Ten years on and these threads still get hundreds of comments. This must be the world’s biggest salt mine. Ten years ago, millions of nerds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly compelled to moan about the loss of their favorite RSS reader for eternity. The volume of the protests are out of alignment with the value that any RSS reader could possibly give, so I assume the nerds are all crying out for the loss of their innocence.
A lot of late 90s to early 2000s geeks had extremely strong opinions and didn't keep them to themselves. Less of it now. Compare the typical Reddit to old Usenet posts.
You will find that the people who were on the unsavoury bbs are the people who are against censorship today.
Out of the half dozen people I know from that period in my life (2000-2006) not one has had a kind thing to say about facebook, google or twitter since 2010. Those firms are the lame dinosaur stuck in a tar pit that we made fun of Microsoft for being in the 00s.
It's the people who called us nerds and made high school hell for us that somehow ended up in hr at tech co and are now setting policy there.
What these people are remembering is when the web was small and dorks-only. Now it is huge and full of normies of all kinds, including every shade of commercialism and fraud.
Reading the comments (I love that the years are written as 02002) this one particularly strikes me..
"...The net works differently than that... and Content owners have missed (and will continue to miss) it for 3 reasons: 1) Technophobia coupled with crippling ego (too cool to look dumb they fear the pipe) 2) Misguided content protectionism (go back and watch 'The Power of Myth'... again! It's the 'story' damnit!) ..."
This is 8 years old (and proven somewhat wrong), and we're still saying it, in some form today.
Oof - that article brings back a lot of memories of Slashdot and being a geek back in the day.
This is possibly one of the most infamous of all Slashdot threads - it was a collection of emails detailing how it was to be an outsider in the days after Columbine.
It was only a matter of time before a certain class of people figured out how to use the internet and subsequently ruin it. I'm more surprised it lasted this long.
I think a lot of people who actively moderate truly public forums/media channels understand this. Not doing anything is the worst thing you can do. At this point in my online life, claiming that "if you ignore them they'll go away" paints you as a co-conspirator/pseudo-supporter or just foolishly naive in my mind.
>there has always been a myth about the time and place where things were more innocent, when trolling was all in good fun.
And it IS a myth. It's a do nothing attitude and it's easy to take when it doesn't affect you personally. Summed up perfectly by the very next statement in the article:
>But what everyone really remembers about these proverbial times isn’t their purity. It’s how they didn’t see the big deal back then. They remember how they felt a sense of permission, a belief that it was all okay. But that was only true for those who were like them, who thought exactly like they did.
It was refreshing to see this view point espoused on a rather large technology site.
For those that weren't around in the 90s, this is exactly what happened. These down votes reflect a perception of the present without a context for the past. The Web was a _very_ different place 25 years ago.
Not only is this sad, it makes me feel old. Its just another reminder that the Internet of the late 90s/early 2000s is dead and not coming back. Instead its been replaced with corporate blandness and faux outrage.
Before the Internet, there was Fidonet, and before that, there were mailboxes.
And you know what?
All that shoot that's going on today was already happening back then: Shitstorms, Bullying, Doxxing, it all happened. Only that it was a small community of nerds, with no celebrities, politicians and influencers, so all it was was a storm in a teacup, that could easily be ignored.
So when 'Social' Media appeared, I instantly knew that this was a bad idea, and never used it.
I did indeed try Mastodon a few years back, and found it to be the same pile of steaming manure that I had expected.
The solution? Except better education, I don't have one.
I keep to small communities of decent people with the same interests, and that's it for me.
The backlash that involved the requisite "three days of hate because something changed on the Internet" and then moved on to "everyone is using it and pretending that it was always that way"?
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