As someone who was also on the internet already in the early 90s (I expect there are many of us here), I've long found it interesting how much of a social shift it's undergone. In the 90s I had online friends that I had never met in person, through various kinds of online games or interest groups. Agora Nomic, the CONLANG/AUXLANG mailing lists, rec.arts.int-fiction, the list goes on. I learned a lot about the world and about people different than me—the line in the OP article about diverse countries and religions felt deeply familiar to me for this reason.
But, in 2019, I don't really have anything like that anymore. The internet's a bigger place, but my corner of it feels somehow smaller. With very rare exception, I don't accept friends on FB unless I've met them in person. Sites that I actively participate on are either very large (so they might be diverse but aren't small-group-of-friends-y) or very small and comprised entirely of people I already knew irl.
Time marches on and the world changes, I know. But when I reflect on this line of consideration, it really feels like the internet didn't live up to its promises.
I'm a bit younger, was a teenager in the late 90s going on IRC and various message boards but I've often mused on the same shift in internet culture.
To me it seems like these groups still exist but you have to stay within your age range. For example I hang out with 35-45 year olds on IRC still. And we all have Jabber with OTR or Signal. None of us have much of social media accounts.
The kids today still have these little communities, they use group chat just like we use IRC. It might be Discord, Skype, Snapchat or something more obscure but it's still the same old rules of the group chat. It's a tight knit group and the rules that have applied to group chats since forever still do apply.
So just because you don't have those connections anymore doesn't mean the culture is all that different. Kids still feel like the main part of the internet (fb, ig) is shallow and meaningless so they band together in their own little communities around special interests or through school and their IRL community.
I envy kids today because I see how new trends spread virally between schools just because they have these group chats with each other. For example recently the kids in my town were hacking e-scooters through some trick that was spreading on their group chats. I still have no idea how they did it, I'm out of the loop.
Blame the spam, scammers, malware and trojans combined with pervasive technical ignorance which conspire to recommend an extremely conservative course of action for laypeople.
While there certainly have been changes to Internet usage patterns, I think all experiences are still possible. In the early 90's when this mother's group was taking off, my usage of Usenet wasn't very social, it was more like the image boards of today--downloading content and running uumerge if you know about that.
Later in the 00's, I got into Wordpress blogging and found some nice communities, as well as created my own. (And I suspect this submission is related to the interesting mommy-blogging submission the other day). I also got on Facebook and reconnected with high school and college acquaintances, but like others here, I mostly restrict fb to people I know personally, so it's not a discovery of new social circles (and I find I don't have much n common with those people but it's nice to share news now and then).
I think my most social online communities have come through forums starting in the 00's and continuing to now. HN is a big one for me obviously, but also some local area forums. I moved away from family and friends during this time, and through local forums, I connected with people near me that I didn't know previously. Oddly, even though they were local and we did have a few meet-ups, our connections and discussions online were much stronger.
But the closest experience I've had to the international connections of this mother's group has been in the past 2 years through Instagram. I started posting only photos of a niche hobby, and by using and searching for specific hashtags (once I found them), I connected to others doing the same. And they are all over the world, US, Europe, Austalia--mostly English-speaking but not all. I mean, when was the last time you connected with someone from Luxembourg (and I actually once knew friends in Luxembourg but I never communicate with them any more). Granted these Instagram connections aren't as deep as with the mothers group, but through likes and comments we support each other's work and help out with tips and advice. All that to say it's not about the tools, it's how you use them.
The key is I use my Instagram account only for this hobby and only to view, search, and post related images and comments. So all my followers and following are related and only in this one community. I do actually browse/consume other topics on Instagram (pretty travel pictures for example), but I do that with bookmarks in a browser, not in the app with my timeline and following.
These small communities grew, disbanded, migrated or merged. Interactions have become quicker, shorter, whereas they were dragged out just killing time with off-topics.
Reminds me of my mom. She was _super_ into the internet between 1995 - 2000.
It's weird to think about now, but she was in IRC channels all day. She was really into the early pirate music scene. She even started dabbling in web development.
Eventually, she just lost interest when life got to busy and over time she become less and less technical.
Which I think is a shame, that would of been so cool if she became a developer.
No offense, but 50-100 years for a profession is absolutely nothing. Engineering fields have been around for hundreds of years. There’s even arcane shit in the Bible about punishment for engineers of houses they approve collapse on people.
Similarly, going back another couple of thousand years: Code of Hammurabi (c. 1700 B.C.E.)
228. If a builder build a house for a man and complete it, (that man) shall give him two shekels of silver per SAR of house as his wage.
229. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapse and cause the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.
230. If it cause the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put to death a son of that builder.
231. If it cause the death of a slave of the owner of the house, he shall give the owner of the house a slave of equal value.
232. If it destroy property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he shall rebuild the house which collapsed from his own property (i.e., at his own expense).
233. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction meet the requirements and a wall fall in, that builder shall strengthen that wall at his own expense.
I know this isn’t Reddit and I’m probably going to get downvoted for pointing this out, but it’s ‘would have’ - it only gets mixed up with ‘would of’ because we often use the contraction ‘would’ve’ in speech.
I was on an IRC channel hosted by this guy. Maybe 5-6 people all 13-15 back in 2007. They were/are my best friends. For over 10 years we talked. The guy who ran it worked for the CIA and got arrested as the person responsible for the Vault7 hacking tools leak. Now the server has been taken by the FBI and I had to have a very interesting conversation about all the shit we said over the years. Now he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison.
Yes, but it's just as easy to reject true things that people say because they violate preconceptions. We see at least as much of that as the other on HN. And don't forget that the site guidelines include "Assume good faith."
Right, I'm sure all of the repeditive HN frontpage content about facebook, tesla, shitcoin, etc is posted "in good faith" and not to accumulate fake internet points.
I met my wife on Usenet in 1993, in alt.psychology.personality. Funny, I was just thinking about that yesterday. I guess all the Usenet couples who will ever exist have already been formed.
There were a decent number of couples who met online, before meeting online meant a dating site. There were BBSes, Usenet, and some early discussions sites. I'm sure people could compile a surprisingly large list of ways people met. A few years later, I even met my wife on LiveJournal, before that went weird(er). So while someone certainly could do a documentary on such things, I don't think any specific couple from that era should be holding their breath for it.
My brother-in-law met his wife on a MUD. I met my wife playing ToonTown online. Any avenue where folks interact will create friends, enemies, lovers, and life partners.
I’m not sure. There used to be some late night ad things that would show a recorded video dating profile and you would call in if interested. The internet wasn’t the first to that.
True, but the "friction" of meeting and interacting with remote people was greatly improved, if that makes sense. Thus you simply met more people, especially at a time where folks interested enough to get on the Internet were probably very similarly minded to you - which was quite rare for the time at least in my neck of the woods.
Some of the first BBS' I remember from the late 80's/early 90's were dating oriented or at least had an active personals section, so it certainly was a constant evolution.
I wonder how often these long distance couples have met up and one or both of them has realised they are not actually attracted to the other. It must happen sometimes. I'm surprised it doesn't happen most of the time. It says something about how human attraction works, but I'm not sure what.
I am aware of a documentary where a mail order bride from Japan did not like her intended. She worked until she had paid off the cost of her ticket to Canada and then married his brother.
My mom was a science fiction author and always shared discussions from the Heinlein Forum on Prodigy with me, ca. 1992-1995. Those forums were small enough and focused enough that people built real friendships and eventually had a few gatherings.
I miss that sort of thing. I don't know where to find it now. The small, close-knit community thing is actually a benefit of walled gardens but I don't know where I'd look now.. The Well? I understand it's moribund at this point.
When I got my first PC around 1981 or 82, one of the first games I played was Microsoft Adventure, a text-based game. My mom recognized the game. It turns out that in the late 1970s, she and her friend had played and solved the game -- entirely over a teletype printer & modem (no screen). She knew all the hints except for one -- the extra point for Witt's End, which I think Microsoft added when they bought the game.
I was thinking about some of the things I did online in the late 80's and early 90's. One of my favorite things was late night chatting on Mars Hotel at mars.ee.msstate.edu.
I was in the comp sci program at McMaster University. Until I got to the university, I had only ever connected to dial up BBS systems. Once I got on the internet, I was hooked and Mars Hotel had lots of very fun and friendly people hanging out late at night.
Fellow msstate alum here! I have a fond memory of taking COBOL in like 2005. We did assignments on a server in the business college. One night an infinite loop slipped into my program. It crashed the server and brought down the MIS website.
Out of curiosity, which groups do you follow, and what do you use for access?
The dorm I used to live in originally had their internal discussion forums as private news groups, but must have switched over to a forum in 09 or so. Apparently normal people couldn't use usenet.
There are many posts here of people who used usenet and IRC years ago who didn't necessarily have technical backgrounds, yet now people state that services like usenet and IRC are too technical and most people aren't capable of making use of them.
What happened is that people are in fact getting less technically able. The predominant tech-related skill now consists of dabbing at a screen in order to consume goods and entertainment or seek validation, as dictated by Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook ...
Nobody has figured out a way to monetize IRC (to use it to steal personal information or serve ads), so no effort has gone into wrapping it up into this kind of easy-to-consume product.
People use “couldn’t” where “would prefer not to if a less-technical option is available, even if some peripheral features are lost with that option” is more accurate is what is happening.
Non-technical people can and will use IRC or usenet when that's all there is, but they aren't willing to pay the cognitive price for the extra power those offer over simpler web tools when the latter is available.
In this specific case? Only the nerds used it, and most people didn't even know it existed. We could have educated them about it, but making a forum and sending out an email was easier.
No understanding of what happened with Usenet is complete without the important aspect of how it came to be used for sharing massive amounts of binaries, most of them copyright infringing.
Even so, it wasn't until a lot of major ISPs got rid of their usenet servers that it was more of an effort to access. Verizon had theirs up to about 2008 or so, yet binaries were commonplace well before that.
I've used both at length, and still use Usenet to this day. Besides reddit being centralized, how are they dissimilar? Is it really that bad if an analogy for a readership that likely have no clue what Usenet is?
Reddit: community moderators can delete spam from the group and stop flame-wars in their tracks; a lot of the noise posts don't show up for most people because most people are looking at "hot" instead of "new";
Usenet: it's on you to create filters and mute threads that you don't want to see. Everyone is their own moderator. (Pretty much exactly in the way that you're the moderator of your own email inbox, smart recipient-side filtering and DNSRBLs notwithstanding.)
It seems like a small difference, but I feel like it's actually responsible for large social differences in the resulting communities.
In a Usenet group (or, equivalently, an unmoderated email list), the spam and flames are visible to everyone, and everyone is forced to engage in at least a bit of the work of moderation—even if it's just to copy and paste a blacklist from an FAQ message into their NNTP client's config. This, IMHO, makes people less likely to overreact to negative/offtopic/trolling/spam posts—they're inured to them, in about the same sense that an immune system that frequently interacts with real threats is less likely to get an auto-immune disease; or about the same way that people who live in the projects are less likely than people in gated communities to call the police just because someone they don't know is walking down the street.
I agree. Many of the mechanics that grew up around dealing with NNTP made for a very different experience compared to web forums. And I think we've lost something as we've moved on from it. (It was also a right pain in the ass in several ways... I just prefer the balance that made us strike to the dynamic that grows in a web forum now.)
I was cringing because I think the comparison between reddit and late usenet is accurate, and I don't like that. Usenet was different at one point, that went away, and the cringe is because newsgroups looked a lot like subreddits by the end. You couldn't have had early 90s NANAE on reddit, and I don't think there is any public forum that is in the ballpark now.
I should probably add that I'm saying this as a fan of and avid user of reddit. I'm unhappy about what we lost as Usenet wound down, not complaining about reddit.
Before the eternal September, the structure and form of usenet encouraged discussions that were just qualitatively different than what I enjoy on reddit these days.
My cringe wasn't due to a bad analogy. I was cringing because I remember what usenet was like once, and the last time I spent much time there, it had lost so much of what made it good that, yes, comparing newsgroups to subreddits is essentially on point, now.
I cringed because the analogy is on target and I don't like that as much as I liked usenet before. Comparing it to reddit gives a pretty good picture of late stage usenet for people who didn't experience it. At one time (I think including the time period this article is covering) there was more to it than that, though.
Of the platforms that are still used enough that casual users know about them, Reddit is probably the closest to Usenet, so it gives a broad idea for those unfamiliar - enough to understand the context.
I don't disagree with that. Especially when it comes to late usenet. I was cringing because usenet started better and wound up at a point where reddit is a good comparison, not claiming it was a bad analogy.
Old tyme internet user here who doesn't get the slightest bit of cringe out of these statements. Reddit is the closest analogy to usenet which relates to later adopters. And perhaps the WWW technically existed in 1993, it was really 1994 when it burst onto the scene.
(Internet was originally non-commercial but there were terminal services where you could email or usenet. Outside of universities and tech corps, ISPs where you could get a personal IP connection weren't much of a thing prior to 1994. There was also pretty much zero discussion on the web in the twentieth century.)
Maybe it's a case of only remembering the good, but I feel like usenet in the '80s and early '90s fostered discourse that was very different than what I see on reddit today. I agree that it's a fair comparison against what usenet eventually became... I was cringing because it is fair and usenet was once better.
I'd agree with that in at least part. Reddit is bad at fostering discussion, one of my major complaints against it.
But its overall role is similar to Usenet: A space for topical discussion on a wide range of topics.
Usenet in the late 1980s was small. 880,000 people with access, about 140,000 actually using (posting) to it, and a core group of probably only a few thousands. John Quarteman's book The Matrix includes Brian Reid's stats from DEC at the time. It grew some by the early 1990s, but the Eternal September still hit with force.
Reddit's user stats are roughly 2,400x that, with 330 million MAU. Scale matters. As does design UI/UX, and a good newsreader >>> Reddit's Web interface.
I recently (like, a year or two ago) got onto a slack group that's just maybe a dozen people, all of us men in our late thirties to early fifties, and man, it's nice. You forget in this era of very large social media sites how small, closed groups feel. Reminds me of corners of the internet 20 years ago.
I want reddit, but on given topics, but without newbies. Age might be a nice filter, but being able to chat about {fitness, running,travel,entrepreuneurialism} away from the crowds that barrel in with "Does anyone else ever..." or "Where/how do I..." 1st year stuff.
I thought about a social media concept called "scene" where people are initially randomly matched based on common interests, but then the group is closed to new contributors at a certain population count. The idea would be to simulate groups that form based on geographic proximity (local scenes and clubs) without the same distance constraint, because for me those local groups have always been more meaningful than online forums, with a few exceptions mostly tied to local groups. The group population cap would limit the number of noobs in healthy scenes.
There are a number of private subreddits somewhat similar to this. They randomly add users once a week, and every week they kick any users who haven't posted or commented in the subreddit during the past week. It creates a fairly tight-knit but always changing group.
Ugh, yes! I'm really into, running, for example. I go to Reddit running subreddit, and it's all just "I completed a 5k and lost 50lbs" or "I'm just getting started, here's a picture of me I'm so proud." Great, but not anyone who regularly runs it's a drag and annoying. Would love some more advanced topics with people like me who run 60+ miles a week, and are objectively a bit fast.
Have you tried just starting threads on what interests you? Just start talking, the people you are interested in might pop up, and a group might eventually self-select.
I've actually never been on reddit, but that's how it has worked in pretty much every online community - including the rKids group from this article.
It's especially annoying for tech related topics, since apparently the average subscriber to a programming subreddit is a 16 year old gamer who has never coded before and spends his free time installing linux distros
I have a similar slack group. About 7 of us. Some of us worked together remotely. The rest were added slowly. All members are adults well into our careers. It's mostly tech articles with a terse discussion and the occasional lunch Meetup for those in the same city. Probably one or two conversations a week. We might occasionally ask each other advice or pass along potential business, but overall it's an incredibly high sign to noise ratio.
It may grow, but I wouldn't want it to be much bigger than it is now.
Or "roll your own." Pick whatever tech you prefer -- Slack, Google Groups, Discord, whatever -- decide on some theme for starting a group, start inviting people.
The problem with that is the channel you join will either not be advertised very well or it will be huge (because it's advertised well). It's hard to find a good, small channel if you don't know anyone to refer you. You can't just go to /r/DiscordServers/top
This kind of private groups are really popular amongst extended family or friend groups in countries where apps like WhatsApp are popular (which is seemingly every country but the US)
It’s crazy how which platforms are popular has shaped how people communicate
I’m from Argentina. Here the we have WhatsApp groups for everything. Friends, coworkers. Even is common to have groups that are subsets of groups from a bigger one, because of more affinity or willingness to discuss certain topics that will spam the bigger one. So yes, I can pretty much confirm that this private groups change a lot the way we communicate.
Facebook messenger seems to be the replacement for WhatsApp in North America, at least in my circles. I have dozens of Facebook messenger groups, with different subsets of friends and activities.
I've been in a similar Telegram group for nearly 4 years now, some of us knew each other from elsewhere online, the rest were strangers before. Its a nice thing to have.
I've never thought that much of larger scale social media, it always felt like shouting out into the void, especially Twitter.
But, in 2019, I don't really have anything like that anymore. The internet's a bigger place, but my corner of it feels somehow smaller. With very rare exception, I don't accept friends on FB unless I've met them in person. Sites that I actively participate on are either very large (so they might be diverse but aren't small-group-of-friends-y) or very small and comprised entirely of people I already knew irl.
Time marches on and the world changes, I know. But when I reflect on this line of consideration, it really feels like the internet didn't live up to its promises.