Comment by dolia
13 hours ago
I feel that too many people are confusing arguments they agree with with logical arguments. Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with.
I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
> I have no reason to believe that back in the day when internet was only for nerds the situation was different.
Strong disagree. Having lived those times, it really really was different, and there are a bunch of reasons for it.
1. First, back then (90s, early 00s) there was very little financial incentive to participate in discussions. BBSs, IRC, forums etc. were mostly non commercial. People joined without any expectation of making a profit, just for "the fun" of it. And for something new, interesting, evolving. Way less perversion of topics for monetary gain.
2. People back then made a clear separation between being online and offline. We literally had the term IRL coined. So a lot of discussions were "in abstract" and much less prone to be taken literally or seriously. A lot less identity / ideology stuff as well. Having a clear separation made it easier to not confuse your real world self with your online persona. Having an idea debated wasn't about you / your identity.
3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign. Until then the Internet was seen as "not important". It has changed a lot since then.
4. Entry barrier. This might sound elitist or disparaging, but it really was a thing back then. The people online were mostly tech inclined, or curious enough to learn. It was much more educational, and (linked to point 1 above) everyone wanted to learn the cool new thing, without any monetary incentives. Much more sharing of pure knowledge, helping out and so on. It of course changed over time, but the early days were really something beautiful. I have very fond memories.
Just some counterpoints:
> 3. Politics was much less divisive back then. There was political debate, but again a bit more "abstract" and theoretical. I'd say the moment when this changed was 2008s US presidential campaign.
At least as one of the "first ones" from the AOL days (too young for the Eternal September, old enough to have gotten online too early) - most of "us" were young and didn't care about News. We were more interested in Mr. Burns getting shot and whatever internal drama was happening in our online fan clubs. I remember 9/11 happening, but instead of switching websites I continued to read online webcomics and my "Learn VB in 24 Hours" book.
A lot of us were just younger then and our social groups were more focused on other things. I am in an indie game Discord right now that's clearly not my demographic anymore. I don't interact, I'm just there for game updates. But, those kids are making their own memories right now. I think as adults, we just sort of ~forgot~.
The internet was different, for sure. But the post you are responding to just stated that they don't really believe arguments were rational and logical back then. I don't think any of your points refutes that.
It was different in several ways, one was far fewer people enforcing norms or doing marketing in those forums, far less moderation and tone policing, and far more tolerance (even rejoicing) into getting into deep technical argumentation and "well, actually" debate. No "influencing" and mere marketable "content" creation either.
Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).
Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.
Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?
> far less moderation and tone policing
This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.
In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.
The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?
That’s a ZIRP problem. You didn’t have massive sprawl communities until the investment was there to build systems to keep Nazis and trolls away.
Slashdot really highlighted this for me - if you followed the site and the core forum of founders, dealing with moderation was horrible. The writing of CmdrTaco over the years really made it sound like it just made him miserable.
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FWIW nerds pre-date the internet. We used to get together in user groups, like at public libraries, and talk tech, logic and reasoning.
Your interpretation of behaviour is slightly off. Nerds use discussion to explore what they don't understand. There is no value in discussing something you already know everything about. What could you learn from that? If someone claims that something is rational or logical, they are seeking feedback to see if others can poke holes in where it is not rational/logical. Think something akin to Cunningham's Law.
> Most of people, when they claim that something is rational or logical, actually mean that it's a position that they agree with
I'd claim a relevant axis is argument as deduction (common in mathematics) vs argument as rhetoric/persuasion (common in politics).
It's not that the former type is necessarily rational. "All birds have wings, planes have wings, therefore planes are birds" is the former type of argument and fallacious, whereas "are you really comparing birds to planes?" is the latter type.
I feel the former can allow deeper exploration of some topic, but sometimes involves things like playing devil's advocate for stances outside of social norms - and requires others to engage at that level rather than taking the rhetoric path of shaming you for even considering it.
It wasn't different.
Indeed.
I remember Usenet in the 90s being 50% interesting conversations mostly about niche topics and 50% randomly devolving into flame wars in larger communities.
Even "Eternal September" as a concept was something from around 1993/1994 right?
Same for the 2000s era online-bulletin-board. I often go to thegearpage.net and am appalled at the amount of shilling, dismissals and disrespect, but then I remember that in the 2000s the main guitar forum was Harmony Central, which was mostly kids calling other kids moms names.
EDIT: But coldtea makes a good point about some (IMO) more recent changes: tone-policing, excessive marketing. There's IMO also a different attitude towards curiosity today.
Discussion quality is, in my experience, mostly a function of group size. Online discussions scale better than in person, but there's a limit.
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I am remembering the same Internet. I got into lots of flame wars on comp.software-eng and before that on Compuserve and various FIDO boards.
It was never a very placid or friendly place. There was more tolerance for vigorous debate than there is now. The debate didn’t change many minds, I suppose.
I think there is a difference when you can assume that the other person probably isn't a complete idiot. Compare Reddit's technical subs and HN and there is a vast difference in general civility. Non-nerds look at this site's CSS and their mental parsing breaks entirely, so that filtering still exists.