this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I do understand the overall point they're trying to make here. As someone who's been around the web and internet since the early 90s, there was a certain magic to the chaos of those early days.
However, this bit:
really makes me wonder about OP. 4chan/8chan/et al have caused incalculable harm. The the world would be a better place if they were completely eradicated, and would have been an even better place had they never existed at all. Sites like those aren't indicative of a different time, they're indicative of the true depths of hatred, toxicity, and sheer chaotic evil people are capable of when given an anonymous platform and no moderation.
You make a point. If we were to relive the 90s both technology-wise and before corporations put their hands on it (so, assuming plenty of websites done by users), I am sure there would be quite a few websites filled with hate, racism, xenophobia etc..
It's not just the corporate greediness that changed. It's the mentality as a whole. We live in a stressful time period where being aggressive towards other people is more of a norm than, say, creating genuine content with lots of colors because that is cool. In the 90s I feel like people were just enjoying life and did not have to worry much. At least, that's how I perceive it. Even piece of arts like music or movies felt more genuine and happier.
But the author also makes a point that corporations certainly did not make it better.
Keep in mind that a lot of the "bad" of today is just people noticing the bad that's been there all along.
People still make fun colorful content, and we make more of that now than we did in the 90s.
It's just that the hateful angry people didn't have Internet access then, and they do now.
It wasn't considered okay to talk about a lot of problems at the time, and it is now.
The Internet of the 90s is incompatible with billions of people using it.
Once you make Internet access less something that only a small group of relatively privileged people have access to, and less are interested in, and something that a more representative sample of the world can use and want to use, you find out that people more often prioritize sex, cats, banal updates on their friends and family, gossip, and to get it in a easy to absorb package.
Yeeeah I sure wouldn't want to be trans on the internet in the 90s. Or a woman, either. Or Black.
I think it's easy to remember the good parts over the bad, and to not see the empty spaces where people weren't allowed into the club at all back then. At least some of the lost civility was just a facade, and limited to a very specific in-group.
But I do think social media algorithms that prioritize rage for ads are a real problem that makes everything feel worse, too. I'm glad Twitter is going down fast.
Also I agree with you in that I could do with more happy media. But of course only the best/most popular media from prior decades is preserved and remembered and celebrated, so I think any seemingly loss of quality is likely survivorship bias + personal taste + the difficulty of finding things when there are a lot of things.
One of my own personal sources of media joy is ao3, and that wasn't founded until 2008, and only entered beta in 2009. That alone means heaps and heaps of well-organized (so well organized!) fanfiction - including humor and fluff and other happy stuff - that I love to bits and that didn't exist at all until recently. Every time ao3 goes down a crowd of distressed people flood Down Detector and exclaim about how they were just in the middle of their [insert hyperspecific fanfic here] and got left on a cliffhanger - it's kinda adorable.