Comment by Karrot_Kream

I came on-line at the tail end of it, when the denizens of the old were trying to find their footing in the new. IRC, mailing groups, early phpBB boards. This means I could've missed some stronger forms of gatekeeping, but the ones I do remember were all what I'd consider pretty good and desirable: it was gatekeeping based on knowledge, or interest in getting one. That is, all natural gates where the act of crossing them ensured you also could enjoy and contribute to the commons. And, importantly, they were mostly gating only write access, not read access.

The overall feel was, the gatekeeping served to bounce off trolls (before that name was common), and to redirect clueless newbies onto a path where they could either go away, or stay, learn a little bit, and then arrive at the gates again, only to find them wide open. Contrast that with the "cozy web", where the gatekeeping just tries to protect the community from the entire outside world. That's a huge change in overall feel - friendly and inviting vs. apprehensive and afraid. Viewing people as potential friends by default, vs. viewing them as potential enemies.

> and making fun of the normies ("I may be a nerd but look at Bill Gates, one day I'll be your boss.")

RE that, I may be biased, but I find it fully justified. It's not like nerds won this in any way - STEM interests, mastery of skills and concept outside of normie culture approved list (i.e. arts and performances - sports of every kind, playing or singing music, painting, writing, etc.), intellectually deep fiction, and clear thinking in general are still frowned upon and actively discouraged by the society.

While the "revenge of the nerds" memes, "Jocks being bosses in high school, nerds being bosses at work" was a good joke / dream to discharge some frustrations over, it didn't materialize either. On the contrary - if you look carefully, most of the successful bosses are high-school jocks too, and I'm talking in fields like finance and tech too. That's because entrepreneurship and playing on the market is a jock's game, not nerd's game. You win it by looking good, talking smooth, and not caring much about the accuracy of what you say - not by knowing a lot, having strong mental models, and treating truth as valuable for its own sake.

> It was a culture I really didn't enjoy and I mostly stayed out of because everyone seemed so interested in exclusivity.

Unless you're talking about those much earlier communities, way before Eternal September, I have a different view. Exclusivity can be good, and back in the IRC/early phpBB era, most exclusivity was of this kind - that is, anyone was welcome, they just had to show minimum effort up front. Contrast that with today's "cozy web", where everything is exclusive by default, and the exclusivity is of the bad kind: secret clubs to which you get invited by existing members and/or both write and read access are behind gates that require great and ongoing investment of time and effort (i.e. keeping up with the flow of the live chat).

Maybe it's the nerd in me showing, but the cozy web is way too personal in this sense.