Comment by mikestorrent
1 month ago
To be fair, back in those "good old phpbb days", people trolled just as hard as anyone does now, and maybe worse, since the consequences of it were not as visible, and getting in trouble for things you said online was virtually nonexistent. Everyone used a fake name, and while it might be possible to dox someone, it wasn't an operational concern for anyone who just wanted to be a jerk...
> people trolled just as hard as anyone does now,
Trolling had (has) a different character in smaller, more private forums: it tends towards more effort. A low-effort troll just gets banned and loses their platform, so the troll needs to at least ride the line of legitimacy. Drawing the line back to Usenet, the sheer effort that went into some trolling garnered respect if not necessarily acceptance.
Drive-by interactions reward volume since the 'game' isn't repeated. Curated social media feeds like Twitter are even worse; the troll has their own audience predisposed towards acceptance and the victim is just set-dressing.
I analogize this to in-person interactions: ostracization is mutually costly. A small group loses a member who was at least making a 'warm body' contribution, but the ostracized person loses a whole set of social benefits.
So true. I was one of those trolls, so I know it well; playing the role of a heel. People would know and remember you by avatar and custom forum titles and a huge garish signature... it cemented you as a person, gave you a face in a way that Hacker News or Reddit threads do not.
The trolling that happened on IRC would put modern day trolling to shame. Imagine posting a link to an exe claiming to be one thing but would actually contain Back Orifice (a Trojan that gave you remote access to the victim's pc). People would blindly download exes and run them on completely unprotected Windows 98.
To be fair I do miss the "old Internet". Less corporate, money grabbing, more freedom.
It's not the internet that changed, it's the people.
I'm an old timer, and I've been there since the beginning. I remember the beginning of the eternal summer, and the gradual decline that came after.
One of my first jobs was actually 3rd shift help desk for a regional dial-up ISP. The people that called were mostly drunk southerner's who, at the time, seemed hopelessly non-technical.
Looking back I now see that any one of them knew much, much more about how the internet actually worked than a the average modern user, and were probably more worldly in general than todays average user.... and there are billions more of them now.
We thought that global access to information would democratize everything and expose people to a higher level of rhetoric and thinking. We just KNEW that the best ideas would rise to the top of discourse naturally and the world would magically become a better place. We were so very wrong. It's turns out that more than cream floats.
Well, of course it's the people. I started online in '94 and it was exclusively the territory of nerds for a long while, even as everyday folks started to use the web and email for basic things. Truly, we should appreciate having places like Hacker News for still giving us a place to post like we always used to...
Plenty of forums still do exist, but I wonder about their future as we age out. Car forums in particular were absolute godsends for amateur mechanics - not just to look up info but to ask a self-selected group of interested folks who were happy to help for free out of a sense of community for fellow fans of their brand.
I think the cDc made some effort to brand Back Orifice 2000 as a remote administration tool and in reality it really was pretty good for that; wonder what happened to those guys