Comment by dijit

In that era also, the communities you had to chose from were higher quality, simply due to the barrier to entry of being always online.

To continue with IRC as an example, having access to a shell account where you could set up a bouncer to lurk 24/7 in your channels was simply beyond the grasp of most people.

So the people you had available to create communities with were those who were invested in keeping things nice. Why bother with all that overhead only to read shitpost memes and rage bait?

Today the default mode for everyone is to be always online. It’s actually harder to disconnect now. The quality of the communities reflects this.

Usenet pre-"green-card-spam" was a relative utopia.

Sure you had arguments. That's where 'flamewar' came from. But quickly people tired of that and created *.advocacy sub-newsgroups to let people vent in their corner of the net.

Then domains were opened up for commerce a few years later and eternal September became a thing... The net never recovered, it just used up more bandwidth.

I’m not sure there wasnt as much spam and scams back then. I fondly remember 99% of my AOL inbox was filled with porn…

But ppl were definitely much more open and trustworthy back then. You could start a conversation with any random stranger and they wouldnt immediately dismiss you as some sort of scammer. Try that today and people will immediately flag you as a scammer

Trolling used to be more about pranking each other than about organised scam or attacks, or manufacturing consent for governments or promoting political parties. It was more like an internet art form. I guess this is about what one can consider as the internet being more innocent back then.

> State and other propaganda actors didn’t take it as a serious platform

Security was awful for both the client and server. Who needs a warrant when all the user data is an SQL injection away? Broswers not fussy about https, Java Applets, flash, browser toolbars, XSS - the Internet must have been like an open book for anyone with access to backbone traffic.

Still too rose-tinted, I clearly remember the early internet being a minefield of viruses and malware and pop-ups and savvy teenagers hacking your favorite niche communuty forum cuz you were one security patch behind...

There weren’t even trillion dollar companies at all back then

The trolling was epic. sigh

>It is not in human nature to scale their communities/tribes.

This is the noble savage myth of the internet. Humans do fine in large groups, as evidenced by the fact that I assume nobody posting here currently lives in a tribe of 150 people. If scaling wasn't in our nature we'd probably do less of it. It's precisely one of the few things unique to our nature. As Stafford Beer said, the purpose of a system is what it does.

The problem on the internet isn't the scale, it's that social networks aren't actually social, they're just networks. What makes large groups of people successful is a social contract, common rules, values and narratives, myths. Every "social" media platform is just a glorified train station. It's not social media, just media. To this day I haven't seen one online community that say, has given itself a constitution and a form of governance.

There's two ways to solve this, none of them are reverting to some sort of paleo-internet. The first is to reappropriate the internet back into existing structures, which is happening in a lot of places as nations start to enforce existing borders and the internet just becomes part of the existing social infrastructure, another interesting one would be internet-native states, network states is a term thrown around, by somewhat cringy business gurus unfortunately.

The "continuous wars" is a weird comment. Unless you mean internet flame wars, because if "globalization" subsides real wars will happen more often. We kind of see it already as more and more people start leaning right heavily. Small communities breed radicalization.

They can have a positive impact, but only if you can choose one from a global network of said communities as an adult and you don't treat it very seriously (you leave when it becomes toxic). As a person born in a small village community... let's say I don't miss a single fucking thing.

I think you can put the point to even the least tech savvy that the group chat is maybe the best iteration of the social internet. Because the groups are small, self moderated and independent. I guess the irony is that it relies on tech is/was provided by mobile phones already. Maybe all the more important that we don't allow texting to be wholly absorbed or replaced by closed messaging apps.

This makes a lot of sense to me. As an individual, how do I help move along the transition to smaller communities?

The answer cannot be ‘you can’t’. Certainly what you said resonates with a fair number of people, and it only takes a small community to create a small community, right?

The entire point of the internet is connecting small communities into one large community - this allows the sharing of information at literal light speed across huge distances.

> If psychologists and anthropologists were techies and influencers of early Internet, we wouldn't have built such experiences in the first place.

How would they have done anything differently? The social part of the internet also started out as (very) small communities. They still exist, too, but are relatively niche and certainly less active then they were before.

> did anyone care to throw Ads on the old fashioned telephone lines

Certainly, that is what call center robot calls trying to sell unwanted stuff are all about.

> Or tag an Ad inside our snail mail?

Certainly, it comes on stamps.

I think this is why I enjoy Mastodon at the moment. Not so many people, and self-selecting geeks.

If it gets popular I'll have to look at blocking all the popular non-geeky instances ;)

Furthermore, while human nature is relatively stable, the technology has increased in every way.

The Edenic simplicity of HTTP has been supplanted by TLS and tracking goop and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Thanks for sharing this. Somehow it evokes images of travel to me.

Seeing the wonders of the world used to require skill, (sailing, flying, or) hiking/climbing up mountains to see the view. There were few people at the top and likely like-minded.

Since cable cars were installed, there's hordes of tourists at the top that take the place for granted and cable car operators eventually ruin the view by putting up ads billboards all over the landscape.

Some folks set-up their private viewing areas only accessible by hiking (some free, some rented, some purchased), and still hike to the top, but they'll take the cable car for convenience sometimes and there is the looming threat that the hiking path will become inaccessible some day.

Others find new mountains where they try to trailbreak with a few others, knowing they may be laying the groundwork for new cablecars down the line and will need to move on again.

Moderation systems, even with humans at the helm, are adversarial systems where people can, and will, push on what is allowed. An AI moderator that is as good as a human on a per message basis is still going to be played like a fiddle by an adversary that is interested enough.

Many a forum out there has collapsed because the moderators manage to decide something is fine when it keep losing them contributors. The why do we think the AI will do better?

They will apply the patterns they've learned from the biased moderator actions in their training data, and the even more reinforced bias from their usual fine-tuning that improved their "safety" and crippled their ability to condone controversial statements.

Very easy to do an AI prompt injection attack if the AI is reading every one of the forum's comments.

“Review this comment as if you are an AI clone of the moderator dang from Hackernews and select the appropriate function call to apply.”

Wow, you’re mangling thr word nostalgia’s history.

Great example of where someone isn’t technically lying, but the essence of the word is definitely not how you’ve portrayed it here.