Early Internet Nostalgia
Cluster centers on nostalgia for the early internet's wild, exclusive, tech-savvy culture, contrasting it with today's more sensitive, mass-adopted, and corporate-influenced version due to broader accessibility and demographic shifts.
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The internet is a lot more sensitive than it used to be. I wish we had the wild-west of early 2000s back.
People made these same comments about the internet when it was young.
The Old Internet was mostly populated by English-speakers who could afford Internet access and had the attention span to work through the process of getting online. The ratio of legit hackers to Septemberites was a lot higher. Corporations had only the vaguest impression of how to exploit Internet users for profit. Foreign nation-states didn't yet have gigabit pipelines pumping out propaganda and misinformation. Cyberspace hadn't been industrialized yet.Most of the junk you had to c
The internet was better when it repulsed a significant portion of people.
> Early internet nerds may feel like they have a hegemony over this domain, but it belongs to the public at large, made up of all types of people with varying levels of risk and criteria for what they deem is acceptable public discourse.Today will feel early too in 100 years.It might not be what you meant but this comment comes across on its own as a bit of sour grapes.It’s less about a hegemony, and more about what was a shared experience for an actually small group of people. They
Couldn't the same thing have been said about the Internet in the early days?
The internet from 10 years ago was also less likely to remember everything you do forever. Messaging between friends happened using services that didn't save conversation history server side, public chat rooms including IRC were rarely logged, blog posts had a minimal reach, and were largely pseudonymous anyway, making the connection with a real person more difficult. Perhaps this kind of lack of consequences drove people into complacency.
The internet was open and fun back in the day. But evil people are why we can't have that anymore.
Exactly. People seems to forget that the social landscape of people using Internet in 90/2000s was totally different. As far as I remember, internet was then populated by idealist early adopters, gamers / tech savvy hobbyists. Part of this pool translated to conservative boomers and now Internet is considered as a serious thing.
Wow, you must be young. This is how the internet used to be, and people liked it.