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gipp

What you've left out of that idyll of the early internet, though, is that its population was

- smaller, by many orders of magnitude

- from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds

- mostly of comfortable material means

These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about.

The "heavy-handedness" of tech companies is IMO less a cause than it is a reaction to the inevitable degeneration of discourse as the Internet grew up.

The techno-libertarian-utopian ideals of the early internet were always a pipe dream because they failed to recognize the role of these factors in their culture, and attributed it all to the medium itself. Which is not to say that the Internet doesn't change our communication, just that it's not necessarily in the ways they wanted.

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Wasn't exactly an idyll, but there was a widespread belief that you abided by some basic standards, just as you might if going to a restaurant compared to sitting at home in your boxers. Or as dang and sctb try to enforce here.

It wasn't that homogeneous, nor always comfortably off. Certainly some groups were hugely over-represented. A lot of the early non-tech groups, and BBS's before them, had a surprisingly wide distribution. You could have a civil discussion on uk.politics with diametrically opposing views. Most didn't degenerate into a flame war, of course some did. Occasionally actual politicians would show up. Or authors in writing groups. Try that today on /r/politics.

The largest change was losing netiquette. Every new join, whether techie, scientist or whatever, was expected to read and abide. Once people started arriving in volume those basic "rules of the club" rapidly became meaningless. No one cared to listen. As people moved through forums, to the social networks the idea of moderation or self accountability at all, died stone dead. Everyone apparently now expects to be just as crass and offensive as they like, because "free speech".

I don't think much of that change could have been avoided. I do think the social networks could have decided to enable moderation far more than they have.

/me checks calendar.

Yep, still September.

To a social network, moderation is a cost center that limits engagement and lowers impressions, while making many of their products get upset at their censorship. Sure they could have done more, but there were a lot of economic reasons not to do so.

Not only that, controversial stuff gets lots of pageviews. An organisation driven by metrics, such as Facebook or Twitter, won't want to moderate it.

You may well be right about the civil nature of things in the early days being due to being composed of a small group of techies whose culture wasn't all that different from each other. Maybe it was naive of everyone. It doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, though, to hope that even the most different of us could talk out our difference more and resort to violence and intimidation less. Maybe we're now seeing how wrong/naive we all were.

>Maybe it was naive of everyone. It doesn't seem like the worst thing in the world, though, to hope that even the most different of us could talk out our difference more and resort to violence and intimidation less.

The naivete of everyone is somewhat understandable because each generation lets new technology (e.g. telegraph, airplanes, internet, etc) seduce them into thinking its capabilities will help humans understand each other.

Some examples of previous naive forecasts:

>"telegraph [...] would end international hostilities [...] the telegraph wire, the nerve of international life, transmitting knowledge of events, removing causes of misunderstanding, and promoting peace and harmony throughout the world."[1]

>"With the perfect development of the airplane, wars will be only an incident of past ages."; "The Wright Brothers Invention Should Prevent Further Wars And Insure Peace"[2]

>"the internet will help us connect with each other and let us discuss our differing viewpoints!"[3]

And no doubt that if some future 22nd-century technology of brainwave-telepathic device is invented, those future people will think that magical thought-communicator will enable peace and harmony. Why would there be any wars if 10 billion of us could just magically send thoughts with universal language translation without even speaking or writing?!? (Don't worry, humanity will figure out a way to use the device for spreading hate.)

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=4y2UAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA16&lpg=P...

[2] https://wrightstories.com/wrights-perspective-on-the-role-of...

[3] today's internet users

Those are true and good points, and the overall argument may be true too. But if so, what are we to do? Don't bother trying to make the world a more peaceful place because we are doomed to failure?

Stop looking at improvements in a “breakthrough” model that becomes equal parts breathless and mindless with each new toy. Start looking at long term, systematic improvements thst raise standards of living, improve education, and reduce conflict. While people are busy fantasizing that they’re changing the world with their latest scooter or delivery app, there are actually groups and individuals who slave away at the coal face of making the world a better place... usually while the Astro Tellers of the world sneer at them from their rollerblades.

Find something that has a proven track record of yielding to intervention, and then intervene there. It’s not sexy to prevent parasitic worm infections, but it does more good than all of SV combined. It’s not sexy to sit in rooms with a bunch of politicians and diplomats and struggle to make microscopic improvements, but it adds up.

The problem is that people in places like this don’t just want to save the world. They want to save the world in their lifetimes, while getting filthy rich, and in no way compromising their ideals. Nobody wants to sacrifice anything, they want improvements to be universally beneficial and personally gratifying. They don’t talk about carbon taxation or cutting down consumerism, regulation or compromise; it’s talk of self-driving electric cars and fusion plants and living on Mars. The only seriously entertained notions are the ones that somehow make the world a better place without making you miss a beat in your lifestyle.

You sound like you've seen/read Kentaro Toyama's "Ten Myths of ICT4D" [0]

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

I’d never seen that, but wow... I love it.

The big issue is that we are trying to make technology as the solution to a uniquely human problem, when at most it would just shift some factors around. It's pretty telling that nuclear superweapons have somehow managed to do more for (forcing) peace than all those other technologies mentioned above

The fundamental mistake seems to be assuming that violent conflict arises from misunderstanding or a lack of close contact.

I think it’s more likely that violent conflict arises from actual conflicts of interest or belief. Closer contact might exacerbate those problems instead of fixing them...

The phrase "familiarity breeds contempt" exists for a reason. A lack of contact with something can certainly lead to ignorance and bigotry, but it's our closest neighbours in geography, culture or ideology that spark actual disgust, anger and hatred.

> Some examples of previous naive forecasts:

Another example would be "Nation shall speak peace unto nation", the BBC motto from 1927, round about the time Dr. Goebbels was using radio to speak a distinctly unpeaceful message.

Very interesting citations, thanks for sharing!

Naive is also calling this demographic diversity. (It's increased, yes, but lol.)

That’s untrue, and ignored evidence from many newer forums and their descent into madness.

Take HN, gaming forums and so on - they work decently.

Here’s my rules of the network from a moderators perspective

1) politics and religion are about maximally polarizing. If your forum/topic has no need for these topics, exclude them with great prejudice.

2) there are 2 types of forums. Some forums are built around goal driven topics. Like vectors units, they have both intensity and a direction.

Scalar topics, tend to gather opinions.

Of the two, vectored forums are easier to manage. When people have a goal and progress to make, it naturally reduces a lot of non-specific wool gathering.

3) the web is the best and worst of books and phones. Like a book, you can always revisit what was written. Like a phone you can always interact with what was said.

This means that if something is incendiary, it stays up for days, and people respond to it as if it was spoken aloud a few seconds ago.

Removing incendiary content early is better!

Community cohesion can happen by content, more than demographics.

Gaming forums? They rank up there as the worst the internet has to offer. Which one exactly are you taking about? Because all the ones I've seen are toxic cesspools unless it's a subreddit for a niche game like Factorio, which is consequently small with a very specific demographic.

I would guess they're talking about niche gaming forums. I know a bunch myself - /r/Factorio, /r/KerbalSpaceProgram, /r/Subnautica, /r/StardewValley... oh wait, the latter two aren't that niche.

In my experience, it's a matter of focus and moderation. Unfocused groups turn quickly into toxic cesspools, whether the groups are made of nerds (e.g. 4chan) or genpop (Facebook threads, or comment sections in those publications who didn't yet turn them off).

Yes, you are right. I was wrong to being up plain “gaming”. I should have made that clear - the dwarf fortress forums are benign and healthy. The world of Warcraft forums are lexical hellscapes in comparison.

As long as the game has some effort barrier which needs to be overcomed to be enjoyed, the community will be healthy and civil. (All things held equal)

There are plenty of factors that play into how or why a forum turns to shit. You're right that size or "niche" isn't always the dominating factor, but in most cases, it's clearly important. There are, on the other hand, plenty of incredibly niche and focused communities that do turn toxic and insufferable (as any Darkfall game shows). People are complex and we tend to talk in short-hand because we don't have the time or desire to write entire papers about why people tend to suck when you put them together.

How toxic was dark fall, what was the type of game and what was the effort barrier required to play it?

Sorry, I meant dwarf fortress forums, for certain complex games which act as natural effort filters.

> 1) politics and religion are about maximally polarizing. If your forum/topic has no need for these topics, exclude them with great prejudice.

I know one forum where all such topics are banned, which seems to be effective. And another of that section of the forum is closed to only visible to accounts older than one one year.

Wasn't there a thread the other day about how Utpoia always ends in Dystopia?

It seems the internet is a good example of what humanity actually is, given free reign (-ish) to its individuals. In short, there are the lovers and there are the haters. It seems that our fascination with the latter is enough to add fuel to the fire, despite declaring that we're 'a lover'.

The other thing they're missing is that it was also rife with child porn and snuff videos.

I too have nostalgia for the old days of the internet where there were lots of niche sites about specialist interests and things were easier to find, but I don't think the internet was ever really an idyllic garden of rational discourse. It was from nearly the beginning a manifestation of humanity's id.

>- smaller, by many orders of magnitude
- from a highly homogeneous distribution of cultural backgrounds
- mostly of comfortable material means

These are, and have probably always been, prerequisites for the kind of civil discourse you're talking about.

In no way in the "idyll of the early internet" I was part of, did I consider fewer people of "homogeneous cultural background" and not poor, as the "prerequisite" for open discussion.

>The techno-libertarian-utopian ideals of the early internet were always a pipe dream because they failed to recognize the role of these factors in their culture, and attributed it all to the medium itself.

Sorry, but part of my techno-libertarian-utopian ideal was open discussion period. Not some version of "civilized" discussion that should follow some specific form and decorum.

Trolling, flame wars, controversial opinions (all of which were part of the BBS culture and Usenet), were totally fine too.

If we just wanted fewer people of middle/upper middle class homogeneous cultural background, we could just talked to our friends face to face.

>Sorry, but part of my techno-libertarian-utopian ideal was open discussion period. Not some version of "civilized" discussion that should follow some specific form and decorum.

Come to think of it, what's described did exist, in communities like The Well. But I didn't then, and don't now, consider them as the model of discussion.

You can find diamonds in the most open (and rougher) discussion. In fact, TFA mentions that much, that in their expected to be a hellish everything-goes Reddit thread, they found pockets of great discussion.

I agree about smaller groups, but I remember being in rather diverse forums early on. The one thing people had in common is that they liked reading and writing, and art, and arguing, and were okay with computers. So that also implies a level of comfort, at least for those who weren't posting from internet cafés.

What degraded conversation the most IMO is that people can just slink away. Someone makes a claim, you refute them, they don't respond, or just answer with a total non-sequitur, or ignore 80% of what you said but have 5 new straw men you're supposed to deal with before they acknowledge that. You can't pull that shit in a forum with 100-200 people, you can't make it a habit, people will remember. Now people much sooner just retreat into some echo chamber to lick their wounds, instead of dealing with the other, for better or worse, and one-on-one, not group-on-group. As persons, not via stereotypes, and in our case over 6-7 years.

Yes, we all had in common that we lived on a street, but otherwise it was kinda random and diverse. Musicians, painters, gamers, authors, druggies, age 20 to 50, with most being probably in their 20s. We even had a member we always mocked for being kinda racist, and after years of that he wrote us a thank you post because he slowly had come around and we had played a role in that. We kicked spambots and were cruel to human spammers, but anyone else, we weren't whimps about, first and foremost. George Carlin was still alive, things were good. We weren't "civil", we called each other stupid fucks where applicable, not "disingenuous". But we also responded when called out, civil or not.

Come to think of it, last year one of our sister forums reopened its doors, after 10 years of downtime. The posts go back to the year 2000, and the admin made a sticky saying if anyone wants to delete their old posts, they're totally fine to. I said I'm less ashamed of all the (no doubt super cringy) things that are on that forum by me, than I would be of giving even one inch to anyone holding it against me. If that anti-intellectualism armband lifestyle wins out, the future is dead anyway, and I don't care how successful I am in it. But if it doesn't, then I'll be glad I never gave in, never even considered it ^^

> Yes, we all had in common that we lived on a street

Whoops, that's a leftover from what that was a reference to; in the previous paragraph I at first wrote "we had to deal with the other kids on the street we lived on" but that sounded too much like standing up to bullies, it really wasn't like that, we were outspoken, but not super mean to each other.

I remember posting some nasty rant, either about Christianity or God, and how another member was totally taken aback at the words I had "made show up on his screen". He was genuinely hurt, and I felt genuinely sorry about that, and we genuinely talked about it. I don't recall any of the content, but still remember my shock at realizing I had made "words show up" on the screen of a person which hurt them. I can't say I learned a lot from that, because I can still be caustic sadly, but in that instance I had hurt that other person and they said ouch, I knew they weren't "playing a card", and I knew they weren't calling me out so the others or the mods might take action. They just replied as their vulnerable self, with their actual thoughts, and maybe because I would have been totally free to double down and be a complete jerk, I felt no impulse to do that at all, since they didn't come at me "sideways" at all.

There's bound to be some nostalgia, sure, but it really was like we were "forum members" first and foremost, and actually did accept being different, instead of trying to make each other "fit". I'm sure I don't grossly misremember that. We treated each other like wild dogs.. no muzzles, no leashes, but also no tricks, and no dog catchers with words on their lips which their eyes and pheromones didn't match. So we barked and peed a lot and bit some, but only ever to defend our own boundaries, assert our own aliveness, not ever to hurt or even destroy someone else.

I saw this discussion with Camilla Paglia yesterday, and I felt weirdly nostalgic for a time I never knew.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPlXO0G3Qzc&t=7m10s

Paglia having a lovely chat with a lovely conservative lady, callers with a separate number for "Democrats" and "Republicans", yet I couldn't stop listening, not even because I cared about the subject so much, just because it's just so edifying to see people agree to disagree without getting stomach ulcers, and happy to find common ground when they do.

Just check out this caller in the same video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPlXO0G3Qzc&t=20m26s

I can think of so many points where I would have expected that caller to be cut off for "seeming too angry", and everybody just rolling their eyes and moving on. Instead, stay in the line, we're gonna talk about this shit. Makes my head spin, makes me homesick. But also makes me confident in not giving up to people who never even knew that, who never had the opportunity to enjoy it. They've been ripped off, and if I gave in I'd be ripping them off, too.

> I give you this one rule of conduct. Do what you will, but speak out always. Be shunned, be hated, be ridiculed, be scared, be in doubt, but don't be gagged. The time of trial is always. Now is the appointed time.

-- John J. Chapman, Commencement Address to the Graduating Class of Hobart College, 1900

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