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I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commerci

I had the same weird feeling reading the post. Where OP was 'living there' in 2007, I was building sophisticated apps with big teams to do things build commercial insurance systems. I don't know whether I built the things that OP missed about the old days, or paved over the things that he used as a child. If there is one thing I miss about the Internet that I grew up with, it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other.

smackeyacky 3mo ago
I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid. Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.
- Delphiza 3mo ago
  Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
  - smackeyacky 3mo ago
    I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was. Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.
  - JKCalhoun 3mo ago
    No, you've hit on the issue. The shit that is the internet now didn't come about solely due to scale—or even from the newbies migrating in via AOL. It came about because bad-intentioned and greed-driven actors moved in to make money, or to push their propaganda.
  - chasd00 3mo ago
    > The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots to be fair, I found eggdrop on almost every single corporate Linux server in all my clients in those days.
    - someonebaggy 3mo ago
      eggdrop responds to explicit commands, yeah? Very different from the ones that infest the modern internet.
      - chasd00 3mo ago
        yes, fair point. hah i was a jr admin at the time. i remember removing eggdrop and closing the holes (or so i thought) only to see it back within a few days. i put a txt file in the directory saying something like "look, you can have eggdrop here just don't mess up the server". I really didn't want to ignite the ire of a hacker way more competent at Linux than me.
- coldtea 3mo ago
  >I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. In that swearing or bad faith arguments were involved, sure. In their nature, breath, and impact outside the web, no. "Flame wars" back in the 90s were entertainment for the people involved.
  - iso1631 3mo ago
    [dead]
sanderjd 3mo ago
To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.
- AlexandrB 3mo ago
  Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
  - dom96 3mo ago
    That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected. It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.
    - glaslong 3mo ago
      This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddit-twitter-cec https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...
      - someonebaggy 3mo ago
        Wasn't there also some connection between Gamergate and Jeffrey Epstein I remember reading about?
rootusrootus 3mo ago
We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.
- JKCalhoun 3mo ago
  And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.
  - toyg 3mo ago
    yeah, the worst that could happen was some IRC shenanigans and getting a bunch of unexpected pizza deliveries. SWATing and doxxing were very rare, and nobody would try to get you fired or ostracized for saying the wrong thing.
    - chasd00 3mo ago
      idk, I remember significant predatory behavior on IRC and pretty bad stuff floating around in alt binaries on usenet.
reaperducer 3mo ago
it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures. Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty. Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.
- HappMacDonald 3mo ago
  I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?
  - reaperducer 3mo ago
    I haven't been on NextDoor in more than a decade. Does it list phone numbers and employers now?
    - iamnothere 3mo ago
      Employers? Why not add number, names, and ages of their children, as well as DOB and SSN?
- forshaper 3mo ago
  I don't know, in the mid to late 90s I was a child on BBS, and a lot of those were semi-anonymous. Perhaps it was just scale, for that. A couple hundred to a few thousand people at most seemed enough, but also mods did work. I guess there was a certain amount of effort to get going, and maybe that was also a gate. Even the speeds, perhaps, acted as a filter.
  - 1over137 3mo ago
    Semi-anon yes, but also often with real world fet togethers.
  - 3mo ago
Aurornis 3mo ago
> We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other. You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time. Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere. This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only remember the parts you liked. When everything feels new and exciting we have more energy to overlook the bad things.
- iamnothere 3mo ago
  I was fine with the flame wars, crapfloods, etc, because at least it was human (except for incredibly primitive bots). The spammers were even humans, and might even talk to people briefly before spamming again. It felt very different. Dealing with assholes is normal and possible, dealing with faceless entities and bots is like punching a wall. Generally though, I agree that Usenet was difficult after Eternal September unless you stayed on top of your killfile. Mailing lists were pretty manageable, and the phpBB era was fantastic if you found some boards you liked.
- tasuki 3mo ago
  This so much! I recently found an old email thread by accident. I recoiled in horror: the vitriol was unbelievable, people name calling each other in the worst possible way. The same people are much more mature these days. The new people in the same community likewise. Times have changed: for the better.
- TFNA 3mo ago
  I remember the bad parts, and they were less bad. Flame-war practitioners, racists, New Atheist axe-grinders, and mentally ill cranks were not exactly engaging in productive discussion, but they were still recognizable as authentic human beings with a life outside that particular obsession. Usenet and web forums allowed users to customize their self-presentation with avatars and sigs, and people often used the same nick across communities so you could see their range of interests in music or coding or whatever. Compare that to e.g. Reddit today where successive redesigns reduced features that made each subreddit feel like a close-knit community of regulars, instead trying to get people addicted to endless-scroll engagement where everyone is a stranger. Or Twitter where, if you browse through the Nitter interface on a desktop browser, you can readily see that many strident political profiles are bots with a profile photo from “This Person Does not Exist” or African/Indian Subcontinent troll-farm employees.

smackeyacky 3mo ago

I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. I don’t think it’s worse now it’s just the volume got louder and things like reddit amplifying stupid to new lows. Easy enough to avoid. Facebook and LinkedIn I would consider novel compared to usenet but it’s hard to tell the fakeness and bots from each other, or from static. Again, easy to avoid.

Delphiza 3mo ago
Yes, what we remember is interesting, especially while reflecting on posts such as OPs. The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots, neighbourhood gossipers, weaponised propaganda... we spurned people trying to sell stuff. My teenage Internet predated widespread use of email, so predated spam. Maybe my rose-coloured glasses remember a smaller number of real people and a demographic that was closer to my own.
- smackeyacky 3mo ago
  I think it’s the demographic that has changed most markedly but even then discourse still rhymed with today’s dumpster fire. Sure, that monoculture of geeks had a veneer of community but that’s all it was. Spam and bots showed up early enough I remember having to deal with garbage in email and Usenet. Even if it started with harmless crap like sending Marty Shergold style email forwards and whatnot. It was no paradise although admittedly it seemed to degrade fast from the early nineties.
- JKCalhoun 3mo ago
  No, you've hit on the issue. The shit that is the internet now didn't come about solely due to scale—or even from the newbies migrating in via AOL. It came about because bad-intentioned and greed-driven actors moved in to make money, or to push their propaganda.
- chasd00 3mo ago
  > The Internet that I grew up with didn't have bots to be fair, I found eggdrop on almost every single corporate Linux server in all my clients in those days.
  - someonebaggy 3mo ago
    eggdrop responds to explicit commands, yeah? Very different from the ones that infest the modern internet.
    - chasd00 3mo ago
      yes, fair point. hah i was a jr admin at the time. i remember removing eggdrop and closing the holes (or so i thought) only to see it back within a few days. i put a txt file in the directory saying something like "look, you can have eggdrop here just don't mess up the server". I really didn't want to ignite the ire of a hacker way more competent at Linux than me.
coldtea 3mo ago
>I remember a lot of bad natured Usenet flame wars. In that swearing or bad faith arguments were involved, sure. In their nature, breath, and impact outside the web, no. "Flame wars" back in the 90s were entertainment for the people involved.
- iso1631 3mo ago
  [dead]

sanderjd 3mo ago

To me, "gamergate" - or I dunno, the "alt right" thing more broadly, it's hard for me to remember which thing begat which, or maybe I never knew - was when I first remember thinking "what's with all the nastiness?". I was on twitter back then, and it felt to me like some kind of flood gate opening.

AlexandrB 3mo ago
Gamergate was definitely an inflection point, though my opinion on it has changed throughout the years. I think it was the first internet squabble where throwing around accusations of "isms" became a common tactic. And in defense of what? "Gaming journalism" is as bad as it's ever been. There's a real "access media" problem in the industry as well as a laser focus on social issues at the expense of almost everything else. Mostly though, it's just a bunch of hype (wo)men for large games publishers. I wish we could get the kind of cutting, acerbic game criticism that Pitchfork delivered for music in the early 2000s - the medium would be better for it.
- dom96 3mo ago
  That’s not how I interpret gamergate. Actually I view gamergate as the staging post for MAGA and Trump getting elected. It was a great trial run for flooding the zone with lies and outrage to defeat progressives. It worked then and continues to work.
  - glaslong 3mo ago
    This is documented even. Steve Bannon is directly quoted talking about leveraging gamergate as a new way to flood the zone, and as a conversion pipeline for young men to the alt right and maga politics. https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddit-twitter-cec https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/23/us/gamergate-harassment-reddi...
    - someonebaggy 3mo ago
      Wasn't there also some connection between Gamergate and Jeffrey Epstein I remember reading about?

rootusrootus 3mo ago

We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.

JKCalhoun 3mo ago
And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.
- toyg 3mo ago
  yeah, the worst that could happen was some IRC shenanigans and getting a bunch of unexpected pizza deliveries. SWATing and doxxing were very rare, and nobody would try to get you fired or ostracized for saying the wrong thing.
  - chasd00 3mo ago
    idk, I remember significant predatory behavior on IRC and pretty bad stuff floating around in alt binaries on usenet.

reaperducer 3mo ago

it is the trust and self-policing. We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. I think it's because back in Usenet days, most people posted their real names, home addresses, work addresses, and telephone numbers as part of their signatures. Now there is zero accountability for anything anyone says. Go ahead and lie. There is no reputational penalty. Maybe what we need is a re-birth of forms, but with accountability. Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached to each message. I bet everyone would be a lot more civil.

HappMacDonald 3mo ago
I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?
- reaperducer 3mo ago
  I haven't been on NextDoor in more than a decade. Does it list phone numbers and employers now?
  - iamnothere 3mo ago
    Employers? Why not add number, names, and ages of their children, as well as DOB and SSN?
forshaper 3mo ago
I don't know, in the mid to late 90s I was a child on BBS, and a lot of those were semi-anonymous. Perhaps it was just scale, for that. A couple hundred to a few thousand people at most seemed enough, but also mods did work. I guess there was a certain amount of effort to get going, and maybe that was also a gate. Even the speeds, perhaps, acted as a filter.
- 1over137 3mo ago
  Semi-anon yes, but also often with real world fet togethers.
- 3mo ago

Aurornis 3mo ago

> We were on forums (even usenet) and got along. Now it is all walled gardens, rage bait, racism, and people shouting at each other. You’re remembering the good parts and forgetting the bad parts that you looked past at the time. Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars. You could find civil posts if you filtered through content but the ugly parts were everywhere. This is classic nostalgia: Looking back you only remember the parts you liked. When everything feels new and exciting we have more energy to overlook the bad things.

iamnothere 3mo ago
I was fine with the flame wars, crapfloods, etc, because at least it was human (except for incredibly primitive bots). The spammers were even humans, and might even talk to people briefly before spamming again. It felt very different. Dealing with assholes is normal and possible, dealing with faceless entities and bots is like punching a wall. Generally though, I agree that Usenet was difficult after Eternal September unless you stayed on top of your killfile. Mailing lists were pretty manageable, and the phpBB era was fantastic if you found some boards you liked.
tasuki 3mo ago
This so much! I recently found an old email thread by accident. I recoiled in horror: the vitriol was unbelievable, people name calling each other in the worst possible way. The same people are much more mature these days. The new people in the same community likewise. Times have changed: for the better.
TFNA 3mo ago
I remember the bad parts, and they were less bad. Flame-war practitioners, racists, New Atheist axe-grinders, and mentally ill cranks were not exactly engaging in productive discussion, but they were still recognizable as authentic human beings with a life outside that particular obsession. Usenet and web forums allowed users to customize their self-presentation with avatars and sigs, and people often used the same nick across communities so you could see their range of interests in music or coding or whatever. Compare that to e.g. Reddit today where successive redesigns reduced features that made each subreddit feel like a close-knit community of regulars, instead trying to get people addicted to endless-scroll engagement where everyone is a stranger. Or Twitter where, if you browse through the Nitter interface on a desktop browser, you can readily see that many strident political profiles are bots with a profile photo from “This Person Does not Exist” or African/Indian Subcontinent troll-farm employees.