Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
To many of the users that claim Lemmy is like the early internet, I often see the year 2010 thrown around. Like, are you serious kid? I’ve been on the internet literally since 1991. I’ve seen some shit. Shit you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Sharing software off the shoulders of radio waves, bright as the EM spectrum… I rode on the back decks of BBS with a bell 103 and watched 300 bps content glitter in the dark near my Tannhäuser monitor. All those moments… they’ll be gone.
Maybe they mean early social media. That term is somewhat misused, though… social media didn’t start with Facebook or Twitter, it began with Usenet and then forums. And yeah, it wasn’t halcyon days back then. We had the same abusive behavior like trolling, alts, bullying, spam, egos and arguing.
I don’t think Lemmy is like 2010 reddit culturally but more like traditional forums though, since on most instances, the regulars all kinda know each other and their admins as well as their personalities, whereas you rarely recongnize any username on reddit unless they are one of these novelty accounts like Vargas or shitty_watercolour or poem (there are exceptions like Unidan or Wil Wheaton but they are rare) and everyone just kinda blends into a blob there.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.
Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
To many of the users that claim Lemmy is like the early internet, I often see the year 2010 thrown around. Like, are you serious kid? I’ve been on the internet literally since 1991. I’ve seen some shit. Shit you wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen things… seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. Sharing software off the shoulders of radio waves, bright as the EM spectrum… I rode on the back decks of BBS with a bell 103 and watched 300 bps content glitter in the dark near my Tannhäuser monitor. All those moments… they’ll be gone.
Attack posts on fire off the shoulder of 4chan.
Goatse … many goats
Rick rolling is the kinder gentler Disney version of the early internet.
It was a time that had little regard for your feelings… not because people didn’t care, but because shadowbanning wasn’t even a thing yet.
Maybe they mean early social media. That term is somewhat misused, though… social media didn’t start with Facebook or Twitter, it began with Usenet and then forums. And yeah, it wasn’t halcyon days back then. We had the same abusive behavior like trolling, alts, bullying, spam, egos and arguing.
I don’t think Lemmy is like 2010 reddit culturally but more like traditional forums though, since on most instances, the regulars all kinda know each other and their admins as well as their personalities, whereas you rarely recongnize any username on reddit unless they are one of these novelty accounts like Vargas or shitty_watercolour or poem (there are exceptions like Unidan or Wil Wheaton but they are rare) and everyone just kinda blends into a blob there.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.