> based on nostalgia for the old days (90's and earlier).
Indeed. The internet in general and the beginnings of the web were a very different place back then. I remember about 1996 or so seeing a URL on a Pepsi can and thinking, "oh crap, it's over."
> The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things.
I distinctively remember people giving purposefully bad advice on innocently sounded IRC channels. By bad advice I mean hiding "rm -rf" somewhere in the command that is given out as advice. If the person complained about losing work, more fun to them. This was something I witness firs time I started randomly poking around IRC (I was not target). I also remember how there was whole philosophy around it, how newbies who come are vampires for daring to ask questions.
I remember there being a lot of "nerds" bragging about how funny it was to cause harm to that or this person - including putting their personal enemies phones into fake sex ads. Plenty were everything except nice innocent people sharing nerdy things.
There were plenty of nice thoughtful people and plenty of normal people who just care about board topic. They were not only ones out there.
>These old conversations bring back memories of how the internet used to be, sparking a strong sense of nostalgia.
You might be looking with rose tinted glasses. I joined Something Awful just as they were closing the file forums in my teens -- I thought they were just worried about the legal issues around stuff like AXXO rips, not... the terrible things.
All my life, I had folks from that place keep me purposefully precarious and police my responses to said precarity.
The early internet was a total shit show, and I'm forever traumatized it took as long as it did into "Hard Candy" for me to realize that guy was not only bad, but abnormal.
(And later on, it amused me greatly when some ex army dude was like "You can't say things like that" when I listed it on my OkCupid and said "Why wouldn't I want a girlfriend who enjoys movies about forcing pedophiles to jump off the roof?")
The friends I made, I made in real life -- it was "The Internet" who invaded my work, invaded my university club, and in one case, a college Democrats kegger where I met my first girlfriend with insults that used to live entirely online, when I was nothing but kind to the best of my ability once I became a man.
(Maybe if you went to more museums and Vagina monolugues, and spent less time getting teenagers high in the back of the MC Chris tour bus, you too could meet a "MILF" and not need to perpetually throw all ages shows for narcissistic supply, rude little man who forgets there's no such thing as "pre med" at our university)
Not you, parent... it's dark out, and I'm having a bad day, for for some of us, the dream of the 90s was an utter nightmare followed by an Eternal September 11th, never reaching this so called "real world" where we'd have the rights and opportunities of the late stage capitalists and... not exactly philanthropists... who made it this way.
>I cannot help but greatly miss the "good old days" when barely any of these gentlemen nor organizations even knew what the internet was and what was going on there...
That last part doesnt seem to have changed that much actually. What changed is that now they try to mess with it anyway.
I miss the trajectory. Many things were exciting in the '90s, but many things didn't turn out so well.
This is pretty much the same way I feel. I'm not sure exactly when things changed, but there is definitely a sense that we went off the rails somewhere along the way. Some time ago there was excitement, optimism, and a sense of boundless opportunity, associated with the Internet and tech in general. Now... well... there's still some of that, but a lot of it has been replaced by negativity, fear, pessimism, doubt, and suchlike. The overall zeitgeist is definitely less pleasant these days, IMO.
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