Comment by Deprogrammer9

Comment by Deprogrammer9 6 days ago

I've been online since 89. Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved. Most people are cool some are fucked up & now a lot are puppet accounts trying to control the narrative of whatever the current zeitgeist is at the time. But thats whats so great about the global networks it can't be controlled. The best "they" (agents) can do is to get a large amount of people to believe bullshit PR spin. Shit like the internet isn't a friendly place. It's whatever you want it to be, it's all in how you engage with people & groups online. The same applies as when you walk out your door.

nox101 6 days ago

I've been on the internet as long as you and from my POV it changed a ton. The biggest changes to me are

(1) social media via smartphones - letting everyone trivially post to everyone else on the planet.

This use to be nerd activity (blogs) and the audience was other nerds. First social media sites, then the smart phone completely changed this.

(2) follows from 1, influencer culture, by which I mean, Instagram, TikTok, X, Youtube all incentivize people performing to try to get as many viewers/followers as possible. Thinking back to the 70s/80s, even the top movie stars just got some fan mail. They didn't have 400-600 MILLION FOLLOWERS to whom they could say anything they wanted. A celebrity had a most a TV show with a crew and editors and a strong chance of getting fired/banned if they got to crazy. Now, any high school kid can have 100+ million followers

It's not just people with followers, 20% of my youtube feed is people trying desperately to have something to talk about. Some news happens, thousands of people "report it" on their "channel". The scale of it is insane to me.

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insane_dreamer 6 days ago

> Absolutely nothing has really changed

been online since then as well; the arrival of ad-driven social media and "influencers" has changed the online landscape significantly. there's really no comparison.

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raincole 6 days ago

> Absolutely nothing has really changed just the number of people involved

Which absolutely changed everthing. The amount of people on the internet makes massive-spam/SEO/misinformation campaigns economically viable. In HN terms, now bad players scale.

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DoodahMan 6 days ago

i don't think even that changed really tbh. 25 years ago spam was still terribly profitable, not to mention much easier to do than today. it was wide open. ah... now i'm feeling nostalgic :)

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- hn_acc1 5 days ago
  
  I mean.. 25 years ago (give or take), my brother-in-law asked me about the "Bill Gates will send you $$ if you forward this email" scam. Even if he HAD fallen for it - what would have been the harm? Some extra forwarded email / spam..
  Now? "Bill Gates and George Soros are going to destroy the world, and the solution is to vote for <super-far-right-wing-extremist> - and he and various people in my/his family are doing just that..". 25 years ago, those people would have never made it to be a candidate in elections..
  
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Groxx 6 days ago

Yea, I lean this way too.

The internet is and always has been just a lot of people. Scams have been rampant since it left the research labs, as have all kinds of vile human behavior.

The scale has definitely increased, but I think that might just mean that more people (by % of people alive) are exposed, and are talking about it. When it was just early nerds, nobody else knew what the heck a BBS was, but it still sounded a lot like local government/business/church/etc.

If you run a community, you have to deal with this stuff, regardless of how you run it. Small ones can get lucky and need dramatically less with a good starter crowd, but they can also have one messy event destroy the whole thing in an instant.

Zeitgeist-level systems like Twitter (well. previously at least) are new compared to '89, but uh. Have you seen what governments have done in the past century+, or Christianity has been doing for a thousand years? When you get millions of people, you get a lot of power, and have a lot of hidden awfulness. Always. No moderation system works at scale. The scale has changed, but not the behaviors or outcomes.

(as a corollary: yes I think we're actually better off without global hubs like Twitter. We'll keep fracturing and centralizing and re-fracturing likely forever though, and the smaller options have never gone away, you just have to look for them like has always been necessary - they're small)

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