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Comment by emerged | Hacker News Reader

The difference IMO is the scale of individual social networks. It used to be relatively smaller independent forums which had all their own particular rules and populations. Things were more truly distributed in an organic way.

Now we have these massive scale social networks who attract all the absolute worst scum of the earth, botnets, etc. The companies running these networks are super massive and formed connections to political parties and financial interests.

The saddest thing is we could all just decide to get off these massive networks and use the smaller ones again, but the genie is out of the bottle and a critical mass of people can’t be convinced to leave the new networks.

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I think another aspect of the early internet culture, is the demographics. The participants were much more tech inclined, I imagine the autism quotient of the early internet user population, would have been much higher than it is today.

I think it actually goes in cycles. I've noticed a lot more people conversing in Discord and small group chats these days than saying everything on big open platforms.

No, the difference is that social media has been very successfully weaponised, by the nation-state/mafia syndicates which communism gave birth to. So successfully, in fact, that it has made traditional warfare practically obsolete.

The social networks of today are to the world what the "Pravda" newspaper was to the Eastern Bloc in the 20th century. A weapon of mass subversion. (Oh the magnitude of trolling and shade in the name of that newspaper... Nothing in the past 100 years has surpassed that!)

This is the right take.

Also, every hacker online pre-facebook realized that it wouldn't take that much effort to do social engineering on a mass scale, but there was a brief period before any large organizations actually got involved and started doing it.

I think we got a glimpse of something special in the early internet, and I think we can build toward that again.

It can’t be built towards unless the nation state actors and bots are accounted for and routed around. I don’t see that happening.

This is a start: https://www.voanews.com/a/australian-government-vows-to-unma...

I thought that in their case it was to out people who oppose government officials? That seems like the opposite of I’m understanding correctly.

Correct:

"If it’s in the public interest, the Commonwealth can intervene in these cases on the side of the defamed person against the social media company. Prime Minister Scott Morrison said the government would proactively search for such cases to intervene in."

Years of cyberbullying didn't spur the government into action. A few choice tweets about politicians did. Though they'll say this is about protecting kids etc

> I think we got a glimpse of something special in the early internet, and I think we can build toward that again.

I mean, you are writing on HN, a specialized community of practice which is the polar opposite from massive social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. And if HN is not exclusive enough for you, there is Lobsters where you need an invite to even post or comment. To me, these dynamics are pretty close to what went on on the "early internet" pre social media. Though it would be nice if federation standards were more widely adopted, to enable optional interop across sites.

Media is a weapon of mass subversion in any society. Look at Murdoch.

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