This might be wishful thinking, but I'm coming to believe that AI like ChatGPT are capable of bringing out the absolutely worst qualities of massive social media sites and in that way might end up saving us from ourselves.
I don't recognize this description of the Internet from any time after 1985 onward.
I think "trust-less" is more what I'm getting at though. In the 90s and early 00s the whole, "don't reveal anything personal, assume anyone you don't have a history with as if they might have malicious intent" was still very prevalent. That only changed when the early versions of social media really started to catch on. My mental mile marker for that happening has always been when Facebook no longer required an edu email to sign up (2005), but I'm sure you could argue it happened earlier.
There are plenty of reasons we should go back to that mindset and AI bots making it incredibly hard to verify that you are talking to an actual human maybe the thing that pushes us back toward that mindset.
I've had many conversations with many people my age (mid 30s) about how we went from "don't post anything about yourself" to "post your entire life online" around when Facebook got big, so I don't think it's something that only I experienced. There's another commenter on this post saying something similar and I remember being taught about "internet safety" in middle school, so maybe it's a generational thing.
Earlier (pre-eternal september) usenet was definitely different though and I think much more like you say - sadly that was before I was old enough to get on-line, so I never saw it.
The past century has really been an anomaly when it came to trusting news, with photos and videos seeming to be reliable proof. Before that, societies had to be structured very differently to account for the lack of proof. You'd hear people from out of town talking about what they saw in a neighboring city.
You'd need to judge how trustworthy the person was.
People would expect a chain of narration, to understand how _that_ person came to learn a bit of information (or if they claimed to witness it first hand).
As AI generated content becomes more popular, I predict we as a society are going to go back to relying more and more on the reputation of the speakers in question.
Who might you consider reputable? People you've met personally, people who your community respects, and of course, influencers who you follow who's persuasive words match your pre-existing world views. Perhaps something else will emerge
I've been starting to think this way as well. It feels like we're seeing something similar to the way that mass spam calls drastically changed the way people use the phones to the point where people don't recognize a phone number, they just don't pick up anymore. As the ratio of garbage goes up, people will just slowly stop using the medium.
My semi-crazy prediction is that AI like GPT are going to be the death of large social media sites. I don't think the internet will die, but I think we're going to return to a more local, trust-less internet like we had in the 90s and early 00s, but for a completely different reason.