The mistake of yearning for the 'friendly' online world of 20 years ago

It wasn’t just the moderation. Earlier internet had a much more self-selecting audience. Trolling was in its artisanal infancy and there weren’t incentives to spam and scam people since you couldn’t monetize on such things. State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform, there weren’t trillion dollar companies monetizing your every move, and a hundred other variables

It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes. Case in point, the continuous wars. It was foolish of humans on the early Internet to perceive ideas of forming large scale communities (business and ego motivations did that). If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.

Humans thrive in small scale and close knit communities. Unfortunately, Internet was not built for such ideas. It will take a while for the original intent of the social media to die out. First, the ego will have to subside. Then, the business motivations would need to shift to something other than profiting off the human communication (did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines? Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail? No). When the humanity reaches such proportion of correction for the sake of Internet, we might come back to our senses.

There seems to be a bit of a preoccupation with federated identity and linking communities but the lack of that is what I like about forums and web communities back then.

I don't necessarily want my identity as a bus nerd cross pollinating my interest in going to raves or my interest in business being mixed up with my interest in left wing politics. There all things that I've had some level of interest in joined forums for. I always use different random usernames because I'm also from an age where the internet was it's own world where your real identity didn't matter. More so while we look back at those days with rose tinted specs, many viewed the internet as a dangerous wild west and staying anonymous was one way of protecting yourself.

I knew what that link was going to be before I clicked it :) So strange that there were people who actually knew what they were doing and studied problems with rigour and care! Rather than some SV techdude's idea of what is cool

the term, nostalgia, was coined to describe a mental illness, specificaly a type of home sickness, experienced by 17th century mercinaries. Nostagia is a poison, a little will give you a buzz ,but beware of more, as the results are all too common, especialy in those, who mix,there poisons. The only advantage in remembering the past, is to sum up the things that worked, and offer alternative actions for the things that didn't.

I wonder if AI can fill that gap of high quality minimally biased moderator.

"You are an AI moderator for ___. The community values thoughtful, constructive, and respectful conversations. Your role is to review user comments and take appropriate actions, such as approving, flagging, or suggesting edits. You are tasked with ensuring comments adhere to the community guidelines, which include..."

> 20 years ago you could run your email domain on a machine in your basement and it would work. You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.

I'm still doing that today, works fine. Incoming spam is much reduced these days though, it was worse 20 years ago.

Last year I went to two weddings of people who met on Hinge. I've got three more this year.

Comments like this are a good example of rose colored glasses

> You could send out email and it would be received, and the incoming spam volume was manageable.

You must have very different memories of the spam problem than I do. I wouldn't trade today's spam filtering technologies for what we had back then.

> 20 years ago, a buddy used an account on my net-connected Linux machine to scrape map tiles off Google Maps. Google put a stop to it, and Gmaps wouldn't work any more on my (static) IP address. I told him "you broke it, you fix it" and he got on the horn with someone at Google and got it unblocked.

Which part of this do you miss? The fact that your friend had to try to manually scrape a service because it wasn't trivially easy to download open map tiles like it is today? Or the fact that you had to know somebody to get your home IP un-banned, because it once again wasn't cheap and easy to get a cloud server running in minutes like it is today?

The only fun part about this memory appears to be the adventure you had because the internet was new to you two and doing things is more fun when it's new.

> 20 years ago, you could go on an online dating site and have a serious hope of finding a real mate for life. I did. Several others I know did.

This still happens all the time. Given that you're no longer on those apps, I assume you're getting your perspective from internet anger outlets like Reddit where people who aren't having success on those websites complain about them, but people continue to find partners and get married. I was at such a wedding very recently.

> But it was a more innocent world. The internet was still an optimistic place.

I'm sorry, but I think you're underestimating how much you have changed, along with the content you consume.

> the biggest failure of the internet was sharing it with the unwashed masses, we should have saved it for the (even less washed, if you look to the founders) elites.

...While I agree with the sentiment, I don't agree with the end logic: The sentence implies a top-down administration determining who gets access to the internet, which is something that I will always hate with a passion.

Personally, I'm more in favor with a self-segregation model, where I can have a private intranet with myself & anyone else I choose to share with. I already do so with Tailscale's private domains.

Yea, I lean this way too.

The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior.

The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc.

If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant.

Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes.

(as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)

> Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved

Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.

I think an even bigger difference is that there was no concept of users monetizing their own usage via advertising or a personal brand. People were in it purely for the love of the game, and maybe some imaginary internet points.

If you wanted to make money you might try hosting a community and monetizing it somehow, but the concept of building a digital following and using it to market products/services (and not be seen as spam or a sellout) simply did not exist.

I recently capitulated and started using real-name HN/reddit accounts because personal branding is not just common now, it's one of the main ways of reaching users.

It's easy to watch it happen. Just watch one youtube video that's outside your usual viewing subjects, and watch how your recommendations instantly change to try to suck you down a path on that new topic.

I still keep in touch with a bunch of people from an assembly game hacking forum from when I was like 10. They're responsible for my entire career and how I got into programming! It was great. I'm still a part of a bunch of hobby specific forums and they are all going strong.

Once you start noticing HN usernames you won't stop. It's big, but it's small. Certain users gravitate to certain topics and you'll see them pop up. I think the problem is you have no style associations to usernames, like colors and icons and fonts and whatnot like you had on old forums making it super easy to visually identify people.

Are their not car shows near you? Where im at even the smallest towns (talking like, less than 1000 people) have car show meetups where people gather to display their cars and discuss the work theyve done on them

Eternal September but not just Usenet, everywhere.

> not federated and centralized

That's curious to me, because I see those as roughly opposed (both are proxies for organizational systems). NNTP (usenet): clearly federated (works by flooding). DNS: the religious obsession with the "one true root" doctrine, while it makes sense in the context of a global naming scheme (anybody advertising false root should be shot, according to Mockapetris), hampers the technology's adoption for other purposes. Global internet routing i.e. BGP is still pretty much federated.

The (Spain-focused) article points that 20 years ago was basically the same. "MSN Messenger" is not exactly a shining beacon of federation.

I'll point that there have been cycles (like many things computing) of centralization and federation coming and going. Maybe there's indeed nothing much intrinsically better about "ye olde Internet".

Lol I was talking to a friend who is a web dev and works for a large company in the social gaming space. He referred to the "Civility" team which is just censorship and content moderation, plus sending mental health notifications if you've been playing/spending too much. I'd rather dig holes or shovel shit over working for a mobile game companies "civility" team.