n/t
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I vividly recall my family telling me not to retreat to communities online, theyre now all posting photos of their children publicly on facebook and I don’t have ‘social-media’ accounts, and very few irl friends
Remember when they told us to never give out our real names online?
I’ve dealt with a lot of social upheaval in my life in the last few years and turned to the internet to fill the gap while a lot of it settled, and the one thing I realize is that I really wish I had the online social connections I had when I was younger. Its not a replacement but its not a bad thing
I miss how decentralized the internet used to be (which is why I like hexbear/federated spaces). I know some of you guys were in the hellhole that was LUElinks, and theres a lot of negative things to say about old internet, but I just miss how personal things could get. Used to have friends on mirc channels and whatnot, would integrate with small communities where people shared how to learn how to do basic hacking stuff. Centralization did help tame a lot of the shittier behavior of people online though… but also the impersonal nature of the current web allows people to do shittiness in a totally different way.
Centralization did help tame a lot of the shittier behavior of people online though
Did it really though
I mean yeah, a lot of it just went under the surface. Instead now people are more dickish because why spend time trying to talk to some random in a sea of millions of other people when you will likely never encounter them a second time? Not going to say that we’re not even guilty of being assholes here at times, but it feels pretty warranted/easy when some complete random shows up and just wants to be difficult. Guess I just miss online spaces where people had more accountability and at the scale of a lot of these centralized spaces theres a lot of room to treat it as space to be shitty to one another. Its laughable that people thought web2.0 was going to usher in some new era where we’d all be politely engaging with one another and sharing thoughts/ideas/ideology when instead its all so impersonal that theres very little reason to engage in good faith.
Oh I thought you were saying people are better now that everyone is on reddit than when we were all in our own weird little corners hah. I definitely think there was more accountability back in those smaller communities where you had a reputation to stake rather than being able to spin up dozens of anonymous sock puppets, basically.
Yeah thats basically what I’m getting at. There was definitely still aggro people who would go out of their way to be a social menace in those small communities, but the social effect of the community had a powerful effect to keep people in check. Its obviously an aspect of how people socialize in the real world that just doesn’t function at scale well. I miss doing things online, like playing early MMOs, where people actually felt that social contract still existed. Now you have to really try to find spaces where that magic is still alive because the cats out of the bag and we all know you can largely be an asshole on the internet without consequence.
I do like telling random fascists online to go fuck themselves though, lol.
Smaller communities also meant it was easier for mods to sniff-test users being assholes. Now with large-scale platforms using AI to auto-moderate, chuds figure out how to be assholes in ways that don’t trigger the algorithms.
It made it easier to moderate it
Moderation doesn’t have quite the same role as the sort of social contract that a tighter more personal community has, though.
Oh absolutely.
There’s still plenty of small irc servers
I’m aware, but one of the fundamental problems is that the scale of web2.0, or the centralized internet (whatever we want to call it) has trained people to behave anti-socially. That cannot be undone no matter what space you’re in, unfortunately.
Yup
tfw I explained to my kids what a BBS is, and they both called me a geezer.
tfw I tried explaining how a computer used to use a dial up line to access chat rooms.
Tfw I then have to explain what the hell a dial up line is.
tfw I explain to my kids what an MSX keyboard is and about how rad the games were
tfw I explain what a 7.5in floppy disk was
tfw I explain how rad cartridges and diskettes are and how discs (blu-ray, CD, DVD) are lame and will never match the hype, or how digital is just a laughable shadow of physical copies (God I hate how cyberpunk is now more digital rather than about diskettes and computer chips)
tfw I explain how VHS standard def had style
If I ever had kids I would set up a local modem they had to dial into to access the internet. This would probably be difficult as I couldn’t just give them a tablet to get them to shut up and leave me alone
I’ll probably never have kids
5·1 day agoNot just giving them a tablet to shut them up would be good for the kid.
Me explaining to my kid why junk emails are called spam.
Monty python?
Si
he’s from Barcelona.
half the british people i know haven’t seen it.
i guess there’s a bunch of american sketch comedy from the 70s i haven’t seen but that’s because i was watching monty python instead
internet culture reached its zenith with the dialup chatrooms of AOL in 1994, with the mass exchange of perfectly timed picture from a film camera where a subject had sudden/surprise intense projectile vomit while simultaneously sneezing at a party.
everything since has been a foolish attempt to chase that feeling.
The World Wide Web ate My balls
I remember that picture but I can’t find it. I feel queasy from the image searches I had to look through
it’s not easy to find. i remember someone bringing it to “internet” class on a floppy disk 💾 and showing it to people while the dumbass coach teaching the class was not around.
CW: Guy Barfing (c. early 1990s)
the composition and posture of the other subjects is also magnificent, especially given that this predated digital photography. someone captured this on film with a flash. like shooting a bullet out of the air with another bullet.
can you imagine having the negative? reprocessing it into a 300+ dpi color and contrast corrected art print.
glorious, you’ve taken me back to a simpler time
But the dancing baby screensaver
just lie to them. tell them you used to have to get the internet by plugging a cable from your PC into your TV and it picked it up over the same waves that analogue TV signals were sent out using your TV antenna, and to go to different websites you would have to change the channel on the tv to try to get a clear picture. and the reason it doesn’t work anymore is because the signals switched to digital
it sounds almost real enough to possibly be true and they might repeat it which would be funny even if you don’t see the payoff
i didn’t know the dad from calvin and hobbes was on hexbear
Back in my day you had to choose between the internet or the phone because it all came along the same cables so you couldn’t make a phone call while someone was using the internet and vice versa.
This was the absolute worst thing about dialup, and early dsl/cable was very expensive and how to justify for families that weren’t doing pretty well.
remember when you had to use the remote to go to a different website? you’d have to manually key in the IP address by using the channel number buttons on the remote.
then “webrings” came along and you could just channel surf by using the channel+ channel- buttons
That would actually be kinda neat
Yeah I use to watch a lot of 4channel
37 was a search page before the numbers went all the way up to a google
Eternal September
The internet is better in a lot of ways because normal people came in, it became a lot less hostile, but in turn those hostile places became even more hostile and filled with enraged nerds. I should know I’m a recovering nerd and I’ve been online since 1999.
I remember going on chatrooms on (mirc?) back in I don’t know how long ago (late 90’s?) and pretending to be a big adultman who drives a car and has a workjob
I used to do that but on aol, only I was like a total spaz as a tween and I’d get flamed for being a kid.
eternal september was good is a helluva take
I view people who complain about Eternal September in the same vein as I view Chinese conservatives who complained about the simplified Chinese alphabet “debasing literacy” by opening it up to the “unwashed masses”
maybe they foresaw tabloids and dan brown
'99 is around the time I first got catfished on yahoo chatrooms. Haven’t trusted the Internet since
oof sorry to hear that.
The 90s internet was somehow even more incel-ish than today’s.
HOW?
TELL ME
It was more time-consuming, more expensive, and required more technical knowledge to access which meant that wealthy white techbros were 90% of the entire userbase instead of an obnoxiously loud minority with outsized influence
The big difference is that it was so dominated by these types that they were one of the predominate in-groups online. In my opinion, at least
There is still hope for those afflicted with nerdism
Last time I watched a Dana Carvey special, he was whining about millenials. So, yea.
