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Comment by ilrwbwrkhv | Hacker News Reader

The internet was ruined when it was de anonymized by Facebook and LinkedIn etc. I remember growing up in a completely anonymous internet. You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally. Then you would go back to society as the real you and temper yourself a bit to fit in and work with others and that was ok because you could blow off steam on the internet.

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Which is ironic, considering the Internet was also "ruined" in 1993 when ISPs gave everyone Usenet access, flooding the Reddit equivalent of the day (if Reddit were the only real forum) with anonymous users who cared not for cultural norms. Prior to that, it was mostly people posting under their real name with their real workplace or college in their email address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

The internet was ruined when your normie older relatives got on it, unfortunately

They were using the internet before 2008 or so but mainly for sending and receiving emails. Younger people who weren't that into computers mainly used them to message their friends on AIM and pirate music on Napster then Kazaa then Limewire (the platforms kept getting shut down). In the post-2008 world, Facebook replaced email and AIM and Spotify/Netflix replaced piracy. The difference is, the people who used to just use the internet for email now spend far more time online because Facebook is designed to be addicting.

The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever. Is it universally better in every way ? No. Could it be better in many important ways? Yes. But hyperbolic statements like "the Internet was ruined" is just nostalgia and hyperbole.

Not quite. I think "surfing the web" has become a worse experience now than in the past. There are some "internet connected" experiences such as Wikipedia which work well. But the biggest change is that the internet has moved away from being an exploration space to a push content space. The hyperlinking got reduced because tech companies didn't want people to leave their platform and that just made the culture very pushy and clingy.

> The Internet is more useful than it ever was for a lot more people. It has more information on more stuff, and you can do a lot more than you ever could, and a lot more people benefit from it in more ways than ever.

Without proof, that's just as hyperbolic as the post you're criticizing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...

The number of users on the internet went 5x from 2005 to now.

https://www.zippia.com/advice/online-shopping-statistics/

E-commerce volume went similarly steep and steady in increase.

https://siteefy.com/how-many-websites-are-there/

Number of active websites went up similarly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia#...

Wikipedia number of articles exploded.

This perhaps, is some rose colored glasses.

I remember friends getting harassed online, where it was one of the few places they could be themselves (for instance, a good friend of mine was openly gay online well before he was in person) and the internet seemingly didn't take kindly to this in alot of corners (gaming for starters)

That said, they were able to find some community that didn't exist the same locally, so the vastness is the upside here in that respect.

Absolutely. As a homosexual or transgender you would be ripped apart online. But you also strangely learnt to fight back and stand for yourself. It was easier because you were anonymous and you were not always online.

There are many anonymous websites, like 4chan, and you are free to create your own, which is itself something you can do anonymously.

I'd even wager that the number of people posting content anonymously has only grown in absolute terms.

How are people you to find your forum if sites indexing sites like google apparently won't link to your site: https://www.google.com/search?q=anonymous+English-language+i...

You are talking as if that isn't a positive. Forums are at their best when they grow slowly.

The 1 in 10,000 forums that actually grow.

Like we used to do it, through word of mouth. Check out rdrama.net

> You could be who you are, say what you want and explore digitally.

You can't even really do that on HN without getting your account deleted. I don't think the blame belongs solely on Facebook and Linkedin so much as anyone who has any kind of power online using it on others as they see fit.

Sometimes people want to say some pretty antisocial things, so it's not too surprising if people tasked with "keeping the peace" are trigger happy with bans. Presence in a community is a privilege, not a right.

That said I also believe you are correct, even small degrees of power can corrupt and being granted power over conversation means your biases may lead to abuse if you don't agree with a view point or the person holding that view.

Sites like this still exist, though some of the more notable examples have heavily deplatforming attempts against them.

The old internet is dead and most people and organizations abhor the idea of anonymity and anonymous (free) speech.

if you want that, go on reddit or 4chan or twitter or hacker news or even instagram to some degree. reddit, instagram and hacker news don't even require email validation afaik

Get this - you can have an anonymous facebook and linkedin account too.

Have you tried running an anonymous Facebook account in the past decade? Facebook lets you use it for a few weeks (or months), then suddenly refuses to let you in unless you provide identifying information that it never asked for before, and refuses to give you your data back until you “verify it's you” (might be quoting Google or Microsoft there, but Facebook has similar wording) even though they have no records with which to compare it to, so that can't possibly be a valid justification.

I deleted my account only last year and for more than one decade I was using a generated icelandic name.

If your name meets Facebook's “real name” standards, it's not like Facebook is going to hunt down your birth records and see whether it Really Is your Actual Real Name™ (not that that's even a particularly coherent concept…).

Did you manage to keep your account anonymous from Facebook – that is, not linked to any of your other identifiers?

Well I have been using firefox containers and adblocks but containers only appeared fairly recently and I couldn't use them on mobile so completely separate I don't think so. My FB account was only linked to my instagram account (also delete now) but under a pseudonym.

I prefer talking about pseudonymity rather than anonymity because you are very rarely truly anonymous on the internet, even using a non nominative handle, especially if law enforcement enter the chat.

Don't be so sure, these pricks are all over the place with their spying agency.

It is against linkedin's policies to use a fake name. While facebook accounts require a real name you can create additonal profiles that use pseudodnyms and can not be traced back to your real name.

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