, getting access to a university's wifi and going around with a laptop to find a place with good signal or staying in internet cafes overnight when it was cheaper. The point is that one would make all this effort needed to get access to it and go around these issues because it was a window to the world, esp for more introvert nerds. I definitely appreciate having such easy access to it nowadays and the internet being, generally speaking, safer. I just wish it felt less of a prison to escape from/fight against an algorithm or tightly controlled "platforms" that want to hook you up to show you more ads, and more as a means of liberation and it used to feel like.

torginus 2y ago
History has shown that friendliness is a terrible goal to aim for in of itself - the modern approach to achieving 'friendliness' on Reddit for example, is to brutally crush any dissent by downvoting, removing content and banning users who go against the grain in any given subreddit. The resulting discussions look like to outsiders like a happy community of friendly people who generally agree on most stuff, yet when you try to actualy participate in these discussions you'll find out just how crappily they are run. Most people leave at this point and the only ones who stay are those whose desire for validation is greater than the desire to express their own opinions.

skeeter2020 2y ago

I'll say it; the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites. To paraphrase Matt Damon from a show only enjoyed by the true internet acolytes "the walking mozzarella sticks who think a three hundred android phone and a verizon contract give them the right to connect to every piece of information in the world..."

x-complexity 2y ago
> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites. ...While I agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the end logic: The sentence implies a top-down administration determining who gets access to the internet, which is something that I will always hate with a passion. Personally, I'm more in favor with a self-segregation model, where I can have a private intranet with myself & anyone else I choose to share with. I already do so with Tailscale's private domains.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I’ve made a complete 180 on the subject. I don’t think you can build and maintain a solid online community without gatekeepers.
  - owebmaster 2y ago
    That's true but the internet should be the place where ever human being is allowed. Then it segregates into multiple well-protected communities.
    - dyauspitr 2y ago
      Every human yes, every thought would be no in my opinion.
- cobertos 2y ago
  I agree, having a little private intranet is great, it's where I'm at. But losing the interactions that lead to finding those people to share an intranet with that happened more often on early internet makes finding people so time consuming, or not possible. Where have you met the people you share your intranet with?

BonoboIO 2y ago

Funny how the internet turned what used to be the “village fool” — the guy everyone ignored when he rambled about nonsense and conspiracies — into a global phenomenon. Now, instead of fading into the background, they find each other online, amplify the noise, and suddenly the whole world has to deal with it. The same tools that connected people for good also made it easier to spread misinformation at scale.

Deprogrammer9 2y ago

I've been online since 89. Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved. Most people are cool some are fucked up & now a lot are puppet accounts trying to control the narrative of whatever the current zeitgeist is at the time. But thats whats so great about the global networks it can't be controlled. The best "they" (agents) can do is to get a large amount of people to believe bullshit PR spin. Shit like the internet isn't a friendly place. It's whatever you want it to be, it's all in how you engage with people & groups online. The same applies as when you walk out your door.

raincole 2y ago
> Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.
- DoodahMan 2y ago
  i don't think even that changed really tbh. 25 years ago spam was still terribly profitable, not to mention much easier to do than today. it was wide open. ah... now i'm feeling nostalgic :)
  - hn_acc1 2y ago
    I mean.. 25 years ago (give or take), my brother-in-law asked me about the "Bill Gates will send you $$ if you forward this email" scam. Even if he HAD fallen for it - what would have been the harm? Some extra forwarded email / spam.. Now? "Bill Gates and George Soros are going to destroy the world, and the solution is to vote for <super-far-right-wing-extremist> - and he and various people in my/his family are doing just that..". 25 years ago, those people would have never made it to be a candidate in elections..
Groxx 2y ago
Yea, I lean this way too. The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior. The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc. If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant. Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes. (as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)

steve_taylor 2y ago

> this nostalgia is preventing us from focusing on finding solutions We're gatekeeping nostalgia now. How sad and pathetic.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 2y ago
How is that gatekeeping? Isn't it an observation?
- steve_taylor 2y ago
  It's saying that people shouldn't be nostalgic about the early internet because it stops them solving the perceived problems with today's internet. It's also implying that people's nostalgia is for sexism and racism.

protocolture 2y ago

Why would we possibly yearn for small forums and channels populated with only our friends and people we want to connect with instead of massive social networks full of every conceivable idiot with algorithms designed to push their idiocy in my face. Yeah sometimes we were meanies. Damn. You got us.

wiseowise 2y ago

Yes, internet was better before. All the bad stuff author describes was confined to fringe spaces like Omegle and 4Chan, where anonymity was the selling point. On private forums, however, you’d quickly get banned for this shit.

bmitc 2y ago

I'd wager a guess that the friendliness, or at least the perception of such, came from not very many people using it, people being segregated into niche enthusiast groups, and people still intelligent and non-addicted enough to not merge it with their identity. However, the Internet was always destined to connect us in the worst ways.

torginus 2y ago

Well, however presumably unfriendly that world was, it definitely didn't have nagware content walls that wanted me to log in and subscribe to god knows what website.

veltas 2y ago

There's a great comment on a breakcore video that says something like "remember that decade between 1999 and 2000". Maybe that decade is yet to happen.

SllX 2y ago

Back around the most recent election I dug up Digg’s front page and some of the comments from it’s earliest appearance in the Internet Archive and jumped around reading the comments sections on news items related to the 2004 and 2008 elections. I walked away feeling much like I did after reading some Ancient Roman Graffiti left in Pompeii: people are just people. What’s different now isn’t the web, it’s just there’s more people, we’re more connected across State and International borders, you can actually find people you know online and the people that were kids back then are in their 30s while a lot of people you once knew online are dead. But there’s still kids, there’s still people who remember the world before the ARPAnet and UNIX and CP/M and Apple and DOS. Hacker News will be 18 this year. All the kids born in 2007 are turning 18 this year. Twitter passed that milestone a year ago and Facebook a couple of years before that.

ratg13 2y ago
The type of people are different. Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not. Now anyone that can afford a cheap phone can access the internet, and the user landscape has changed. Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world. Those days are over and the internet is a much more hostile place.
- SllX 2y ago
  > The type of people are different. That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries. By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web. > Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly. Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005. > Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world. Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.

soygem 2y ago

Internet is a proper noun, with a capital I. The Internet was a better place, would it only be for the fact that kids didn't have access to it. And less offendable people.

floppiplopp 2y ago

Meh, the internet today is mostly boring. Everything's looking the same, sounding the same, all in service to impressions for ads and probably follower count. Additionally AI slop fills everything with more of the same corpo garbage and algorithm optimizations that makes number go up. What the internet back then had was a charming weirdness which has become rare. It wasn't better back then, but it was more interesting and strange in a not so kaputt way as today.

circlefavshape 2y ago

I've been hanging out on the same forum pretty much daily since 1998. Looking back through threads from 20+ years ago is a great antidote to nostalgia - just a crowd of immature know-it-alls spouting utter shite (and very often being very unfriendly to one another)

imaginationra 2y ago

Back then it felt like people were trying to be useful and to make things/places that were useful in some way to other people. Now it feels like people are making things/places mostly to use other people- they stopped viewing people online as "people"- now people are "data" to be "monetized" The various art forms/entertainment has also become "content" to be "monetized" All of this has made the modern internet very cold and boring- everything has been corporatized. * It's a tiny and obscure thing but jumping into and chatting with people in Hyperfy(https://hyperfy.io/ https://hyperfy.io/) worlds feels very much like early internet as you often chat with the builder of the world who is into some non-normie thing. * Hyperfy v2 is now open source btw https://github.com/hyperfy-xyz/hyperfy https://github.com/hyperfy-xyz/hyperfy

deleted 2y ago

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Sohcahtoa82 2y ago

What we didn't have 20 years ago was interaction bait/rage bait. I mean, I guess rage bait still existed, but it was FAR less common. Don't feed the trolls, we used to say. Now, everyone with a room temperature IQ and a massive ego can't help but correct people. So many videos of people deliberately doing things wrong that they HAVE to comment. Or poorly worded questions that make people argue over the correct answer when they can't even agree on what's being asked. Not to mention that social media has given a bullhorn to every moron conspiracy theorist, and now we have a greater number of Flat Earthers than any time in recent history, not to mention political issues.

vondur 2y ago

I remember the web was full of trolls (just look at old Slashdot posts), and newsgroups could be pretty toxic back then. Just the web was more niche back then and not as many people were exposed to it.

kazinator 2y ago

This article is blindly equivocating on "friendly"! People were the same assholes in forums twenty years ago. The platforms as such were more friendly. They were not enshittified toward extracting value from the user, and attracting new users at the expense of becoming less usable for the current ones. Or not as much.

exabrial 2y ago

I'm curious how old the writer is?

TwoNineFive 2y ago

I was there. I helped build it. It was better.

PoppinFreshDo 2y ago

The good old days you could ping of death those win9x lusers!

n00b_heal 2y ago

Doubt that author really lived in that era for multiple reasons. And if you don't like corp AI slop, maybe you should leave the silo'd internet?

rurban 2y ago

In the old days a user was forced to block hostile actors, whilst now evverone urges some admin to block the hostile actor. Platforms are gardens, before they were open spaces, with lots of spam. Censorship and deplatforming demands are now all over, esp. by the traditional press, and the left. Esp. worrying are the continuous demands in the press to censor hatespeech or lies. Young Gen-Z folks are crying loud when I call them weak. Next they call HR. Stalin rears his ugly head again. And academic freedom is gone. They even let in police now.