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There's an issue of scale to it all, and interconnectivity. Back in '98 you could reasonably post something in one forum/BBS/IRC channel and it would only be viewed there. There was no way to look up who was on what website or room and where they regularly hung out. And even if there was, it's unlikely that more than ten people would ever see what you posted. There weren't enough people to care, and there wasn't any extrinsic incentive to look up what people did outside of your tiny island. Eventually the island would sink, and all traces of it except maybe an archived snapshot of the home page would remain.

Smartphones changed that with Youtube and Facebook. Youtube incentivized you to use a Google account, and Facebook wouldn't let you use it anonymously without an account. Because you could use one account to log into multiple places people could track you across websites. People could make archives, screenshots, and transcriptions of anything you had done with those linked accounts. With this change there was no safe corner to hide if you said something stupid. And because so many people were foolish enough to tie their real identities to these online accounts with their real names or pictures of themselves, it gave a way for particularly unruly people to track these individuals even offline. There was now a real danger if you said something stupid, because instead of just getting your post deleted or starting a derailment in the thread people could harass you at your home, get you fired, and even send the police to terrorize you in the middle of the night via SWAT raids. It's no longer just one person calling you out. It's now hundreds, maybe even thousands, all armed with information.

And this is why I say it's stupid to require phone numbers and real names to sign up for insignificant things like being able to view someone bake a duck shaped cake live over the internet.

I use pseudonyms and post weird shit online, but I still feel very reluctant to post anything on large public channels inside a company. Everything is tied to your real name and all of us are hyper aware now that every single fucking thing on the internet is monitored, and will be used against you if necessary. I am 99% confident a tool already exists that a manager can use to get all messages from employee X over the last N months and summarize the content and surface any "red flags", which in a corporate setting would be incredibly broad.

We have slack integrated with glean and anyone in the company can do this, not just managers.

It also has access to our internal wikis, GitHub, and other internal tools.

> There seems to have been a shift, somewhat, in the comfort level of different generations about saying things "out loud" in large public rooms.

I think this is merely the shift from doing this as a hobby, to doing this for work. Random coding problems mixed with banter I posted or answered on IRC back in the day? Purely hobby stuff, things I done after school instead of doing my homework. No stakes beyond the community itself, I could disengage at any moment, nobody would care - there was no commitment of any kind involved.

Today? Even if we switched back from Slack/Teams/whatnot to IRC, the fact remains, the other people are my co-workers, and we're talking about work, and it's all made of commitments and I can't disengage, or else I starve.

That changes the dynamic quite a bit.

The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation. I like to post ideas, brainstorm, engage if I have a minute to respond to someone with a thought - kinda like being in an office - whereas many others seem to use it to blast out information after a lot of polish and they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get stressed whenever someone asks a question or actually replies.

Use tools for what they are good for and create a culture that makes each tool work best for your organization.

> The problem in my opinion is that folks afraid of posting treat chat channels like email and official record instead of a conversation.

They would be right: HR will get access to everything you ever posted in a company chat if they have a reason to check. Some people don’t care, some… do.

Fair point. It’s a record, but should not be treated as formally. Just because you are having a conversation doesn’t mean you have to breach HR guidelines.

My comment was related more to the _overhead_ required before posting. Either way best not post anything that would be an HR issue in any format. (Also your private chats will be available in discovery as well if found out)

Maybe I’m not the best to opine on this as I’ve been wildly successful at building community at companies but I’ve also been burned by this. I suppose I’m privileged enough that I’d like to work somewhere that I can still collaborate with low friction remotely - and if the company doesn’t like it then I’m not a good fit.

It's written communication on company infrastructure, tied to your real identity and org chart, and subject to retention policy.

Yes it absolutely is formal communication. Microsoft makes this painfully clear with how they market teams.

> they form a culture of announcements and no engagement, and get stressed whenever someone asks a question or actually replies.

I agree, but this may mostly be pointing out they are not very good/qualified at whatever they are doing tbh.

I got a minor reprimand in a performed review for having a slightly heated conversation in a public channel. In the past that company had been very open about communicating about negative stuff (our CEO emailed the entire company when he visited one of the hardware labs that was a mess), but the upper management started tamping down on anything negative, and one of the things that suffered was any sort of honest communication.

Kind of a ship of theseus situation culture wise - when the original leaders are all gone, did they pick good successors to fill their spots? Very often not.

This sometimes happens also when the original leaders are still present but they dont understand the effect the metrics are having on the entire company when it grows big.

Have a senior leadership team and want them to not tell you bad news when you are the CEO/Leader? Then link their salary/performance to metrics like number of production incidents their team has. Suddenly the number of incidents that you know of decreases.

If that does not work to isolate you as the leader from thr reality of your company then link their salaries to a metric like number of projects finished before or at deadline and watch how tech debt increases multiple folds and how everything is suddenly estimates are increasing all over the place.

Want people not to ask meaningful hard questions in All Hands? Just make sure anyone that seems critical be labeled as not culture fit and done. All questions are positive and nice. Make sure to always ask for name and disable any anonymous questions asked.

Not trying to say metrics are bad or they should not be used. But they are not pure functions :) they do have side effects and sometimes very large ones.

Indeed, it's called Goodhart's law. As soon as metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I got a major reprimand because I answered too many questions posted in the public channel. All in my area of expertise, mostly after hours.

At first they said it was "great". But it soon turned sour and resulted in "it seems like you spend too much time answering questions", and I should "focus" and "free up" that time to work on my assigned tasks.

Well, I don't answer anything anymore. In fact nobody does. It used to be that you got precise technical answers from someone directly working on the tool or problem you asked about. The previous CEO would sometime even answer themself. Not anymore.

Now people ask, but nobody answers. The rest has devolved into LinkedIn style self-promotions and announcements.

But now the layer of management above you can justify organizing meetings to "get aligned" and "communicate". Structurally, i see how it happens

There's always been a silent majority in every platform, IRC/HN/Reddit/Twitter/Facebook/Insta/TikTok. Doesn't matter what platform it is, most people are lurkers, silent consumers, they don't post.

There's nothing new here, there's no problem to solve. Doesn't matter if you're anonymous or publicly identifiable. 90% of people don't contribute, they just consume. 9% contribute occasionally. And 1% are regular contributors.

The 1% or 90-9-1 rule is pretty well known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

The "water-cooler" chats are in the same place/app as the more important conversations. I don't like getting pinged constantly for people just chatting, but I wouldn't want to mute it in case someone actually has something urgent to say. It's weird to have that all in one place with one set of notification settings on all of it.

notification sounds destroy my ability to concentrate so per-channel notification settings were a game changer.

I typically have busy but important channels muted with a carve out for @mentions, watercooler channels are just muted but I check on them a few times a day.

> I have encountered people who are scared to post in large public channels.

People weren’t assholes and/or snowflakes in those days. Implicit in being on the net was that you were fairly well behaved.

Oh lord no. I’m not sure that’s true at all! I mean in the early cool era of the internet there was a concept of a “netizen” and a window of brief joy, but the internet has always had domineering trolls, bullies, spaces where clumsy newbies were brutally flamed etc.

The main difference is that more spaces were quasi-professional and non-pseudonymous, in that one largely got one’s internet access and identity (IP address, email address, invitation) from the institution of higher learning one attended or worked for. So there were direct, two or three degrees separation consequences (my boss knows someone at your institution) in those spaces. I suppose this is what you are referring to.

(In my early era of commercial internet work I can remember a colleague shutting down an accidentally abusive scraping bot by working out who was likely to be the boss of the person running it and phoning them up)

But away from those spaces were many places that were just as bad as they are now.

The internet has always (in my time of using it, which is all of my adult life as someone who is over half a century old) demonstrated that a good culture is a question of starting conditions and quick maintenance actions.

A non-trivial amount of the worst behaviour I have personally witnessed on the internet happened before the year 2000.

One difference, IMO, is that in technical forums / chat rooms, flaming was generally (modulo Torvalds, but honestly I give him a pass - the guy has to keep the level of quality excruciatingly high at all times, and that must be tiring) more reserved, and was along the lines of “RTFM.”

That’s not to say there’s more vitriol today; it’s swung the opposite direction, where newbies expect to have answers handed to them, or worse, they’ll post AI slop and then be genuinely surprised when someone asks them to explain it, or to show their work.

I don’t think that people should be belittled, but I also think it’s unrealistic to expect that experienced people should patiently teach every newcomer the same things over and over, without them having put in the minimum effort of reading docs.

I’m reminded of something I saw once on Twitter from a hiring manager who said that the best signal they had was whether a candidate had a homelab. This was met with criticism from many, who bizarrely accused him of being classist, since “not everyone has time to do that for fun.”

How far back are we talking? 90s? 80s? 70s?

For the 70s, I would agree with you. But the moment home users, and particularly kids, gained access to the internet, you started to see a subculture of trolling.

Source: I was one of those 80s kids. It’s not something I’m proud of, but writing bots to troll message boards and scrapers for porn and warez played just as significant role in my journey into my IT profession as writing games on 8bit micros.

Well, yes. We definitely fucked with the systems, and to a lesser extent the people. But 80s internet didn’t have shit like swatting. Or what Mr. Beast makes people go through for entertainment.

And everyone was in on it. We were all trolling, and being trolled, and perfectly well aware of what trolling was. But now people deliberately target and exploit the vulnerable on the internet.

I feel like the only thing you needed before was a fairly thick skin, but now you need a lawyer and a smorgasboard of security.

Mr Beast isn’t the internet. He’s a TV show host. And there’s been exploitative TV shows for decades. This isn’t a format Mr Beast invented.

As for security, that was always an issue. Malware, denial of services attacks, etc aren’t a recent phenomena. And hacking was so prevalent that even Hollywood caught wind, hence the slew of hacker movies in the 80s and 90s (Wargames, TRON, Hackers, Anti Trust, Swordfish, Lawnmower Man, and so on and so forth).

The problem isn’t that internet etiquette has gotten worse. The problem is that there is so much more online these days that the attack surface has grown by several orders magnitude. Like how there’s more road accidents now than there was in the 70s despite driving tests progressively getting tougher (in most countries). People aren’t worse drivers, there’s just more roads and busier with more vehicles.

Depends on a size of community and where.

Early 2000s, public channel on a LAN with ~3k people in a post soviet country – say something stupid to a wrong person and you'll find yourself with a broken nose, because the guy/gal is a friend of the admin.

Obviously macro communities exist that differ in etiquette.

I was just responding to the generalisation made by the GP.