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Comment by good8675309 | Hacker News Reader

How did we get here?? How did we stand by and let the internet turn into this? Hell the people that created these nightmarish algorithms read HN regularly

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"We" adopted services that cost nothing, and this is the customer support we paid for.

Exactly. Plus, it's not like "back in the day" you could do anything about random bans on IRC, Usenet or whatever.

It was impossible to ban people from Usenet, because it was a distributed system.

It was possible to ban people from moderated groups, or complain to their ISP and get their ISP to ban them (much harder), or it was possible to simply cancel their messages.

I believe at the peak 1/3 of all usenet traffic was spam and 1/3 was spam cancels.

Back in the day the IRC ban would most likely be handed by a human, or if automation was involved, the person behind the automation would be reachable. There's the potential for assholes of course, but at least those assholes weren't trying to monopolize humanity's entire social fabric so you could always join another IRC network if you were banned on one.

We didn't pay he did not expect support. The advertisers did

No one cares about holding big companies accountable in a real way.

There's internet arguments about everything, and there's usually a reason. Some people want it this way, others don't.

You won't believe how many people get paid to support/endorse/encourage X which is just fuel on the fire.

I don't really see change happening any time soon.

It’s not that people don’t want to hold them accountable, but rather there is no reliable means to do so without taking unreasonable personal risks.

What do you mean by personal risks?

“we” didn’t get anywhere. The “internet” didn’t turn into anything. Nobody has to use Twitter.

We let normies use the internet. We had our shitfights before, sure, but when the wine mums and over opinionated 18 year olds got on the whole thing went to hell.

More like you let mba's run the internet. Eternal September is a real phenomenon but that's not what this post is.

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