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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

#261

Post by glaslong »

someonebaggy wrote: post #237
glaslong wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...

Wasn't there also some connection between Gamergate and Jeffrey Epstein I remember reading about?

Mostly through Steve Bannon as far as I'm aware, yes. Though apparently there were connections through moot, and later Peter Thiel adjacency as well.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-...

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#262

Post by glaslong »

vaylian wrote: post #192
glaslong wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right? The 2000-2010s saw a massive rejection of popups. Blockers became common. Best practices emerged that avoided them like the plague. I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop. Now popups are fully back as login, sign up, cookie and deal spam. We've actively regressed on this front back to "pop-ups everywhere!"

> I recall hand-wringing on the difference between popups and modals in our webdev shop. I hate modals even more than pop-ups. There are valid reasons to use either, but in most cases they are a form of abuse.

Agreed! Usually this came up because someone wanted to add a popup, but call it a modal to sneak past the bad connotation. When really they shouldn't have been doing either and they knew that; just laundering a UX they knew was crappy.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#263

Post by saratogacx »

glaslong wrote: post #152
dom96 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected. It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.

This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...

At the time it was happening I recall thinking "This should be a typical flair up that'll die down to smolders in a couple of weeks and life will continue" as so many dicey internet things had done in the past but that time there was something that kept that fire burning, it wasn't organic feeling, it was as if it was hooked up to life support just to stoke more engagement and stronger, more subtlety incompatible opinions.

It worked, we collectively fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It keeps working. It will likely keep working for a long time as people continue to feel empowered by self-entrenchment and the want for affirmation that they're on the right side of history.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#264

Post by zerolabs »

dirkc wrote: post #52
EliRivers wrote: post #25

Purely for the fun of thinking about it, and not just to be awkward: We owned a heavy, wooden CRT TV set from the 1970s or 1980s that hid all buttons behind a fake, black "speaker" that you could press to pop open. A decade or two after we had tossed this TV into our barn for disposal, my brother and I took turns hitting the glass screen as hard as we could with a baseball bat. It never left a mark, regardless of how…

I grew up with a TV like that. I'm pretty sure the one we had probably caused at least a hand full of slipped disks

[dead]

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#265

Post by tasuki »

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…

This so much!

I recently found an old email thread by accident. I recoiled in horror: the vitriol was unbelievable, people name calling each other in the worst possible way. The same people are much more mature these days. The new people in the same community likewise. Times have changed: for the better.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#266

Post by ryandrake »

empyrrhicist wrote: post #225
AlexandrB wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything…

I struggle to believe that it had anything to do with "Gaming journalism". I tried several times to figure out what the big deal was, and each time left with the impression that it was really just a bunch of antisocial misogynists who wanted a hate figure. Like, then and now I do get the impression that there's very little in the way of real "journalism" going on in gaming, but that seemed like just a weird non-sequi…

It was pretty obvious to anyone following along that the concern about the integrity of "gaming journalism" was a phony pretext.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#267

Post by intended »

smalltorch wrote: post #55
intended wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This framing sets up variables incorrectly. People have only a limited amount of time, energy, and hence capacity to process information in a day. People used to go and are still going to facebook, because Facebook makes some part of that equation easier. There’s many knock on effects, but the issue that is the biggest factor which will prevent people from following.

>This framing sets up variables incorrectly. What are the variables that would cause a shift a to more sovereign and secure populace in your mind? For me, the variable/impetus was knowledge it was even possible to easily set up your own space. The realization that 'Oh, we can connect without the middle man' Between the original Internet and the beginnings of the 'new' centralized internet built on top of it, a entire…

I took some time to approach this.

I think there are no ways to set this up at scale.

The populace has too many things to do, for a singular set of behaviors to prevail. Unless those behaviors were critical to survival (and even then it wont be universal coverage.)

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#268

Post by ryandrake »

bluedino wrote: post #87

Things we don't have to worry about anymore: 10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers... Your Windows 98 machine being taken over by viruses minutes after booting up Pop-ups! Pop-ups everywhere! Adware infesting your system. WeatherBug, HotBar, BonziBuddy, Ask Jeeves…

> 10 ISPs worth of free trials and shortcuts on your Windows 95 desktop. AOL, MSN, Compuserve, Prodigy, AT&T, NetCom, UUNet, NetZero, EarthLink, MindSpring, countless local and regional providers

It sucked having them installed by default on your desktop, but I'd argue the availability of numerous ISPs was a good thing that we have lost. Today is far worse, where at most two of Comcast, Charter, Cox, AT&T, and Verizon are the only options for most of the US population.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#269

Post by sanderjd »

jerf wrote: post #209
sanderjd wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to dis…

Yeah, seems like the whackjobs became a lot more visible.

Re: A retrospective of my time on the internet

#270

Post by jameshart »

someonebaggy wrote: post #240
jameshart wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.

Web 2.0 has a few different definitions but one of them is when HTML pages started to contain significant JavaScript, and another is when websites started to be middlemen between users rather than users interacting only with the website operators.

To give it some value as a term, what Tim O’Reilly meant by it was a shift to participatory, user content driven websites. Blogs, Flickr and Wikipedia were quintessentially Web 2.0 phenomena.
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