"More local" may not be the perfect description. When I wrote it I was thinking of things like AIM where, for the most part, you knew everyone you were interacting with. The more I think about it, there were plenty of chatrooms and forums at that time though, so yeah, probably not a good word to use.

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.

Having been online since about 1983, I never had this "trust-less" experience. I can understand what you're saying though, because by the time my kids started to be online in the 00s, I was generally trying to convey to them the same point that you're making.

Different strokes for different folks I guess.

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.

I'm from the same cohort as you and can corroborate this. I definitely remember how strange it felt to me when social media became a thing and the taboo of attaching personally identifiable info to your web presence suddenly disappeared.

Yes I remember when a local direct connect hub had a LAN party and many people met IRL for the first time. I continued to meet these people in later years in normal life even after the hub was shutdown. That was semi closed and people were generally trustworthy.

This might just be a way of aging ourselves. I do feel that Facebook blatantly flipped the norm that you used a pseudonym and kept personal information private when communicating (much less publishing) online - that's the norm I grew up with in the 90s and even the early 00s.

Back on usenet in the 80s and 90s, your ID was essentially your email address (but likely using bang path notation). There no pseudonyms, and everyone was a real person with identifiable features and a real world location.

I was a heavy usenet user in the 1996-2000 era and this wasn't true for me or most of the groups i hung out on (and even less so for IRC chans).

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.

Yeah, once AOL came aboard and the green card lawyers showed the future of spam, things took a turn.

And it was only so they could target you with ads or so your friends could find and add you so they could target them with ads