The Internet Used to Be Smaller and Nicer. Let’s Get It Back | Hacker News Reader

The Internet Used to Be Smaller and Nicer. Let’s Get It Back

wsj.com

10 pointsprostoalex9 comments

The author maybe doesn't remember just how much trolling their used to be. There were so many news groups dedicated to trolling specific people. An example was net.loon.<name>. Joe Baptista and Rob Reilly were two that were often targets of trolling, as they themselves were notorious (but amusing) trolls. Sometimes people would be berated repeatedly and mercilessly just for the cardinal sin of asking a question that's been asked before. Online arguments would stretch over months, and many an outright physical threat was made.

Doxxing (which didn't have that name yet) was far more rampant then than it is today. People would literally gang up against you, collecting info until they have enough personal info to out you publicly, just for having the audacity to disagree with something, or adding an inconvenient bit of info to the thread.

Also sexism and racism was out in the open and unfiltered.

And it was a lot harder to block spam back then. There was so much of it!

The net was certainly fun, and very much a type of Wild West. Information was hashed out and shared freely, but that still holds today.

Those early formative years should not be looked back upon with rose tinted glasses. That's an absolutely incorrect view, since many of the good aspects persist to this day.

Now there is also more trolling but done by professionals with an agenda and a more "accessible" language

Only "more" because there are more people to victimize. Otherwise the tactics are pretty much the same.

Before it used to be over Usenet News and IRC. Now it's simply moved to the modern versions of those social networks. It's amplified because of numbers only.

The proportion of good vs bad people (for lack of a better vague terminology) is pretty much spot on.

The scale of all of these things is way higher than it ever was in the past.

The only difference is maybe aggressive moderation of public has pushed it into the shadows a bit.

Also we've invented new horrors to visit on people, like swatting.

Don't for one second think the modern internet is friendlier than the old internet, just because you don't see the ugliness as much.

Nobody thinks the modern Internet is more friendly. But it takes some fanciful memory tricks to don the rose tinted glasses when comparing it to the pre-commercial net. Yes the bad stuff is greatly amplified today. But absolutely everything that you can say that made it "better back then" is actually still here today. That was my point.

Even the crime. Today, kiddy porn is sorta kinda hidden on the deep/dark web. Back then, it was all over the news groups and IRC, out in the open. And the luring was exactly the same as it is today. How is that a better Internet?

Pre-commercial Internet was not friendly. There were just fewer people being hostile compared to today. 4chan would easily have fit in, and indeed there were many similar groups and sites back then. But now everybody and their grandma is on the net and can see it happening and easily become targets (just like it was back then!). And other than population size of netizens, that really is the only difference in behaviours. More people doing the same things. New wine, old bottles.

In my opinion, smaller and nicer can be achieved right now. It all starts in the home, and then in the neighborhood, and then in the community. The internet can be a tool for these things alone: home, neighborhood, community.

The “magic” solution: stay in bounds and focus on what’s closest; nicer things will emerge on the macro scale.

Yes, just like forest fires and guns, only individuals, particularly heads-of-households, can do things. It's not up to wealthy corporations to change behaviors, they're either beyond reproach or market forces drive them to do very bad things, and market forces are like the weather.

> Let’s Get It Back

It's easy, just don't use sites like Facebook. Alternative is fediverse, it's not that big and unlikely will be too popular.

It's not possible, folks don't ever let you truly start fresh.

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