>> It snuck up on us, or rather, it was quietly imposed upon us by profiteers

Into the early 2000s, everyone still knew never to use a real name online. Murderers would probably get you or something. Don't want randos knowing you you are. Besides, handles were cooler. Some well known people had publicly known aliases, but aliases were the norm... like on HN.

In my bubble, it was FB that really broke through this. I heard about fb as a social network, but with real names. That way you could friend people from real life. It was actually quite a revelation, like a public address book... very useful.

Anyway... Zuck is, IMO, more of an "eye for the tides" guy than the tide itself. He realised that "relentlessly cataloging and indexing information about every single person on the planet in a way that anyone can search instantaneously" was happening and he decided to be there first.

Anonymity was mixed.

Definitely pretty much everyone was anonymous on warez boards and the like. On the other hand, a lot of local BBSs actually had something of a local community in real life as well. And the people accessing Usenet from corporate and academic accounts often used their name and affiliation.

> Into the early 2000s, everyone still knew never to use a real name online.

In the mid-2000s I was at school, where we were simultaneously being taught (in 'Information and Communication Technology' lessons) never to use a real name online [0], and signing up to Bebo & MySpace with our real names.

It's (there beginning to exist people) growing up with the internet that all but killed that, I'm sure of it.

[0] with some limited web ring/social network type site for schools, for which we given aliases and then, I don't know, wrote BBcode and marquees and stuff about our school-safe interests and hobbies

I’ve never used my real name online. I still remember my shock when google said you had to use your real name for Google plus (or was it google wave? I can’t remember anymore.) I noped right out of there.

Bezos has said repeatedly that nobody is the tide itself. You capture opportunity not by swimming to the tide but by getting in place before it comes.

The real question is how do we know what tides are coming in the future so we can position ourselves to be ready. Thats where the luck comes into play in my opinion.

Yeah both FB and Google killed the pseudonym, migrating the internet from a cool new place to a cesspool

I agree with you, but just want to politely add that it didn't really sneak up on us, we were warned from the beginning, we just ignored it.

It's like in the story about the frog in the pot of hot water, if someone keeps telling the frog, "you know, that water isn't going to stop getting hotter," and the frog is saying "seems fine to me, I think you worry too much."

The frog just sits around in the pot, but we turn the majority of our society into boiling pots; when the frog decides it's too warm after all and jumps out, we have nowhere to go.

On a side note, too bad the frog story is false.

We had X-No-Archive: YES throughout the 90s, which thankfully DejaNews honored (up until Google purchased them in 2001, anyways). Search engines are destroying the social fabric of humanity, making it possible for haters to hate with perfect precision. We've been on the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now, and we've earned today's toxic and deadly Internet that resulted from it. Oh well.

> "...the wrong course ('index everything! archive everything!') for thirty years now..."

that's overly broad. although i particularly dislike dichotomies, we can draw a simple one here for illustrative purposes: there's public and private information, and omni-indexing/-archiving is the "wrong course" only for private information, with private information encompassing more than just sensitive data, including any personal information a person chooses not to divulge publicly.

humanity has absolutely advanced from indexing all public information, even considering the exponential rise of disinformation and idle bullshit. instantaneous knowledge coalition and mass multiway communication are the two astonishing advances stemming from the internet. and now we're dealing with the inevitable but unintended negative consequences of these amazing advances.

Your chosen dichotomy is both common and insufficient, and I am with you in disliking it. The dichotomy I'm considering is threefold instead: Worldwide, Community, and Secret.

This is what the classical public/private dichotomy is missing: the social information strata of "local community only" information that gets lost when we convert everything to the Internet. Without a Community context, there is no safe place from haters. Searching a Community's content should not be possible from a Worldwide context.

My comments on HN are Community, not Worldwide, but modern search indexing has no grasp of the difference between those two, and lumps them both together as Worldwide — what your dichotomy calls "Public". Yes, some people will intentionally write content for Worldwide consumption, but the vast majority of my written words are intended for Community consumption only. We see this every day, when some unwitting soul on Twitter gets their off-the-cuff Community-context tweet selected as Trending and the entirety of Worldwide descends upon them. Even celebrities, people who specialize their career in producing Worldwide content, have started to realize that they, too, need Community-context spaces to live and breathe in, and that online social media is not a safe Community space for them.

What is an example of a healthy Community space, on today's Internet, that protects against the content discovery efforts of Worldwide haters, while still allowing new participants to join the space? (Certainly it's not HN, which is trying and failing to be a Community space operating in Worldwide context.)

ps. I forgot Secrets!

Secrets are mine to divulge in the Worldwide context, and no one else's. My biometrics, my medical records, my fetishes would all be good examples of what we would expect to be kept Secret. I understand and accept that some Secrets will be upgraded to Community context in the matter of course of human sociology, and I don't expect idle gossip to end. But I have every right to expect that my Secrets will not be divulged to the world, even if they're known to my Community. Unfortunately, due to search engines deciding that all Public content is therefore Worldwide, all Secrets that are shared within any private Community will end up indexed for all the haters to find. That's a very lonely way to live, not being able to be vulnerable within a Community. No wonder people use Facebook; it offers a well-known Community context (private groups) that's not searchable from a Worldwide context.

In defence of search engines, when content disappears from the web, it disappears from the search index within months. And robots.txt has been a thing since forever.

But I agree with the overall point, that archiving is distinct from indexing, and we need better mechanisms than copyright to take down content given many services terms allow content to be kept forever and/or make it hard to delete content uploaded by others. This might come down to free speech vs privacy, though.

> And robots.txt has been a thing since forever.

Unfortunately, both archive.org and the affiliated Archive Team now intentionally ignore robots.txt files.

Archive Team, in particular, wrote a very irritating and condescending screed called "ROBOTS.TXT IS A SUICIDE NOTE" [1]. Apparently, they don't understand that not everyone wants their stuff backed up forever and they treat anyone who disagrees with them as a moron. And that manifesto wasn't written by some random team member, it was from Jason Scott himself.

I know that Archive Team isn't officially part of IA, but they are tightly integrated with their archiving operations. It's a bad look.

[1] http://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Robots.txt

If I ever again post a website, I’m going to post it with basic auth, so that search engines won’t index it to begin with. Exposure doesn’t pay the bills, after all.

> ...haters to hate with perfect precision.

Except... not. All too often, we see stuff people did or wrote years ago being used against them. Those things may not reflect the person they are today, and that's even worse than "hat[ing] with perfect precision."

Searches will always have the problem of the lack of context. A song or a literary work can mean totally different things if we lack the context or understand the years when they were written.

The second and more serious problem is people thinking that algorithms are so smart that are infallible. This, when a much more sophisticated human brain would have a serious trouble trying to navigate the long lists of random dictionary words that we enter in a browser.

Netizens in general don't understand, or don't care, and just simplify and fill the gaps until they have a caricature that can fit in some "well known stereotype" slot. The result is that our societies are being more and more fractured, radicalized and isolated into different groups.

That's certainly one view, but it's not my view. If people don't feel safe participating today on some topic that haters have google alerts set up for, then those future archives will be heavily biased in favor of content that's acceptable to the haters of that time. Sounds like a great way to ensure the spread of hate across social generations to me.

Meh, even before 2000 all throughout the 80s and 90s there were white pages (that eventually made it to the Internet) that listed every telephone user's name and address. Talk about creepy! I hated it at the time but AT&T actually charged money (like $5/mo) to keep your name out of the directory so I let it slide.

I wonder why white pages fell out of favor. Maybe the global access made them a bit too invasive, or people voted with their feet. Or switched to mobile phones which did not do this.

It was a useful tool. Still would be. Online searches for people are hard now. But note, those were limited databases. Phone number and address. No birth dates, security numbers, etc. It was a tool, not a weapon.

We still have a much different attitude toward that kind of data today. If some company leaked all its customers' names, addresses and phone numbers it would be considered a terrible scandal. In the 80s you would be upset if the phone company didn't print out that same data and give it to every customer for free.

On the other hand, there was a huge outcry at the time over Lotus Marketplace https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Marketplace

That sort of information is regularly bought and sold today. A breach that's just names, addresses, and phone numbers will draw a few headlines, some comments on HN, and a bunch of scolding tweets. But I don't imagine most people see that as particularly sensitive information in most circumstances. (Some exceptions of course such as the fact that you're in a particular database is itself sensitive.)

The recent tmobile breach?

A database feeds more evil than a printed book could, even if scanning/ocr it were feasible.

>I wonder why white pages fell out of favor.

People could look up numbers online if they wanted to, so there was just no need for a big book any longer. They also never had cell numbers so they became less useful in that regard. And most people don't just call a person out of the blue any longer.

I meant more why this kind of directory lost coverage overall as cell phones came in. Maybe it was just really that unpopular to have the name, address & number be public by default.

I don't know the history of why there was never a cellphone directory. There was never a monopoly controlling all those numbers for one thing as was originally the case with landlines--and regional monopolies after the Bell breakup.

I also suspect that by the time cellphones got big, the public overall wouldn't have been big on cellphones numbers being listed.

Around that time frame is also when spamming picked up quite a bit, while at the same time early mobile plans rarely had unlimited talk time making the spam particularly costly.

Most people's early mobile plans were very limited, the person receiving the call paid for it in the US, and costs were even higher for calls that weren't from your immediate local area. And, as you say, junk landline calls were becoming a bigger deal.

This old article https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/06/why-isn-t-there-... claims that the wireless carriers didn't want to put out a directory because consumers would be upset if they had to pay for junk calls.

Many of us who grew up on or before the web think this has always been creepy and shudder at each new step we take into darkness. Privacy advocates have been screaming into the ether since the beginning, and it hasn't done anything to stop the erosion of privacy.

A huge percentage of society is willing to accept anything Facebook, Google, and Apple throw at them and simply don't care about the present and future ramifications. Some think about it, others enjoy the convenience or think that there's no way it can harm them. Some even drink the cool aid and honestly believe surveillance is good for society.

I fully expect to wind up in a future where we're all starring in our own versions of the Truman Show. Sensors everywhere, constantly streaming our choices and preferences. Our health data, associations, and even thoughts and feelings used against us.

When everyone is watching everything you do, you're no longer free.

Agreed. I don't think people realize that privacy exploitation for profit is really just a negative externality and moves us away further from equilibrium (along with environmental negative externalities where corporation x pollutes more for short term profits but long term ecological degradation)

> by all power structures

Including one of the largest power structures, "users who enjoyed the convenience of finding people."

Voyeurism is a powerful force.

“Eventually, convenience will eat all worldviews.” - smbc-comics