[HN Gopher] The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online wo...
___________________________________________________________________
The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years
ago
Author : geox
Score : 67 points
Date : 2025-01-12 14:03 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (english.elpais.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (english.elpais.com)
| goalieca wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I guess you never stumbled down the liveleak and /b/ back
| alleys.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| What do you think teenagers discussed over MSN Messenger
| exactly? The finer points of botanical knowledge?
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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..
| m3047 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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/Micro...
| mentos wrote:
| 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..."
| elpocko wrote:
| They will apply the patterns they've learned from the biased
| moderator actions in their training data, and the even more
| reinforced bias from their usual fine-tuning that improved
| their "safety" and crippled their ability to condone
| controversial statements.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| So spin up your own forum and don't moderate it. Or spend
| some time (un-)finetuning an LLM moderator so you can talk
| about race or eugenics or whatever "exciting" controversial
| statements you want to talk about. Who cares.
| hibikir wrote:
| Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are
| adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what
| is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a
| per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle
| by an adversary that is interested enough.
|
| Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators
| manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them
| contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is
| reading every one of the forum's comments.
| mentos wrote:
| Can have the AI just flag posts for a human to review in
| v1? Then as you refine the prompt injection detection can
| move to have the AI be autonomous?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| There is no way to get rid of a prompt injection attack.
| There are always ways to convince the AI to do something
| else besides flagging a post even if that's its initial
| instruction.
| mentos wrote:
| The raw text of the persons message can/will be posted to
| the forum and be obvious to the community if it's a
| prompt injection to be flagged for human review and their
| account banned.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Sure, that's if human moderators see it before the AI, in
| which case, why have an AI at all? I presume in this
| solution that the AI is running all the time and it will
| see messages the instant they're sent and thus will
| always be vulnerable to a prompt injection attack before
| any human even sees it in the first place.
| webwanderings wrote:
| It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.
| Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on
| the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale
| communities (business and ego motivations did that). If
| psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers
| of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in
| the first place.
|
| Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities.
| Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will
| take a while for the original intent of the social media to die
| out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business
| motivations would need to shift to something other than
| profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw
| Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside
| our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion
| of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to
| our senses.
| rexer wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I
| help move along the transition to smaller communities?
|
| The answer cannot be 'you can't'. Certainly what you said
| resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a
| small community to create a small community, right?
| dingnuts wrote:
| You only need two friends and a chat server to have a
| community. I've been running one for my friends, like a
| self hosted discord, for almost ten years. It is by far my
| most valuable online space. There's maybe a dozen users.
| Whatever. It's great.
| dijit wrote:
| > Self-Hosted Discord
|
| How does one achieve this?
| coldtea wrote:
| Downloads some forum software and runs in it on a VPS or
| similar?
|
| There are also some FOSS Discord clones in various states
| of maturity
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| irc if you don't require any bells and whistles. matrix
| if you want attachments and encryption. zulip if you're
| running a company.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I'm on a couple of email lists that have a similar vibe.
| A dozen or two active participants. No ads, no giant
| corporation trying to push engagement or steer the
| narrative. You just have to ignore the occasional FOMO
| feelings and understand that no, trying to find
| "community" in a sea of 10,000,000 users on a giant
| social network is not how we are wired.
| beej71 wrote:
| Absolutely. I'm in about 10 communities like this. I
| don't think I need global reach or hundreds or thousands
| of "friends".
|
| For a wider net, I have a self-curated feed on Lemmy and
| Mastodon. It's super clean and positive compared to
| suggestive social media.
|
| The old Internet will never be back, but The Good Parts
| still exist and can be remade. I don't have to visit the
| shitty parts.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _The answer cannot be 'you can't'. Certainly what you
| said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only
| takes a small community to create a small community,
| right?_
|
| It also takes a culture. The small community needs to have
| a culture that empowers them to exlude the enlargement of
| the community and to prevent those wanting to open it to
| those not fit for it get to dictate terms...
| mongol wrote:
| By hanging out in the smaller communities and leaving the
| larger ones behind. You can't change the world, but you can
| choose how you live in it.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Furthermore, while human nature is relatively stable, the
| technology has increased in every way.
|
| The Edenic simplicity of HTTP has been supplanted by TLS and
| tracking goop and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| It wasn't just the moderation. Earlier internet had a much more
| self-selecting audience. Trolling was in its artisanal infancy
| and there weren't incentives to spam and scam people since you
| couldn't monetize on such things. State and other propaganda
| actors didn't take it as a serious platform, there weren't
| trillion dollar companies monetizing your every move, and a
| hundred other variables
| mingus88 wrote:
| In that era also, the communities you had to chose from were
| higher quality, simply due to the barrier to entry of being
| always online.
|
| To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell
| account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your
| channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.
|
| So the people you had available to create communities with
| were those who were invested in keeping things nice. Why
| bother with all that overhead only to read shitpost memes and
| rage bait?
|
| Today the default mode for everyone is to be always online.
| It's actually harder to disconnect now. The quality of the
| communities reflects this.
| srmarm wrote:
| There seems to be a bit of a preoccupation with federated
| identity and linking communities but the lack of that is what I
| like about forums and web communities back then.
|
| I don't necessarily want my identity as a bus nerd cross
| pollinating my interest in going to raves or my interest in
| business being mixed up with my interest in left wing politics.
| There all things that I've had some level of interest in joined
| forums for. I always use different random usernames because I'm
| also from an age where the internet was it's own world where
| your real identity didn't matter. More so while we look back at
| those days with rose tinted specs, many viewed the internet as
| a dangerous wild west and staying anonymous was one way of
| protecting yourself.
| metalman wrote:
| the term, nostalgia, was coined to describe a mental illness,
| specificaly a type of home sickness, experienced by 17th
| century mercinaries. Nostagia is a poison, a little will give
| you a buzz ,but beware of more, as the results are all too
| common, especialy in those, who mix,there poisons. The only
| advantage in remembering the past, is to sum up the things that
| worked, and offer alternative actions for the things that
| didn't.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| cookiewall free archive https://archive.ph/aVwAv
| alganet wrote:
| > 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.
| seneca wrote:
| 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.
| macNchz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| 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). 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.
| antigeox wrote:
| What I'm getting from your over all message is that the
| Internet used to be less hateful 20 years ago.
| let_me_post_0 wrote:
| The internet isn't less hateful today, anyway.
|
| In the past internet communities were more heterogeneous. Now
| everyone lives in a bubble. This makes the snowflakes feel more
| safe. But this also concentrates the racists, sexists and
| bigots in their own bubbles where their hate festers.
|
| That heterogeneity is what I miss the most and snowflakes in
| general ruined web 2.0 for me.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| The internet is plenty heterogeneous today... given there are
| multiple communities that encourage mass killings
| (Christchurch, most infamously), the internet is _too_
| heterogeneous.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| most inspiring piece of content I've read in weeks and it comes
| from the pessimizer, thanks for that. also first time I've come
| across the term buttbuttinating but I like it, captures the
| zeitgeist.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This is not true. Basically everyone I know (including me)
| didn't pretend to be white or male. We didn't bring up our
| identities at all. Nobody gave a shit.
|
| I'm not pretending that every single person had a sunshine and
| roses experience. Assholes exist in every time and place, and
| some people are unfortunate enough to run into them. But I'm
| sick of people claiming that the Internet of yesteryear was
| such a cesspool that if you were anything except a white dude
| you had a bad time. That was never the case.
| raytopia wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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!
| thsag wrote:
| During the first bubble (1998-2000) there were Java stock
| ticker applets that were better than what we have today. You
| could already get actually cheap flights via travel sites.
| There was a short window where you had access to the Sabre
| booking system directly. Travel sites are expensive and garbage
| nowadays.
|
| There were flash games that are better than what we have now.
| In Usenet there was real free speech.
|
| There also was the uninteresting AOL walled garden that was
| quickly replaced ... by other uninteresting walled gardens.
| Except that everyone is now a sharecropper in some walled
| garden, depending on the moderator's grace and feeding AI
| scrapers.
|
| The only thing that is better now is Rumble/YouTube, which
| depend on the vastly improved bandwidth. Ironically, YouTube
| also still allows far greater free speech in the comments that
| other platforms except for _some_ newspaper comments sections,
| which also allow a lot.
| curtisblaine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What mistake would that be?
|
| Reference points are necessary to understand a crappy present.
| m3047 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| thsag wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So, it's a mistake to wish things aren't as fucked up as they
| are?
| idlewords wrote:
| 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.
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