> I can't help but remember (through my biased lenses of course) when most of the web (that I visited) looked like 4chan.
Interesting. I don't remember the web (or the pre-web internet) generally looking like 4chan in the earlier days. Pockets of it always did, of course.
But we are both engaging in a statistical error here -- we're using sample sizes of one. Your experience and mine may differ quite a lot simply because we hung out in different parts of the internet.
It really is interesting that our anecdotes can be so different. I'm assuming you're older than me (25) since you mention the pre-web internet, so I'd also guess that by the time you were on the web/pre-web internet you would've had a more developed filter than I.
My introduction to the web progressed roughly with watching my dad use BBS -> playing Neopets and Runescape -> becoming very involved with Runescape forums -> running a Runescape forum (first introduction to moderating user-submitted content at the age of 10. Yeah...) -> getting involved with video game modding communities, which meant I was spending all my free time browsing forums, following every link, completely absorbed by everything the early web's computer game communities churned out.
My experience probably would've been very different if I hadn't been able to get around the parental controls my parents used, or if I had been interested in different hobbies with a more approachable web presence.
I've been nostalgic for the "old web" lately, but I'm also very, very grateful that I haven't clicked on an inconspicuous URL that turned out to be a jumpscare, virus, weird porn, or gore in quite a while.
EDIT: I don't want to imply that the Disturbing Web == Videogame Web; that just happened to be my experience.
> I'm assuming you're older than me (25) since you mention the pre-web internet
This is an excellent point. You're younger than my eldest child, and I was active on the internet from way back when it wasn't available to the general public. That has to color our experiences -- even if only in that what you consider the "old days" and what I consider the "old days" are entirely different eras.
There is/was also a profound difference between /b/ and most of the rest of 4chan though. Not all of the site is /b/, that's just the most famous. It definitely set some of the culture of the other boards, but not to that same degree.
The video game/tabletop game boards on 4chan were fairly normal for boards at that time, and it's not like everyone who was active on 4chan was there to post or read /b/. You might dip into it for a laugh or dare now and then, but at least when I was younger it was more like the internet equivalent of sneaking into the abandoned house down the street: a "dangerous" thing that felt cool to do.
We definitely had different experiences, then! I would say most forums, even a lot of the mainstream ones, tolerated some level of 4channess. Facepunch forums ~2009 was the first time I thought "wait, are these guys actually Nazis or just think it's hilarious to act like they are?" Stickpage.com forums ~2005 taught me an important lesson in not clicking URLs from domains I don't trust -- ESPECIALLY if they end in 'hello.jpg'.
Like I said in my original post, that's the lens through which I viewed the internet. It could be different from yours.
I'm not trying to 'normalize' 4chan but, honestly, I've bounced from plenty of Discord servers that are indistinguishable from 4chan. I think it's OK to recognize that at least some part of the non-4chan web is still very 4channy.
I think the web used to be much more diverse, or rather heterogenic. Communities really differed a lot. They still can, but now there's this thing that has shifted from the TV and print media to the web in full: the public opinion.
In the past 10 years the public debate and public consciousness has finally been transfered to internet. Mostly because of social media. And while doing this, the "public" has changed from a moderate and gate-keeping environment of the press and TV networks, to something more wild and "liberated". And it has picked up a lot of traits that we would formerly observe in the more rough pockets of the web.
I don't think those pockets have changed or seized to exist, some of them have become more radical than ever before, it's just that what we consider to be the public space where everyone is grounded to has changed place.
I also have a quite ambivalent memory of the Internet from around 1998 on. Of course the standard content is more readily accessible. But more toxic stuff ranges from weird chat experiences on the IRC for instance to disturbing content. What changed probably is that a lot of stuff moved from various places of the Internet (Usenet, IRC, Torrents, Tor-like networks...) into the Web. Speaking of discussions, now they happen right at the entry doors of the Internet: at the online presences of big news outlets.
In any case, I'm quite happy with normal discussions and normal content though...
Interesting. I don't remember the web (or the pre-web internet) generally looking like 4chan in the earlier days. Pockets of it always did, of course.
But we are both engaging in a statistical error here -- we're using sample sizes of one. Your experience and mine may differ quite a lot simply because we hung out in different parts of the internet.