Though in some ways it's the same, here is the difference: it has become more diverse.
In 1991, the people you might have conversed with on Usenet were a lot similar to you. Of course, if we go to some comp.lang.* newsgroup or whatever, people are similar even today.
But I mean that if you went into any newsgroup whatsoever in 1991, on any topic, everyone there would probably have been some sort of professional in a STEM field, academic or university student. Go to, say, rec.pets.dogs, and it wasn't just any dog lovers from any walk of life, but mostly engineers, programmers and sysadmins who are into dogs.
That's way different from going into Reddit today, where it's now any Tom, Dick and Harry from any walk of life, who only have a certain topic of interest in common and that's it.
People have social interactions online which they wouldn't have in real life. In real life, if you run into someone who is from, say, a "lower" social class, they have it written all over them, and it puts them in their place more effectively than any downvoting system.
For instance, in real life, you would either never argue politics with an obvious "despicable", or else you'd immediately attribute everything they say to the limited scope of their background and just nod your head politely.
Basically, there is no new divisiveness; the quiet divisiveness we already have just comes out when people get together and hide behind aliases and avatars.
There was a real technical or situational hurdle to even be present on the net back then, and I think most users had a sense of wonder and perhaps respect for the platform they were privileged to even get a glimpse into and partake in. Maybe? Today the amount of low-effort/low-value thoughtless vitriol makes up a much much larger percentage of the communication and web content than "back in the day". Spend but a few moments and you will encounter some flamebait/sensationalistic noise. It used to be a lot harder to be subjected to such stuff. Tragedy of the internet commons, or something.
Thus you would remember a bit of the tail end of the era before Eternal September.
Normally, September was the time when a crop of new students would get accounts at universities and step into the world of Usenet for the first time, behaving like asses.
In September 1993, AOL connected to Usenet. That became known as Eternal September.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
The online world we have today is basically the continuation of Eternal September, reaching further depths of deterioration.
I'd suggest you missed noticing some of the more divided corners of Usenet back then. Consider (admittedly an extreme example)
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/soc.culture.yugos...
The real problem with practically every internet community is its moderation, because the worst people with the least business doing that job inevitably float to the top and are then impossible to dislodge without voting with your feet and creating an entire new community.
It's overly reductionist to attribute Trump and Brexit just to online trolls, but it's folly to ignore their effect at the margins (because both Trump and Brexit were relatively close calls, influencing a 5% middle ground definitely mattered).
A good portion of the ragamuffins who are overflowing the online world have not such concept. Everything is personal.
Interesting. I don't remember the web (or the pre-web internet) generally looking like 4chan in the earlier days. Pockets of it always did, of course.
But we are both engaging in a statistical error here -- we're using sample sizes of one. Your experience and mine may differ quite a lot simply because we hung out in different parts of the internet.
My introduction to the web progressed roughly with watching my dad use BBS -> playing Neopets and Runescape -> becoming very involved with Runescape forums -> running a Runescape forum (first introduction to moderating user-submitted content at the age of 10. Yeah...) -> getting involved with video game modding communities, which meant I was spending all my free time browsing forums, following every link, completely absorbed by everything the early web's computer game communities churned out.
My experience probably would've been very different if I hadn't been able to get around the parental controls my parents used, or if I had been interested in different hobbies with a more approachable web presence.
I've been nostalgic for the "old web" lately, but I'm also very, very grateful that I haven't clicked on an inconspicuous URL that turned out to be a jumpscare, virus, weird porn, or gore in quite a while.
EDIT: I don't want to imply that the Disturbing Web == Videogame Web; that just happened to be my experience.
This is an excellent point. You're younger than my eldest child, and I was active on the internet from way back when it wasn't available to the general public. That has to color our experiences -- even if only in that what you consider the "old days" and what I consider the "old days" are entirely different eras.
Every where banned you for gore, child porn, harassment, encouraging suicide.
I really don't think you should be trying to normalize 4chan as thats just the way the internet is.
The video game/tabletop game boards on 4chan were fairly normal for boards at that time, and it's not like everyone who was active on 4chan was there to post or read /b/. You might dip into it for a laugh or dare now and then, but at least when I was younger it was more like the internet equivalent of sneaking into the abandoned house down the street: a "dangerous" thing that felt cool to do.
Like I said in my original post, that's the lens through which I viewed the internet. It could be different from yours.
I'm not trying to 'normalize' 4chan but, honestly, I've bounced from plenty of Discord servers that are indistinguishable from 4chan. I think it's OK to recognize that at least some part of the non-4chan web is still very 4channy.
Discord is very new. I think the point of the post is the current internet has gotten worse. The web wasn't like /b/,its becoming like that though.
In the past 10 years the public debate and public consciousness has finally been transfered to internet. Mostly because of social media. And while doing this, the "public" has changed from a moderate and gate-keeping environment of the press and TV networks, to something more wild and "liberated". And it has picked up a lot of traits that we would formerly observe in the more rough pockets of the web.
I don't think those pockets have changed or seized to exist, some of them have become more radical than ever before, it's just that what we consider to be the public space where everyone is grounded to has changed place.
In any case, I'm quite happy with normal discussions and normal content though...
Without making excuses for 4chan, perhaps the reporters should freak out about their own behavior first? So much of the news-media has an incredibly narrow focus, almost to be lying by omission. For a minority member of society, reporters are the 4-chan.
One of thousands of examples: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-harvey-20170829-story.h...
In the early days of social media, the idea was to create engaging communities, which I felt for the most part happened. I was on a LOT of social media platforms in the mid aughts and really got a lot of it with the people I connected with. For me, it was actually quite positive and healthy then.
In the last eight years or so? I had to get off. The overwhelming negativity, the weaponization of the platforms, the "cancel culture" and a rash of other things just make a majority of the platforms completely unusable now. On top of that, you add in the incredibly poor track record these platforms have with user data and privacy, the non-stop tracking, and the thousands of ads in your feeds?
It used to be a joy to use these platforms. Now it's gotten to a point where I'm not sure what the point of social media is anymore.
So we can summarize as "there's been a huge uptick in the toxicity online (which was always there)?"
I think the GP has nailed it, however - we are reporting theatre hecklers as news, and instead of watching the play, everyone is now watching the punch-up in the aisles, and placing wagers.
The problem is that the theatre is on fire, but that hasn’t quite yet eclipsed the spectacle of a good old fashioned confrontation.
Well, that didn't happen. What happened instead is that the ongoing discussions seem to stir up even more disagreement; and people are not really talking to each other, they rather signal their belonging to this or that faction. Also, the internet has been weaponised: leaving aside the organised "troll factories", any group that feels strongly about something can try to impose it to everyone else just by occupying as much space as possible. And then, if others express publicly their own ideas, don't you want your idea to be represented too? Then it becomes a shouting match, where each faction tries to fill as much public space as possible by shouting at the top of its lungs.
Part of this is the traditional media's fault. We thought newspapers and tv networks were going to die, drowned in the huge amount of available information sources. Instead, the web is still hierarchical: few media outlets shape the conversation deciding what to report on and how, then everyone else has the choice of closing ranks around the proposed narrative or in opposition to it. The dream of global peer-to-peer conversations didn't really come to be.
Group dynamics are crazy - you can use them to get people who might be drinking buddies to instead get into tin cans and try to murder each other, because you’re using the ultimate anonymity of a battlefield to let slip the dogs of war.
I think people have realized what the real line of what will be tolerated in society. There isn't any repercussion for being a pos in real life or online. I think we're to polite to the people being rude.
Judgement of whether this is good or bad aside, it is definitely easier to maintain peace and harmony when the socio/economic/cultural differences are smaller. Those days are long gone.
I'm finding the only winning move is not to play (i.e. "don't go to the theatre; stay home and read a book")
The US political polarization is more widespread, on and offline, but online discourse is still pretty mild compared to the old days of greater anonymity.
Enforcement of community standards has backfired in the form of weaponised censorship.
Anyway, I don't comment on any services that use a real name policy. I'd prefer that my name didn't appear on the Internet at all, but don't fight against it when it inevitably happens via some participant lists and whatnot.
Even where there's some anonymity by using a user name, there's rarely anonymity from legal authorities, who can easily access your entire internet and location history - and a VPN won't help you, because those aren't secure.
This. It's not that polarization and toxic ideas didn't exist, it was arguably much worse in the past with slavery, genocide, etc.
You had entire countries publicly advocating for violent racism and citing sources that they claimed supported their views. It's pretty harsh to call us post-truth but not them. Their lies led to brutal consequences for millions.
And it used to be the media was a pretty strict funnel (pre-Internet, pre-TV) where you had to be interesting to someone with power like a politician or an editor to get mass exposure for your ideas. Everyone else was relegated to preaching in the park. Now, we have virtual parks (websites) and preaching can reach millions.
I frequently see Twitter memes spoken from people's mouths in person. I mostly abstain from it, but like it or not, Twitter does matter.
I've also been online since 1993, and used Usenet for many years. Back then you could compartmentalize some argument as a bunch of nerds, but now it's just "people".
FWIW I also agree that the wisdom of "don't feed the trolls" has been forgotten. So in that way it's gotten worse too.
That was usually accurate. (Although I should say there were very intelligent people on Usenet, and that's why I used it. I learned a lot there.)
It's harder to do that now. You can ignore certain channels, but they spill out into the "real world" quite frequently.
To give a different example, UFC fighters pick fights with each other online, often on Instagram or YouTube. So what happens online is critical to the entire sport, which has grown a tremendous amount in the past decade. It determines whether they get paid $100K or $1M. Real life happens online now.
That's a somewhat random example but there are many many subcultures / industries where what happens on social media determines what happens in the real world.
If you use dailymail.co.uk and search for “outraged” there’s quite a few examples of this formula being used.
I suppose it increases impression time of adverts which means higher price earned for them. I’m not criticising the business accumen.
Anyone can set up an internet petition about anything. The presence of one does not meant there's some gigantic audience clamouring for some game idea/casting idea/etc.
Really, it's the same problem just dressed up differently. Now the issue just has these new buzzwords attached to it like "algorithm" and "data privacy" and whatnot. Nothing will change until people learn to leave their pride on their desktop, but that's not the way of some cultures.
I think the big difference between today vs. back then with respect to toxicity, is now that the web is so centralized, most sites the average person probably visits (twitter, reddit, etc) involves them interacting with strangers who they may never interact with again, so there is less of a feeling like they need to "hold back" like you might when talking to someone you know you'll meet again.
Probably the only exception to this (for me at least) was Facebook, because back when I used it I almost exclusively interacted with people I knew, so there was still that same incentive to not be an asshole because you'd actually meet these people again later. These days a lot of people interact with strangers in the comments of pages/groups for like politics and other stuff, and I feel like that's where most of the nastiness is.
Not everything can be reduced to a technology problem.
This is an American, and even worldwide problem.
Everyone is writing about polarization right now.
Ezra Klein, who I normally loathe, has been doing the podcasting rounds lately about his new polarization book, which has a pragmatic take on the problem.
He doesn't see a way out right now.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Ezra Klein on Politics, Polarization, and Identity
The Weeds: The road to polarization
According to Ezra, part of the reason we have this now is because our personal identities are now stacked in line with our political identities.
Why this stacking occurs might just be a natural process.
As for the media, It's not only the media's fault.
There was a feedback loop between media and audience.
When media was unbundled from the national model, only slightly more polarized people could be reliable customers and so media had to compete over them, which polarized the media, which polarized the audience etc...
Even stronger than that, for many people their political identity IS their personal identity, and those folks can't see anybody else any other way.
I was a child when Clinton was elected. We lived in a conservative neighborhood, and I remember there being disappointment but as far as I can recall everyone resumed their normal lives after that.
Then when GWB was elected, I lived in a more liberal town and there was some angst, maybe a bit of protesting, but by and large everyone went back to their lives.
Trump has been interesting. For many people, if you voted for Trump, you are a Nazi. As far as they're concerned, your political identity IS your personal identity. And let's be fair to both sides, for a lot of Trump supporters, being a MAGA-hat wearer is their personal identity.
We're on the road to something, and it's not good.
Nope, tribalism and divide et impera is a human phenomenon
A strong immune system is the best defense. If it rolls off your back, is it really toxic?
"These people are attempting to incubate a culture where you might get swatted for being vocally not a straight white man, but it is we who are too sensitive." Nah. The problem isn't the people who have the misfortune of being downrange of scumbags, and never is.
The answer is that you can't, and there isn't a firm line where all trolling is on one side and harassing/violent behaviour is something different.
Many of us can heuristically decide that trollish behaviour aimed at us won't extend to our person/home/workplace, and doesn't need to be taken seriously. That doesn't mean it's a rule for everyone or an excuse for that behaviour.
All the more reason for everyone to concealed carry. If not a firearm, at least something like a karambit.
What you call “extreme” is the reality for people less privileged than you being subject to these fucks’ weird jollies. What’s your just-ignore-it stuff going to do for them?
Whether someone who isn't as threatened by the toxicity "bucks up" and lets it roll off their back or even participates or not. It's still toxic.
E.g. don't tell me "racism isn't toxic except that you're sensitive and choose to be offended by it."
agree. but online trolling or banter isn't a toxic environment so its not toxic.
you would censor them? now THAT is a toxic environment.
The just roll it off, ignore the trolls collective strategy back amounted to enabling and whitewashing weev.
Oh my, I never thought about it but this is absolutely true
I don't think that's true. The tone of American political news nowadays doesn't seem that different than British newspapers in the 1990s. "It's the Sun wot won it" was an explicit boast about The Sun's polarizing influence... in 1992.
Of course both The Sun and Fox News in the US are part of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. But if anything this style of news seems like it arrived in the UK ten or twenty years before it was manifest in the US.
Something stuck with me a long time ago when I was watching tv a lot, there was a character on Scrubs named "Dr Cox" who said people are bastard coated bastards with bastard filling.
I would also say I’ve never thought of myself as a troll .... but given the number of downvotes I get on hn, I probably am at least troll-ish. So with that in mind, here’s the troll-ish take:
When people post something online it’s often in anticipation of something good coming from it. At this point there’s nothing any system or protocol can do to make this person less impacted if anything less than a unicorn floats pout of the sky dropping little unicorn turds over their one little contribution to discourse. We simply can’t change the super enormous personal expectations that one builds up as a result of commenting.
At the same time there’s this real world trend that is starting to reflect the virtual world. People talking to each other face to face using the same etiquette they would in a virtual setting.
I would suggest it’s not just tribal... it’s that increasingly we are unable to turn off and disconnect from the virtual world... we are literally interacting through a pseudo-real dimension in the mind precisely because we cannot put our phones down.
I recently read through the post about inner monologues and I was surprised a) there were so many people who have entire theoretical conversations in their head and b) that post had so many comments - maybe it was the most comments in a single post ever.
So here’s the deal - humans talk to themselves as a matter of being human. Now, a sizable portion of a humans daily interactions are online where societal norms have been adjusted, there’s simply no way the inner dialogue in the real world isn’t being impacted by this - just look at how teenage life has been decimated over recent years.
As for what to do about it. #1, you personally have responsibility for making sure your inner dialogue is healthy and isn’t 100% from online sources, #2 you have to unplug for much more of the day than you think, #3 a good book wouldn’t hurt, #4 you need to learn more about history than you think — a good book that explores the topic of mob mentality in US politics is Six Frigates by Ian W Toll. You literally won’t believe how the period between the revolutionary war and the war of 1812 mirrors modern day until you read this, #5, have some empathy for other people regardless of their viewpoints, #6 realize that no matter who is in charge, it’s going to be ok.
I can’t tell you how many people I know literally went apeshit when Obama got elected, sold all their stocks, bought gold and prepared for Armageddon. I also can’t tell you many people literally went apeshit when trump got elected, sold all their stock... to both groups, I say how’d that work out for you? Not very well and yet life goes on.
You kind of have to be a little meh about everything...that’s my view anyway...
Then again I was mostly looking for html tutorials, facts for physics and history projects etc.
Flamewars have always been with us and a bb or forum flamewar was always something to watch (often annotated with a flame gif on the thread header).
As with everything web, it's just scaled as the web has scaled.
Always been a toxic element, it's just the echo chamber got louder to the point where it drowns out the normal people.
I've been on lots of forums where the only rules were "no personal attacks and no porn" and they worked just fine. If the forum has a topic, then moderating to keep on topic is reasonable. Polite disagreement and discussion is the hallmark of a healthy forum.
There is of course more to curating a community than its moderation policy.
"Just ignore the troll" is a good personal advice it is just not sufficient for the forum as a whole.
> That's a purely American phenomenon
This is wrong. Europe turned nationalistic and right wing much earlier than the US. Look through the last 10 years and it's been something they've struggled with for the entire decade and earlier.
My point is that racism and right-wing nationalism isn't something that somehow started in Europe in the last couple of decades and then came to the US. It's been there since the beginning on both sides of the Atlantic, and systematic racism in the US has been a thing since before the founding fathers put ink to paper.
In addition, you can't just say "Europe" as one unit. There are vast cultural differences between even neighboring countries. Europe does not act as one united country, it's a patchwork of localized opinions and cultures.
FWIIW all the chimping in the threads about death threats: these were extremely common in the old days of Usenet too. I've lost track of them; from all kinds of arguably insane people, satanic cults even; more recently lunatic grad students mad I made fun of their field on my blog. So was doxxing. Nothing ever happened, and I have no respect for people who report them like it's news. While it's probably happened by now that someone's internet beef turned into actual violence, the ratio is absurdly low. If you can't abide some idiot being mad at you, stay off the internet I guess.
Quality-wise maybe but nowhere near the same in numbers. Back in 1990-2005 it took expertise to reach the Usenet. Facebook, Reddit et al. changed the game by essentially giving every village idiot without technical knowledge the "freedom" to troll on FB, Youtube, whatever. Conspiracy theories had their own niche usenet spaces, today there are FB groups for all kinds of utter bollocks with hundreds of thousands of members and absolutely no quality or sanity control.
Additionally, for newsgroups you needed some kind of client, most people could only access them after work, further reducing the user base, and there was nothing remotely similar to "likes" - today, people do everything for likes, with instantaneous feedback and no limits (practically everyone has a smartphone with FB and notifications), driving an ever faster and faster "news" cycle.
> And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it
No, this is not US-only. It may be most expressed in the US (and amplified by its two-party system), but us Europeans see the same issue. Brexit is the most obvious, but France, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Germany also have problems with polarization and (mostly) the far right using outright lies to further it, with Russian financing / backing suspected and proven everywhere.
The thing that must change is to get rid of Russian money in politics, and to enforce neutrality and fact based reporting in media.
Remember before the iPhone, the internet was a much smaller place, and accessed mostly in front of a computer. With Smartphone you now have 4.5 Billion Internet user all using it at any time of the day. The Internet is also much faster. Creating content is easier. We are may be 10 - 100x more in online content consumption then in the 2000s.
And I agree this is not US only.
So yes it is definitely a social AND psychological problem. Not a technical one, no blockchain, Distributed Social Media, Machine Learning, new AI, Cloud, Servless, (WhatEver)aaS etc will solve it.
You're crazy my dude(tte). I've been on the interbutts since 1991 and Usenet days, and it's exactly as it always was. The big difference is we have reporter ding dongs on Twitter thinking Twitter, aka the comments section they removed from their web presence, is the real world. Also old people on Facebook who never learned the lessons of being on Usenet in the early 1990s, aka arguing on the internet is a lame and addictive hobby.
There are minor accelerants for this; youtube really did have some kind of pathological radicalization rabbit hole in its recommendation engine for a while (now it's just boring and useless and shows you "more of the same" on "blue checked" accounts). And of course, the other media encourages polarization and demonization of the other for dumb short term. That's a purely American phenomenon, and nothing's going to change it until the people pushing this swill on MSNBC, Fox and CNN decide to change it.