The spread of social media from mid-00's onwards, and especially in 10's was a tragedy, but not for the main reasons people normally think. The way people organized back then (forums, IRC channels, blogs, etc) was more authentic, as there was no tangible corporate interest in keeping you hooked to it through underhanded algorithmic manipulation to drive engagement. There were no sponsored content, no farming of every piece of data about users to feed an endlessly greedy advertisement machine. It was just people and their genuine interests.
Part of the problem is that geek culture became mainstream. When I was a kid in the 90's, me and my friends were considered the weird bunch for liking videogames, computers, tabletop RPG, etc. Sometime around mid-00s it became mainstream, and brought along with it people that prior to that had no interest in that niche of culture, and along with it that culture meaningfully changed for the worse.
There's more to it, but I rambled enough. If there's one positive thing I can think of, is that at least the general positivity surrounding tech is gone. This skepticism is healthy, especially considering how things worsened since then.
A lot of the early-ish Internet depended on the generosity of others - Usenet, IRC, Linux distros or SourceForge for example, lots of that was universities and ISPs - and on users keeping to the unwritten contract of "don't be evil". Bad actors weren't the norm, especially as there were no monetary incentives attached to hackers. Yes, you had your early worms and viruses (ILOVEYOU, remember that one), you had your trolls (DCC SEND STARTKEYLOGGER 0 0 0), but in general these were all harmless.
Nowadays? Bad actors are financially motivated on all sides - there's malware-as-a-service shops, bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies attract both thieves and money launderers, you can rent out botnets for a few bucks an hour that can take down anyone not hiding behind one of the large CDNs. CSAM spreaders are even more a threat than before... back in the day, they'd fap off in solitude to teen pageants, nowadays virtually every service that allows UGC uploads has to deal with absurd amounts of CSAM, and they're all organized in the darknet to exchange tips about new places / ways to hide their crap in the clearnet because Tor just is too slow.
And honestly it's hard to cope with all of that, which means that self-hosting is out of the question unless you got a looot of time dealing with bad actors of all kinds, and people flock to the centralized megapolises and walled gardens instead. A subreddit for whatever ultra niche topic may feed Reddit and its AI, but at least Reddit takes care about botnets, CSAM and spam.
I think that Shodan and LetsEncrypt (or rather, Certificate Transparency) are partially to blame for the rise of cybercrime. Prior to both, if you'd just not share your domain name outside your social circle, chances were high you'd live on unnoticed in the wide seas of the Internet. But now, where you all but have to get a HTTPS certificate to avoid browser warnings, you also have to apply for such a certificate, and your domain name will appear in a public registry that can, is and will be mined by bad actors, and then visited by Shodan or by bad actors directly, all looking for common pitfalls or a zero-day patch you missed to apply in the first 15 minutes after the public release.
Maybe the fact that I recognize that the way things changed were unavoidable fuels my general disdain internet culture nowadays, and my skepticism to tech innovations in a broader sense. Oh well.
I'd also blame rampant cheating for that. It's damn expensive to keep up with pirates, but cheaters are an entirely different league... the most advanced cheats these days are using dedicated PCI cards to directly manipulate memory with barely any ability for the host to detect or prevent it [1]. From the grapevines, there are developers charging hundreds of dollars per month to develop and maintain these things.
On top of that, up until the late '00s no one cared too much about racist slurs, sexism or other forms of discrimination. Maybe you'd get yeeted off from a server if you'd overdo it. But nowadays? Ever since GTA SA and its infamous Hot Coffee mod, there are a loooooot of "concerned parent" eyeballs on gaming, there's advertisers/sponsors looking for their brand image, and game developers also don't want to be associated with such behavior. And so, they took away self-hosted servers so that they could moderate everything that was going on... and here we are now.
I'm not an avid gamer, but it's not hard to notice that multiplayer games nowadays means "all the player in the world". Most games don't have a local version to either play with multiple controllers or through LAN. They don't even want to allow custom groups to play with. Cheating is way easier to manage at small scale.
Do not mistake my tolerating slurs and other insults for enjoying Nintendo games with being okay with it or the people who did it, or the people who did it and still remember being able to do it without consequence as a better time.
You typically played with a small group of people. LAN houses with people that were there physically, or groups of friends (even if they were online friends).
Even for stuff such as bnet when I played Diablo 2 or WC3, you typically created a game instance, and over time you could recognize the people playing. You curated friends lists, so you would know to avoid the ones that behaved in a way that didn't jive with the rest of the group.
Perhaps it was not scalable, and a change for the worse was unavoidable. There was a simplicity in those interactions that is completely lost and may be impossible to capture again. An echo of a time long past.
Things are better now because you can find that group that aligns with your values. You aren't stuck with the shitty guild that tolerates your differences (at best) because there are enough people online and gaming to where there's probably another that fits better. And it's even better offline because you can connect with those few people in your nowhere little town who aren't butts.
edit: for example
There is no community, I am in a centralized server being matched against random people. And when there is a community, it's normally a cesspool where online interaction is at best meaningless. See Twitter for example (no matter if it before or after the retarded buffoon that acquired it, it was always a toxic dump).
Anyway, what is past is past. I talk about those times without much nostalgia (I was a broke teenager at the time, not really the happiest of times). I just rationalize about how things got worse since then.
How do they work? I know that in a game (Red Dead Redemption 2, for example) cheaters have infinite health and so forth. How? The server is responsible for validating all actions performed by players to prevent cheating, such as verifying movement, health, ammunition, and other game variables. It is not supposed to accept health values sent by the client without verifying against expected game logic. The server is the authoritative source. It is not supposed to rely on the client for authoritative game state, and if it does, it is fundamentally and terribly flawed.
Indeed. Likely the client is responsible for certain state things and/or implicitly trusted with state updates. How this happens is that most of your game devs are not paid enough or given enough time to do it right. Engines are selected (generally not built) for their ability to get shit to market fast and multiplayer is an after thought, hacked on. And management just shrugs and says we'll force players to run anti-cheat ring0 nonsense.
Or in racing games, extremely precise braking and steering assistance. Everything that a gamer can do, a cheat can also do.
As far as assistance goes: I despise it. Modern games have "aim assist" which is just a built-in aimbot. sighs
But also lots of commercial social media sites and forums disappeared, because the company got bust or changed its focus.
That doesn’t follow from the points you made. What follows is that you have to deal with whatever percentage of bad actors you get. If not, you have to contract someone to handle that part of the job or do the entire job. Plenty of opportunities on those sentences that look nothing like today’s feudalism.
For example, I have several sites I self-host on cheap VM’s with lighttpd and BunnyCDN. I can do anything I want with the whole site, including moving suppliers. They have no comments. I have both an email and Facebook messaging if they want to contact me.
For comments, the main problem is catching spam or illegal content. That just means a 3rd-party provider needs to see the content, make a decision based on customer’s needs, and customer’s server needs to post the edit they made. Disqus already implemented much of this concept but it could be modified for more owner control.
The stronger control some want over comment quality requires more time and controls. There’s tools to help with that. The Lobste.rs’s site had great moderation tools. MetaFilter added a cheap, paid system for account creation that filtered tons of spam. Most implementations just need laborers to enforce their view of social norms with might or might not be easy, and might not be right or worth keeping around either.
That leads to countering the last assumption some commenters have: the methods used should keep the sites around as long as Google or Facebook. Most, human activity is temporary. Much has little, long-term value. Many sites will serve their purpose for a specific time. Others might go up and down. These possibilities are fine for non-mission-critical uses. Life will go on.
Well, the "eternal september" problem... back in the '00s you could reasonably run a forum or a blog even if you're some high school kid, all you needed was your parents and 10 bucks a month for some shitty virtuozzo/UML VPS. No need to deal with stuff like setting up a CDN just to survive some random asshat thinking they can DDoS you off the 'net.
This does make sense, of course: 1990s->2005-ish is ~15 years, it's 2024 today. The "weird" kids became adults and replaced the previous and outgoing generation and their norms.
Put another way, what do you think happened to all the "normal" kids? They would have become adults too, so wouldn't you expect the "normal" to replace the previous and outgoing generation rather than this one particular minority?
Silent majority. It wouldn't surprise me if most "normal" kids simply minded their own "weird" business and waited for the winds to shift more in their favour.
What is mainstream today was counterculture 20~30 years ago, which coincidentally is about right for generational shifts in trends.
What happened is that in early to mid 2000s, careers that nerdy kids flocked to became desirable because they were well paid.
To this day I think there is something vaguely amusing regarding the push to get more girls to code, and how it is implied that women don't flock to it as some kind of conspiracy to keep them away from nice jobs or whatever.
By all means, I think this push is a good thing. Especially as I have a daughter and I'll certainly teach her the ropes when she is a little older, maybe try to code some silly games with her, that sort of stuff.
But in the 90s when I was a kid? Girls were absolutely repeled by anything nerdy. When my group of friends found a girl that had any remote interest in nerdy things, they would fall over one another to try to accommodate her. Fairly pathetic when I remember in hindsight. There was this active desire to feel less as outcasts by having our own tastes validated by someone from the outgroup, that sort of thing.
It was a different world. Weird to think that it was a mere 3 decades ago.
The one thing I do believe is legit to miss and not just rose-colored nostalgia lenses is that, back in the 90s, I remember all or the vast majority of what I found only was not tied to profit in any way. I'm not against profit per se, but I do believe you get a very different network when people create content because they want to share something they're interested in as opposed to them trying to make a living out of that.
Moved to tears. A strong sense of 'How Time Flies'.
Perhaps I'm overly optimistic but considering what we do have, I'd hardly call it a screw up. Far from it. I grew up in the 90s and looking around I'm amazed at what we have.
Last week was the first time in 5 years that I physically went to the bank, and it was only due to a rare edge case scenario that their online services (until now) don't cover. Just about all admin in my life is done online.
And there's so much tech to tinker with. Raspberry pi, Arduino, PCs, ... Connect it to your mobile device and it just explodes what you can do, if you have the energy and time for it. Fun / nerdy tech is (for the most part) dirt cheap now. Sensors, electric motors, microcontrollers - it's all there readily available for basically nothing.
... and considering the personal tech / mobile devices. I remember interviewing for a job in the biggest city in the country some 16 years ago. Printed paper map, getting paper tickets for the subway, getting lost and almost missing the interview. That's unthinkable nowadays. I'd have the map on my phone and I'd let my mobile phone guide me through the subway, with the ticket on the phone.
The kind of surveillance that walks hand in hand with this is what hackers of the 90s intended to prevent from happening.
I don't think it's all screwed up though. The difference were seeing is what happens when the marketeers take over (no offence intended) the technologists. Everything has to have a point, be commercialised. Learn to filter that stuff out, and the nerds and geeks are still there, doing interesting things, you just have to fight more to see it.
Perhaps, but these will be different people than those who miss the 90-00 internet.
In 2017 I thought I missed bitcoin, still managed to mine a meager amount on my parents computers. In the modern day I was proven wrong.
Was it skipped, or was it spread over many decades with AI winters interspersed throughout?