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A retrospective of my time on the internet

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Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#211

Post by mock-possum »

sanderjd wrote: post #67
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were o…

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

You were never on 4chan before that I guess?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#212

Post by chasd00 »

toyg wrote: post #198
JKCalhoun wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.

yeah, the worst that could happen was some IRC shenanigans and getting a bunch of unexpected pizza deliveries. SWATing and doxxing were very rare, and nobody would try to get you fired or ostracized for saying the wrong thing.

idk, I remember significant predatory behavior on IRC and pretty bad stuff floating around in alt binaries on usenet.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#213

Post by coldtea »

smackeyacky wrote: post #41
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were o…

I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid. Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.

>I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars.

In that swearing or bad faith arguments were involved, sure.

In their nature, breath, and impact outside the web, no.

"Flame wars" back in the 90s were entertainment for the people involved.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#214

Post by NetOpWibby »

HappMacDonald wrote: post #119
myself248 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hosting a talk-show / variety-show hasn't been a novelty in a long time either, what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000. What's depressing to me is that the broadcasting network still has the same old standards-and-practices censorship. Despite the peer-to-peer promise of the internet, peer streaming just hasn't taken off. And in recent years it's get…

If only someone would just bump up the size of the address space, so that there would be enough to go around again. I mean, it's kinda like Y2K, isn't it? We're stuck with this old addressing scheme that chose 32 bits per address back when that was a lot for any computer to comfortably handle. But today if we used up twice.. no, even four times as many bits no PC would bat an eyelash and the increase in address space…

We could just use IPv6, no?

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#215

Post by NetOpWibby »

I was born in '88 and I feel like my generation is the last great one (doesn't ever generation think this? Hah!) because I got to experience playing outdoors and online, and was able to do a bunch of dumb stuff before smartphones existed so there's no photo proof.

I miss the feel of the internet I grew up with...I don't think it's coming back. However, I do think we can make a new one.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#216

Post by icedchai »

fehu22 wrote: post #107
lizknope wrote: post #7

It looks like it starts with: >I was born in the late 1990s >2001: The Family Computer I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to…

Money getting into the net as created many problems

Yes. The very thing that made the Internet sustainable, commercialization, also destroyed parts of it.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#217

Post by iamnothere »

Aurornis wrote: post #204
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were o…

> We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other. You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time. Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere. This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only rem…

I was fine with the flame wars, crapfloods, etc, because at least it was human (except for incredibly primitive bots). The spammers were even humans, and might even talk to people briefly before spamming again. It felt very different. Dealing with assholes is normal and possible, dealing with faceless entities and bots is like punching a wall.

Generally though, I agree that Usenet was difficult after Eternal September unless you stayed on top of your killfile.

Mailing lists were pretty manageable, and the phpBB era was fantastic if you found some boards you liked.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#218

Post by afpx »

willmadden wrote: post #142

Most of the old internet could be restored with the right search engine and browser. Index all of the invasive BS to page 100 or the results, and put the interesting/relevant things up front. People might pay for it. You could do some of it with an extension.

Lately, since I've pretty much blocked most media companies in /etc/hosts, I've been enjoying reading the pre-2015 from archive.org. Although, I do have some grief, I guess I'm ok with being the last analog generation; it's not my world anymore.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#219

Post by glaslong »

reaperducer wrote: post #116
Delphiza wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were o…

it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures. Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty. Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountabilit…

A lot of Facebook is people with their real names posting vitriolic bile in full view of their entire real life family and friends.

I don't think Real Name policies are the solve. It still doesn't matter when you interact with 1,000 random real names in the comments whom you'll never have to reconcile with in real life. The latter is the important part. The medium itself reduces people to content and encourages context collapse.

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