Moms Who Were Extremely Online in 1993
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
But, in 2019, I don't really have anything like that anymore. The internet's a bigger place, but my corner of it feels somehow smaller. With very rare exception, I don't accept friends on FB unless I've met them in person. Sites that I actively participate on are either very large (so they might be diverse but aren't small-group-of-friends-y) or very small and comprised entirely of people I already knew irl.
Time marches on and the world changes, I know. But when I reflect on this line of consideration, it really feels like the internet didn't live up to its promises.
To me it seems like these groups still exist but you have to stay within your age range. For example I hang out with 35-45 year olds on IRC still. And we all have Jabber with OTR or Signal. None of us have much of social media accounts.
The kids today still have these little communities, they use group chat just like we use IRC. It might be Discord, Skype, Snapchat or something more obscure but it's still the same old rules of the group chat. It's a tight knit group and the rules that have applied to group chats since forever still do apply.
So just because you don't have those connections anymore doesn't mean the culture is all that different. Kids still feel like the main part of the internet (fb, ig) is shallow and meaningless so they band together in their own little communities around special interests or through school and their IRL community.
I envy kids today because I see how new trends spread virally between schools just because they have these group chats with each other. For example recently the kids in my town were hacking e-scooters through some trick that was spreading on their group chats. I still have no idea how they did it, I'm out of the loop.
Later in the 00's, I got into Wordpress blogging and found some nice communities, as well as created my own. (And I suspect this submission is related to the interesting mommy-blogging submission the other day). I also got on Facebook and reconnected with high school and college acquaintances, but like others here, I mostly restrict fb to people I know personally, so it's not a discovery of new social circles (and I find I don't have much n common with those people but it's nice to share news now and then).
I think my most social online communities have come through forums starting in the 00's and continuing to now. HN is a big one for me obviously, but also some local area forums. I moved away from family and friends during this time, and through local forums, I connected with people near me that I didn't know previously. Oddly, even though they were local and we did have a few meet-ups, our connections and discussions online were much stronger.
But the closest experience I've had to the international connections of this mother's group has been in the past 2 years through Instagram. I started posting only photos of a niche hobby, and by using and searching for specific hashtags (once I found them), I connected to others doing the same. And they are all over the world, US, Europe, Austalia--mostly English-speaking but not all. I mean, when was the last time you connected with someone from Luxembourg (and I actually once knew friends in Luxembourg but I never communicate with them any more). Granted these Instagram connections aren't as deep as with the mothers group, but through likes and comments we support each other's work and help out with tips and advice. All that to say it's not about the tools, it's how you use them.
The key is I use my Instagram account only for this hobby and only to view, search, and post related images and comments. So all my followers and following are related and only in this one community. I do actually browse/consume other topics on Instagram (pretty travel pictures for example), but I do that with bookmarks in a browser, not in the app with my timeline and following.
It's weird to think about now, but she was in IRC channels all day. She was really into the early pirate music scene. She even started dabbling in web development.
Eventually, she just lost interest when life got to busy and over time she become less and less technical.
Which I think is a shame, that would of been so cool if she became a developer.
228. If a builder build a house for a man and complete it, (that man) shall give him two shekels of silver per SAR of house as his wage.
229. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapse and cause the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.
230. If it cause the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.
231. If it cause the death of a slave of the owner of the house, he shall give the owner of the house a slave of equal value.
232. If it destroy property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall rebuild the house which collapsed from his own property (i.e., at his own expense).
233. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction meet the requirements and a wall fall in, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Hammurabi_(Harper...
Hits me hard everytime I think about it...
It's not only about which assumption models reality better—it's also about the change it makes in ourselves.
That definitely deserves a documentary.
Some of the first BBS' I remember from the late 80's/early 90's were dating oriented or at least had an active personals section, so it certainly was a constant evolution.
I miss that sort of thing. I don't know where to find it now. The small, close-knit community thing is actually a benefit of walled gardens but I don't know where I'd look now.. The Well? I understand it's moribund at this point.
Still is. Mind you, last I checked my subscribed newsgroups was this morning; maybe it's gone now?
The dorm I used to live in originally had their internal discussion forums as private news groups, but must have switched over to a forum in 09 or so. Apparently normal people couldn't use usenet.
There are many posts here of people who used usenet and IRC years ago who didn't necessarily have technical backgrounds, yet now people state that services like usenet and IRC are too technical and most people aren't capable of making use of them.
What happened?
Non-technical people can and will use IRC or usenet when that's all there is, but they aren't willing to pay the cognitive price for the extra power those offer over simpler web tools when the latter is available.
, including (or perhaps especially) privacy, freedom, and control over one's personal information, ...
Nobody has figured out a way to monetize IRC (to use it to steal personal information or serve ads), so no effort has gone into wrapping it up into this kind of easy-to-consume product.
In this specific case? Only the nerds used it, and most people didn't even know it existed. We could have educated them about it, but making a forum and sending out an email was easier.
That's not true. Many people who didn't have a technical background were posting on usenet and were in and out of various IRC channels.
"It was called Usenet, which was kind of like Reddit today"
Usenet: it's on you to create filters and mute threads that you don't want to see. Everyone is their own moderator. (Pretty much exactly in the way that you're the moderator of your own email inbox, smart recipient-side filtering and DNSRBLs notwithstanding.)
It seems like a small difference, but I feel like it's actually responsible for large social differences in the resulting communities.
In a Usenet group (or, equivalently, an unmoderated email list), the spam and flames are visible to everyone, and everyone is forced to engage in at least a bit of the work of moderation—even if it's just to copy and paste a blacklist from an FAQ message into their NNTP client's config. This, IMHO, makes people less likely to overreact to negative/offtopic/trolling/spam posts—they're inured to them, in about the same sense that an immune system that frequently interacts with real threats is less likely to get an auto-immune disease; or about the same way that people who live in the projects are less likely than people in gated communities to call the police just because someone they don't know is walking down the street.
I should probably add that I'm saying this as a fan of and avid user of reddit. I'm unhappy about what we lost as Usenet wound down, not complaining about reddit.
While that is true, usenet also has moderated[1] groups (e.g., misc.legal.moderated).
Conflating Usenet with reddit is like conflating the Internet with AOL.
I'd say it's bad for the readership because it gives them wrong information. I always feel it's better to have no analogy than a bad one.
My cringe wasn't due to a bad analogy. I was cringing because I remember what usenet was like once, and the last time I spent much time there, it had lost so much of what made it good that, yes, comparing newsgroups to subreddits is essentially on point, now.
I cringed because the analogy is on target and I don't like that as much as I liked usenet before. Comparing it to reddit gives a pretty good picture of late stage usenet for people who didn't experience it. At one time (I think including the time period this article is covering) there was more to it than that, though.
(Internet was originally non-commercial but there were terminal services where you could email or usenet. Outside of universities and tech corps, ISPs where you could get a personal IP connection weren't much of a thing prior to 1994. There was also pretty much zero discussion on the web in the twentieth century.)
But its overall role is similar to Usenet: A space for topical discussion on a wide range of topics.
Usenet in the late 1980s was small. 880,000 people with access, about 140,000 actually using (posting) to it, and a core group of probably only a few thousands. John Quarteman's book The Matrix includes Brian Reid's stats from DEC at the time. It grew some by the early 1990s, but the Eternal September still hit with force.
Reddit's user stats are roughly 2,400x that, with 330 million MAU. Scale matters. As does design UI/UX, and a good newsreader >>> Reddit's Web interface.
It’s crazy how which platforms are popular has shaped how people communicate
I've actually never been on reddit, but that's how it has worked in pretty much every online community - including the rKids group from this article.
I've never thought that much of larger scale social media, it always felt like shouting out into the void, especially Twitter.
It may grow, but I wouldn't want it to be much bigger than it is now.