Comment by lizknope
5 days ago
It looks like it starts with:
>I was born in the late 1990s
>2001: The Family Computer
I was both in 1975 and my first experience with the Internet was in 1991 when I was 16. I thought it was amazing. There were Usenet forums for thousands of topics and places where nerds could talk about stuff from bands to TV shows to programming languages. There was no graphical World Wide Web (unless you worked at CERN) We had to use Archie to find an FTP site and download a file based on the name.
Does that Internet exist anymore? Well Usenet is still around but since 2000 it is mostly spam or for sharing files now.
Then the author says:
> 2012: When Everything Started Changing
I think everything changed when Eternal September happened. When I first got on Usenet the older students told me to lurk for a month and always read the FAQ before asking a question. Then I started seeing all these annoying posts from people ending in @aol.com and that was when the Internet and Usenet really started to change.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> Old usenet was full of vicious flame wars.
*plonk* (It's why kill files where created.)
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.
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.
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.
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I think this is more about us all being on platforms that value engagement and simply don't care if that "engagement" is people fighting with each other. The Internet always had whackjobs... in fact on a per capita basis I'd bet that in the early days we're praising as "we all got along" the whackjob ratio was higher than it is today and it has since regressed to the norm... but the systems structurally tended to discourage the nastiness. There was still plenty of it, but on Usenet, you could add the guy who enraged you to the point of blinding rage to your ignore file... and you could add the two guys who refuse to ignore each other to your own ignore file. In the Weblog space you could just, you know, not read that other blog that infuriates you. On custom forums the community was small and tended to evict people.
It was not paradise. But it was more workable, when the platforms weren't designed by PhDs to seek out and exploit your outrage for their ad clicks.
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The leaked Epstein files have revealed that the GamerGate "outrage" was largely astroturfed[1]. It was one of the first large-scale experiments run and observed by people like Steve Bannon, Jeffery Epstein and Peter Thiel on how "flood the zone" with outrage and contradictory information, allowing people to be manipulated for political gain.
[1]: https://clownworld.news/epstein-gamergate-chan-culture
You were never on 4chan before that I guess?
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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.
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.
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>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.
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We did not all get along. I remember some incredible flamewars on echomail, certainly, and also on usenet.
And yet those look so quaint (in scope, certainly) nowadays.
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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.
A lot of Facebook is people with their real names posting vitriolic bile in full view of their entire real life family and friends.
I don't think Real Name policies are the solve. It still doesn't matter when you interact with 1,000 random real names in the comments whom you'll never have to reconcile with in real life. The latter is the important part. The medium itself reduces people to content and encourages context collapse.
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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.
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> Something like Reddit, but with everyone's real names and contact information attached
This is what some Europeans governments are effectively trying to achieve, although hamfistedly (as governments typically do).
We definitely need a replacement for Twitter/X for mainstream journalists, politicians, and other leaders, to interact in.
I mean, isn't that just NextDoor?
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Yeah, but it does seem like there have been multiple distinct changes, rather than this just being an age-based phenomenon. I seem to be about a decade older than the OP, and I'd also say that the early '10s is when things got less fun. Although I dunno, I thought "web 2.0" was just hype (and thus bad) and that Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012. So maybe it's less of a specific year discontinuity in my mind than the article suggests.
Facebook only took off in a big way worldwide around 2010-2012 though (at least worldwide). I joined in 2009 (and long left) and I remember still having to explain to a lot of people what Facebook was.
But yeah, it's not a single point, there are many points around that time that are pivotal, like Google acquiring DoubleClick in 2008. GMail taking off around the same time and increasingly making blocking more and more other mail servers. Google and Facebook adopting XMPP and then killing off federation in 2013 and 2015 once they had a lot of users. Apple introducing the iPhone, which resulted in phones becoming the main consumption device for many people, in a very locked-down ecosystem for users, where companies can extract all the analytics they can get their hands on.
Also, smartphones made people terminally online, which strengthened network effects and made it more attractive to make social media and games addictive. That doesn't work so well if you can only access the net at night on the family computer that is shared with four people. Even though I was a student when smartphones came around, I'd only check e-mail in the morning and maybe e-mail and socials in the evening.
Within my bubble of college aged people in the US in the late 2000s Facebook was already mainstream by 2007 (and I would say 2006, even, though I'm a bit more worried that I'm misremembering that).
But yes, I'm generally in the "it's the phones" camp of grumpy olds :)
Edit: Oh I just looked up the rollout schedule and it looks like it is more likely that I started my account in 2004. It might have taken it a year (at most) to become fully mainstream among my peers after that, so call it 2005 or 2006.
It was the smartphone that completely ruined the internet. Once everyone was connected 24/7 it became the ultimate eternal September.
Absolutely agree
Web 2.0 wasn’t just hype. It was also rounded corners and glassy lozenge buttons implemented with CSS sliding door background sprites.
Web 2.0 has a few different definitions but one of them is when HTML pages started to contain significant JavaScript, and another is when websites started to be middlemen between users rather than users interacting only with the website operators.
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>> Facebook was ruining everything, and those were five to ten years before 2012
Facebook didn't even exist 10 years before 2012 ..
They said it in reference to web 2.0 and Facebook (“those”), and the start of both fell into that 5-10 year window.
Facebook was released at my university in 2004 (just looked this up), and I'm sure I had an account within the first month (as did 90% of people at the school, probably). This is smack in the middle of my 5-10 year window preceding 2012...
Mine was also around '91. I lived in a small town and so while it seemed as though people started buying more PCs a few years later I was definitely one of the few who had access to the Internet early.
Forums and chat were captivating at the time. I remember timing my after school routine to be able to hit up a "chat room" of people I had found through a random forum. And then we found IRC which changed the game.
I also got a check pretty early on the Internet for banner ads I had on my site. That was around '95 or '96, I believe. I was amazed that someone would send me money for that. The site back then was probably popular because I had an early web cam and would often have it on while I was talking in public chats or on IRC. I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore. But I remember continuing to collect those checks all the way through early college as the site changed, I ran a small forum, and started to write small how-to posts as I had gotten more intrigued with BSD & Linux around '98.
I'm surprised the timing of connection for the author, though. We had dial up first, obviously. But I got a cable modem around '96 or '97. 1Mb/s down (no idea what it was up)! Game changing for sure. Today I have symmetrical fiber to the house, yet it's not fun like it used to be. It's turned into a commodity, a utility you just require as the author points out.
I think the Internet for me changed around the time the first iPhone came out. Prior to that I feel like the Internet still had character and most generally didn't have access to the Internet from their phone, or if so it was very limited. The mobile web back then was still pretty bad, especially with all of the heavy browser components mobile devices definitely couldn't handle. Flash, Silverlight, Java, etc.
I've spent time with my kids to show them things on the Internet but for them it's very different. Access is assumed and it's generally looked at like I looked at FM radio or broadcast TV. It's hard to get excited for them when my main concern is making sure they know about data, privacy and general security. Very different indeed and feel lucky to have experienced the early Internet.
> I feel like the Internet was friendlier back then, definitely not something I'd be comfortable doing anymore.
It was a novelty, then (remember Jennicam?), but now "streamer" is just a normal profession.
Hosting a talk-show / variety-show hasn't been a novelty in a long time either, what's new is doing it as an independent creator for an audience of 20 or maybe 200, rather than 2,000,000.
What's depressing to me is that the broadcasting network still has the same old standards-and-practices censorship. Despite the peer-to-peer promise of the internet, peer streaming just hasn't taken off. And in recent years it's getting harder to have a real IP address in the first place, so that window seems like it's closing.
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Yeah, I definitely remember Jennicam now that you bring it up. There were a lot of people vying for cam attention back then, I think it's basically the inception of the influencers we see today. Then again I don't know that anyone thought it was really something of a way to make a living. Maybe a very small few, but if any of those early day cammers/streamers had tried to get a discount at a restaurant for a positive review that would have been met with confusion for sure. I guess when one calls themselves an "influencer" they know what they're after.
> I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.
The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:
The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.
That’s why this topic produces so much agreement when spoken of generically, but when the date of decline becomes the topic everyone just starts pointing to their early years on the internet as the golden age.
> The original Eternal September is about a specific year, but it has become an evergreen concept for each younger generation:
> The Internet was really cool when I started using it and everything felt new or novel, but it started going downhill later.
And you can also replace "Internet" with any other concept and you will find a lot of people in their early 40s and over (sometimes even earlier) bitching about how everything changed and it's now messed up.
> And you can also replace "Internet" with any other concept and you will find a lot of people in their early 40s and over (sometimes even earlier) bitching about how everything changed and it's now messed up.
Maybe we (humanity in general) should take a hint from that and stop messin' shit up?
I'm trying to avoid this feeling but how do I tell the difference between nostalgia and things actually getting worse?
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This is just life in general. Every generation thinks it is unique in growing older and thinking how much worse things have got since when they were young (or their parents were young). You can find examples of this in very old literature.
You can also see this in many threads here on hn.
It's more specific - the Eternal September concept is also about gatekeeping, and how a moderate barrier to entry is often good for a social space.
like the old slashdot min(uid) flex
The author is conflating the internet changed when Cell Phones entered, they were around since the early 00's but really late 2000's was it more practical and introduced the world to the Internet.
Skimming the Article I disagree with 2012/iphone 4. I think it was around the iphone 3gs, but it was when the first iphone was released did the Internet truly change, around 2007. That introduced the idea of most people to a easy portable computing device, even if just a browser at the time of release.
I'm the same age group, but was fortunate enough to have Internet access from 2000 onwards with brief access at my local library (lol) and school.
"The iPhone 5 was released. The first iPad Mini was released. The Wii U was released. Windows 8 & macOS Mountain Lion were the primary operating systems. YouTube, Tinder, & Vine ruled the digital landscape. Perhaps you even watched Gangnam Style on YouTube this year.'
All these are basically what happens after a successful forary of innovation changed how computing was done e.g. 3G.
2012 was full 4G access, though there were pockets around 2010/11 but 3G was there, EDGE, EvDO, etc that enabled interneting through cell phones.
When the "mobile first" design pattern really took off is when the Internet was handed to the masses IMO. That's when it became accessible to everyone's mom and grandparents through their phone and that really changed things from a user base perspective. At the same time, all the mobile apps started getting published and the internet, to most people, became answering the question "which app do i tap on?". Honestly, it's pretty much that way for me. The Internet, outside of work, consists of this website, my youtube app, my wikipedia app, spotify app, and maybe google news app.
I believe it was 1997 when I saw a URL on a can of Pepsi and thought, "yep, that was nice, but it's all over now."
I was born in the mid 80s, enjoyed the internet from 95-2005ish and then thought there was a decline. Seems like there is a pattern here...
I'm in your same age bracket (a bit older actually) and joined Internet mid-90's and there were already plenty of trolls and nasty, mean people. They were just fewer in absolute numbers because statistics.
Also, as youngsters, we probably tolerated those that were there much more - at least if the trolling wasn't directed at us - because teenagers are still learning life and emotions.
I bet when you were about 22 plus or minus a couple years music started to change for the worse too!
I'm roughly the same age. I miss the 90's Internet and remember getting online in mid 1991, learning about Gopher, FTP, Telnet, Usenet, IRC, etc. It was an amazing new world to explore.
I also got Internet access in 1991, although I was quite a bit younger than you. Thanks to a family connection I was able to get SLIP dial-in access to the state university mainframe which had an Internet connection. I also got on Usenet, but utilized email and gopher a lot more than Usenet. I was, by most standards way too young to be on the Internet without direct focused supervision, but the Internet was new then and nobody thought anything of it, and so I would find people who were experts in various fields and email them my questions whenever I wanted to learn about something and I was often surprised by the friendly, thorough, and reasoned replies. Long before eBird and Merlin BirdID, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology had a gopher page with a contact address, and I emailed them all sorts of (probably dumb) questions about birds when I was a bored kid stuck on a farm in the Midwest running up the long distance bill, and they were always patient and answered my questions with all the seriousness they would provide to a colleague.
I really do feel like the Internet was a friendlier, more curious, and more intellectually focused place prior to Eternal September. I remember the shift well. While, like most people, I also enjoy video games and liked being able to play online with other people (first with MUDs and later with graphical games), once more "normal" people got Internet access there was a serious and deep regression to the mean, with a sudden commercial and entertainment focus. It was no longer about intellectual curiosity, hobbies, and finding like-minded people, it became a place dominated by commercial interests and driven by advertising.
By 2007, I was part of that commercial focus. I don't think anything of the old Internet remained after 2000, to be honest, and entering the 2008 financial crisis it heavily accelerated the commercialization. Most of the current things people are dissatisfied by online were in their beginnings but already extant by 2007 and the writing was already on the wall.
If our governments decide to implement age verification, maybe we can use it to our advantage and create a new part of the internet for everyone who was in their teens/twenties when the internet became a thing. And get out of this eternal September.
I call this the first wave of Eternal September. Then you had Facebook, where all the "normies" joined the internet because of Facebook.
Then you had smartphones, people no longer needed to be home to be online.
These major events have impacted the internet greatly. I'd argue that everything and everyone being primarily on phones has impacted the web negatively since less and less people even bother using computers.
Facebook increased the interest for the average person in order to re-connect with old high school friends, then with family.
Mobile phones lowered the barrier to entry by becoming the standard gadget everyone had, and the main way people access websites and services.
I do wonder if society / the internet would be better off if we didn't all have it on our phones and would login after hours.
This is me too. First access to the internet was through a dial-up to a "bulletin board" (via a girlfriend's fathers account). From there you could launch a shell and get (I will get things wrong here) lynx, gopher, usenet, telnet (muds), etc.
Then I went to university and we got access to the internet directly there, but in the country I grew up in, it was pretty much only university students on IRC etc at the the time. Within a couple of years the commercial providers sprung up and "everything went downhill" (the sentiment being expressed here).
Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.
Spoon feeding isn't inherently bad. The issue is that the spoon went from a small pile of sugar to full spoon. Then when someone really needed help, they got lynched by a mob for asking for help because it was seen as spoon feeding.
The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being. "Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"
That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.
By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".
Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.
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They also started top posting!
>> The point is not the consumers of the Internet
A) They're not just "consumers"; people produce a huge percentage of the content, via facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc
B) The people of a society define its culture. When you change the people, you change the culture
IMHO, it's more about being a community of choice rather than elitism.
When I joined, nobody was there because they had to be. Including vendors. That's a totally different vibe than now. There was also excitement and optimism of something new, and i was youthful.
It's not elitist. It's just nostalgia.
"The change I was part of when I was between the ages of 15 to 25 was the best!"
"The change of the next generation that wasn't recognizably my peer group was bad and ruined everything :("
“Change” is just the state altering. It can be the producers and it can also be the consumers that alter that state.
The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.
How can you separate those things? The changes happened because there were more people, and those people were valuable to market too. Hosting and moderation became more expensive, so that created a form of pressure as well. It's convenient to blame the producers (I hate Facebook as much as anyone), but I don't think it's terribly useful to try to hold them accountable.
I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.
I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.
Money getting into the net as created many problems
Yes. The very thing that made the Internet sustainable, commercialization, also destroyed parts of it.
I feel like there's a tendency to lump the net and the web into the same thing, when in reality the net isn't dead, the web is
But what non-web parts are left? email lists, usenet, gopher, etc. are deathly quiet.
Torrents?
I think most of these things still exist, but as a tiny proportion of traffic, because total traffic grew so much while these old protocols shrank somewhat, but they are certainly still there.
The focus is now on applications rather than protocols, that's the bigger difference. One uses Discord, or Slack, not IRC, because their centralised nature enables them to iterate much more rapidly (IRC has barely changed in 30 years while Slack has emojis) and this leads to them simply being much better products. Email still isn't reliably encrypted.
Back in the 80s you didn't have a choice - you couldn't create a worldwide app network, so you had to design a distributed protocol that could be operated independently by the sysadmin at each site. In 2026 (really 2005+) we can do global centralised systems and we mostly don't have independent sites (as in locations) with sysadmins, so it worked out differently. There are a few "digital cooperatives" that try to bring the old model back - nonprofits that host services for their members - but there aren't many and there isn't really a good reason for a layperson to join a digital cooperative and use IRC instead of using Discord, which is where all their friends are anyway.
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Gopher is still kinda active, usenet has a few holdouts, email is as alive as ever, gemini is niche but there, IRC refuses to die, atproto is just getting off the ground, activitypub is a thing in some circles, matrix is around in some circles, xmpp is the only non-shit messaging standard, and I'd argue the "platforms" of today (facebook, twitter, instagram, tiktok, youtube, etc.) aren't really the web despite being web based
Podcasts aren't exactly a pre-Web aspect, but they're a non-Web form of online content. Some quite good.
Usenet is coming back through the cracks. Google finally graveyarded support and all the spammers went with them. It's pretty low traffic except for some select groups, though. comp.lang.c and talk.origins will never die. :)
until mid 00s broadband internet was not widely available outside US/Europe/Japan. At one point I think over 10% of the internet was just Russia. Even today Russia and Japan make up about 5% of the internet each. you can see this in early 4ch culture especially
this meant most of the people on the internet were middle class suburban from the developed world, educated, literate, and technical. importantly, 3rd world bot farms and relentless content grinding had not yet taken off. that is a big difference
Oh hello, me! ;-)
>I think everything changed when Eternal September happened.
That was a critical turning point, to be sure. But what came about with the conjunction of social media and the smartphone around 2010 was a much more impactful one, as it made the Internet undergo extremely essential changes, not just a qualitative (and quantitative) modification of its userbase. The Internet became the media outlet for hypercommercialism and late-stage capitalism, basically, and all the societal changes we've seen since are byproducts of that paradigm shift.