Surely the scale and speed of information flow has greatly increased since the late 1990s and early 2000s so as to not be comparable to today.

difference is tiktok and short video algos exploit ppls worse natures. like i know a few ppl whose feeds became e-thots doing dances in bikinis bc they wouldnt go seek it out but tiktok showed them that and their watch metrics or whatever were better. or ppl whose feed became far right shit bc it showed them some of that.

there's a lot of stuff we know isn't good and won't consciously choose to go watch. but short video shows us some of that and we subconsciously engage with it more instead of consciously choosing so we watch more and more.

this is hard for adults to deal with but way worse for kids with shitty impulse control.

Early internet was populated mostly by educated people and there were very little (if at all) monetary influence to drive engagement. So i guess these two factors are sufficient for internet to be much safer place.

4chan dates from 2003, for reference.

It may be the case that algorithmic feeds and social networks that have one giant global context tend to expose stuff like this in ways that would have been less likely on the early web. 4chan has always been pretty awful but you wouldn’t have seen it unless you were on 4chan, which for most people was “never”. The norm at the time was to be in multiple different communities, and there typically wasn’t much overlap.

By contrast, TikTok is all one big space, and if the algorithm wants you to see something you’ll see it. That part is new.

Maybe that falls under “monetary influence to drive engagement” in which case I suppose I agree.