Y'all talking like the early internet had everything figured out, and modern e-Society is some kind of degenerate form of that gilded past. It wasn't that great. Nothing was standardized, barriers to entry were unacceptably high, and people with technical knowledge held massive advantages over everyone else. This ain't no "Make WWW Great Again."
I don't care what the rules of the internet were in 1980 half so much as I care what they should be in 2018. And I'm an advocate of a historical perspective, but it's not history if the good things are all you mention. (That's called propaganda.)
@u2764 that's the same problem we have with the Constitution.
@u2764 I remember 1990's internet - it was nothing but disconnects and crappy websites
Yeah, @u2764 anybody who thinks the early web was a utopia needs to really, like really reread the contents of the jargon file
@u2764 "This toot best viewed on Navigator 4.1"
@u2764 At least things are standardised now, right? :)
@u2764 that's a really useful observation.
seems to me the growth and evolution of internet culture as a whole is reflected in the lifespan of its communities. early adopters use enthusiasm to leap barriers to entry and are often a pretty homogenous group.
then it gets popular, barriers lower, and the community diversifies. early adopters crave the homogeneity of the early days, because it was easy.
understandable IMHO, but yeah, that sucks. it's uninclusive and lazy.
My 2 cents as someone getting on the internet in 1990 before www
Early internet advantages:
- Much access was tied to your job or university affiliation. We were shitty to each other, but only to a point. No one wanted to be fired or expelled for being stupid to a stranger.
-There was much less people, so I think people found it easier to carve out there own niche to be comfortable in. Usenet newsgroups to be in. Then IRC channels.
(1/n)
@u2764
I think the space to be comfortable was a key to making people feel it was "better". Everyone was always cranky in September when the next group of 18 year olds came in and took a while to learn the rules (aka netiquette).
People were super cranky when AOL brought everyone on the internet because there were always new people tromping around ignorant of the rules. (Eternal September)
(2/n)
@u2764
IRC helped a lot because it opened up so many spaces for people to be themselves. I avoided it for many years because I saw friends spend all their time doing it. But again, I think it enabled the sense of more space for everyone.
The proliferation of websites and web forums and email lists was a place for everyone to be themselves. It was tougher to cause problems for folks because you had to try and cause problems in a million places to do so.
(3/n)
@u2764
Facebook and twitter seemed amazing at first because you could connect with SO MANY people in one place. It was like a family reunion except for everyone you knew.
Except - Facebook, twitter, etc. have collapsed interaction spaces down into a couple areas for the most part. Your "cool people" are there... but so are they jerks, the people who make you uncomfortable, etc. It's hard to get away because you'll lose your "cool people" space.
(4/n)
@u2764
So, early internet only seemed better because you had your own niche you liked. And, only for the privileged who had access. Which most of us there didn't know. We might have thought we did, because we were being exposed to all these new ideas we'd never seen before. But they were just new ideas of a limited set of folks. Mostly privileged white folks.
We had to deal with jerks, but we had tools for that.
(5/n)
@u2764
Last one, I promise.
Now people are concentrated into fewer, bigger spaces.
The jerks have decades of experience weaponizing grief. Hell, they've weaponized causing grief to whose who try to avoid grief. The new spaces don't even have good tools for dealing with this because the new spaces are made by the privileged elites of the privileged elites.
I think that's why Mastodon feels special. We're making more, smaller spaces to be ourselves again.
(6/6)
It's like the tech utopists seamlessly transitioned from saying "the future will be beautiful" to saying "the past was glorious" without ever thinking about the fact that what they'd imagined wasn't feasible from the start.