I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child.
If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
> We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.
You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time.
Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere.
This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only remember the parts you liked. When everything feels new and exciting we have more energy to overlook the bad things.
I was fine with the flame wars, crapfloods, etc, because at least it was human (except for incredibly primitive bots). The spammers were even humans, and might even talk to people briefly before spamming again. It felt very different. Dealing with assholes is normal and possible, dealing with faceless entities and bots is like punching a wall.
Generally though, I agree that Usenet was difficult after Eternal September unless you stayed on top of your killfile.
Mailing lists were pretty manageable, and the phpBB era was fantastic if you found some boards you liked.
This so much!
I recently found an old email thread by accident. I recoiled in horror: the vitriol was unbelievable, people name calling each other in the worst possible way. The same people are much more mature these days. The new people in the same community likewise. Times have changed: for the better.
To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.
I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to discourage the nastiness. There was still plenty of it, but on Usenet, you could add the guy who enraged you to the point of blinding rage to your ignore file... and you could add the two guys who refuse to ignore each other to your own ignore file. In the Weblog space you could just, you know, not read that other blog that infuriates you. On custom forums the community was small and tended to evict people.
It was not paradise. But it was more workable, when the platforms weren't designed by PhDs to seek out and exploit your outrage for their ad clicks.
Yeah, seems like the whackjobs became a lot more visible.
ejecting jerks is something forums did better than social media, even if the definition of jerk varied widely and was forum-specific. I can't imagine a forum doing something like promoting the user with the most interacted with posts; they'd probably lock the thread and consider banning
The undercurrent here for me is barriers to entry and monopolies and network-effects, ex:
Con: You had to search to find a community.
Pro: There were lots of independent communities that had competition in case one was badly moderated.
And if you did that now you'd probably have no forum left because everyone has been trained to generate engagement.
Has it been tried?
I mean, it is a common moderation goal, in physical meetings, to make sure the silent ones gets heard.
Could be interesting to try a social network approach om those terms: promotion inversely correlated with engagement.
The leaked Epstein files have revealed that the GamerGate "outrage" was largely astroturfed[1]. It was one of the first large-scale experiments run and observed by people like Steve Bannon, Jeffery Epstein and Peter Thiel on how "flood the zone" with outrage and contradictory information, allowing people to be manipulated for political gain.
[1]: https://clownworld.news/epstein-gamergate-chan-culture
Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
I struggle to believe that it had anything to do with "Gaming journalism". I tried several times to figure out what the big deal was, and each time left with the impression that it was really just a bunch of antisocial misogynists who wanted a hate figure.
Like, then and now I do get the impression that there's very little in the way of real "journalism" going on in gaming, but that seemed like just a weird non-sequitur people would trot out as a fig leaf for all the vileness whenever confronted about it.
It was pretty obvious to anyone following along that the concern about the integrity of "gaming journalism" was a phony pretext.
That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected.
It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.
This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...
At the time it was happening I recall thinking "This should be a typical flair up that'll die down to smolders in a couple of weeks and life will continue" as so many dicey internet things had done in the past but that time there was something that kept that fire burning, it wasn't organic feeling, it was as if it was hooked up to life support just to stoke more engagement and stronger, more subtlety incompatible opinions.
It worked, we collectively fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It keeps working. It will likely keep working for a long time as people continue to feel empowered by self-entrenchment and the want for affirmation that they're on the right side of history.
Wasn't there also some connection between Gamergate and Jeffrey Epstein I remember reading about?
Mostly through Steve Bannon as far as I'm aware, yes. Though apparently there were connections through moot, and later Peter Thiel adjacency as well.
https://www.garbageday.email/p/here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-...
I think you're both right. It was around that time that internet and real-life culture started fusing together increasingly. Internet became more political, including in the tactics used, real life became /b/, even the president is an internet troll. When everyone is on the internet, all of a sudden our socioeconomic and political differences are magnified and the narcissists and sadists have a never ending feeding-trough.
Yeah i feel like that was one of the first times regular people out in the real world really tangled with hardcore internet trolls. I think it was a shock to both to have their territories invaded by the other.
Yeah, whatever pretenses gamergate started with, they got brushed aside pretty quickly in favor of right wing outrage politics. The beginning issue (games journalism being a big club of hollywood wanabes supported by corporate bootlicking) was quickly turned into an angry mob of misogyny and anti-intellectualism.
Around 2015-16 the same stategy was deployed to mainstream politics, which is when I feel internet culture truly died for good. Social media went from a pastime to an engine that fueled real world events.
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Like Chuck Norris, chuds don't sleep. They wait.
You were never on 4chan before that I guess?
I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid.
Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
No, you've hit on the issue. The shit that is the internet now didn't come about solely due to scale—or even from the newbies migrating in via AOL. It came about because bad-intentioned and greed-driven actors moved in to make money, or to push their propaganda.
> The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots
to be fair, I found eggdrop on almost every single corporate Linux server in all my clients in those days.
eggdrop responds to explicit commands, yeah? Very different from the ones that infest the modern internet.
I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was.
Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.
>I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars.
In that swearing or bad faith arguments were involved, sure.
In their nature, breath, and impact outside the web, no.
"Flame wars" back in the 90s were entertainment for the people involved.
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We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.
And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.
yeah, the worst that could happen was some IRC shenanigans and getting a bunch of unexpected pizza deliveries. SWATing and doxxing were very rare, and nobody would try to get you fired or ostracized for saying the wrong thing.
idk, I remember significant predatory behavior on IRC and pretty bad stuff floating around in alt binaries on usenet.
it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along.
I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures.
Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty.
Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.
A lot of Facebook is people with their real names posting vitriolic bile in full view of their entire real life family and friends.
I don't think Real Name policies are the solve. It still doesn't matter when you interact with 1,000 random real names in the comments whom you'll never have to reconcile with in real life. The latter is the important part. The medium itself reduces people to content and encourages context collapse.
Read what I wrote again. It's not just names, but names and contact information.
There is already typically enough information to contact people's family, employers, or (as was popular / horrific for a moment) send SWAT to your house.
Real names and contact info don't stop people, and worse, they expose everyone to these tactics. If I read a comment of yours that I don't like, I can asymmetrically punish you by signing you up for spam or worse, and you'd never know who did it or why.
We do need solutions where people stake value (like their real identity) and have to contend with real repercussions. But I don't think identity like this actually gets us there.
The reason Old Internet felt better is probably still the solution: smaller online communities, where you have a sustained presence, and getting account banned would meaningfully disconnect you from your social group.
Algorithmic feed / Front Page effect seems to be the main cause of the problem, since you get a flood of people disconnected from the community or topic, having no context, piling on, then leaving.
YouTube seems to have recovered from being a toxic pit and now manages this well. But I haven't found a good writeup of how they made the shift.
I don't know, in the mid to late 90s I was a child on BBS, and a lot of those were semi-anonymous. Perhaps it was just scale, for that. A couple hundred to a few thousand people at most seemed enough, but also mods did work. I guess there was a certain amount of effort to get going, and maybe that was also a gate. Even the speeds, perhaps, acted as a filter.
Semi-anon yes, but also often with real world fet togethers.
It wasn't that anonymous. A lot of people were posting from work accounts with full email and other contact info.
> Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached
This is what some Europeans governments are effectively trying to achieve, although hamfistedly (as governments typically do).
We definitely need a replacement for Twitter/X for mainstream journalists, politicians, and other leaders, to interact in.
I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?
I haven't been on NextDoor in more than a decade. Does it list phone numbers and employers now?
Employers? Why not add number, names, and ages of their children, as well as DOB and SSN?