100% true.
Another good data point is John Gabriel's Great Internet Fuckwad Theory: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19
That was written 14 years ago, effectively before modern social media. This problem has been a long time coming. The problem isn't that we couldn't know. It's that people kept thinking it would magically be different this time.
I don't think that's the problem, rather it's that the overwhelming majority of people currently on the internet are completely unaware there was a 'last time'.
Generally just this.
But at best, they had an incredibly rosy view of what was going on. E.g., looking back, a Twitter founder claims that in 2006 everyone "was cool": https://twitter.com/rasmus_kleis/status/974552443789836288
Given Gabriel's theory, that's obvious bunk. And having talked to some online community pioneers, abuse started pretty much from the get go. Look at all the replies I got when I brought it up on Twitter, for example. Story after story of early experiences of trolling, abuse, etc: https://twitter.com/williampietri/status/974847531317211136
There was (and is) a strong strain of technoutopianism, where we take the shiny new possibility and project a perfect future onto it. This goes back at least as far as the introduction of the telegraph, which many thought would bring about world peace: https://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Ninetee...
As Neiwart documents, though, many of the terrible people online today are intellectual descendants of the terrible people who were doing their social networking in person and via the mail: https://www.amazon.com/Alt-America-Rise-Radical-Right-Trump/...
You and Rasmus twist Ev's words to somehow be about oppression instead of what he clearly meant: the early internet was inhabited by geeks and he (a geek) liked that. It's also clear that he's talking more about spammers than abusers. Of course with scale both will ramp up.
Secondly we see the presentation of a hard left view as the only valid way of thinking. Pro-gun people showing up to a forum about gun control is in no way abuse, it's the internet fulfilling its promise of giving everyone a voice (even if you don't agree with them).
Yes, there have always been trolls, spammers, jerks, loudmouths... What social media seems to have created is a unique culture of grievance hunting, virtue signalling and a worship of victimhood.
Again, please don't take this as a personal attack, it's just an observation from someone who's been on the internet for a really long time.
I also think I'm reading Ev just fine. He says "We laid down fundamental architectures that had assumptions that didn’t account for bad behavior." As one of Twitter's first users and a former Twitter employee, I think he's right. But when Twitter started in 2006, people had been behaving badly on the Internet for a long time, and it was far from being a "just nerds" place. The September that Never Ended started 13 years before Twitter, for example.
I also don't believe that my view is "hard left". I'm a gun owner, and am fine with people talking about guns. You're distorting what I said, which is that "rabid pro-gun types turned up to aggressively dominate and/or ruin the [gun control] forum". We were talking about abuse, and this was given as an example of clear forum abuse. Yes, gun owners can participate usefully in gun control forums, but being pro-gun does mean you can't be abusive.
I think facebook has easily proven that the anonymity part of that equation is _very_ optional.
The post is worth the quick read; I like the suggestion that the solution is more clearly implicit this way.
[1] https://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2013/02/18/the-coroll...
"Careful what you say online" is a big part of what we teach our kids nowadays. It's a variant of "careful what you say in public", with everything now being public.
On a personal note, I once was denied a job based on the fact that I made a one-off comment 5 years previous that I was starting to dislike Object Oriented Programming. That's all it took to convince this company I wasn't fit to work for them.
If a comment that innocuous can be used as a reason not to hire, then you have two choices: never say anything online ever or stop worrying about it. I opt for the latter. So has most of Gen Z. Worrying if expressing utter mundanity online is going to be used against you is no way to live.
> We will do better.
Yeah, I don't think so.