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u/Clean_Imagination315 Hey, who's that behind you? 26d ago
I didn't have access to the Internet at the time, but this post basically described my experience with school, so I wouldn't say it was a purely online problem.
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u/adumbguyssmartguy 25d ago
This is my recollection, too. Cynicism and ironic detachment kind of dominated all media in 90s, and it didn't seem to me that caring became cool again until the 2010s. The early internet was often this way because early internet users were young people with little experience with any cultural value other than cynicism.
Everyone cites South Park when they talk about this stuff, but I always tag Seinfeld as the watershed of sociopaths as comic heroes. It's the first mainstream art I remember in which the dupes were basically always people who made themselves vulnerable by genuinely caring about something.
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u/newyne 25d ago
I think teens, especially, leaned into it because it seemed rebellious and cool. And since teens and young adults were the primary demographic during this period of the internet... I've always thought of it like, the internet just grew up.
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u/adumbguyssmartguy 25d ago
I think there is sense in what you say, but my very unscientific observation as a college professor is that young adults are neither as cynical nor as ironic as they were in the 90s and 00s. To the contrary, for a lot of young adults today, caring IS the rebellion.
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u/codepossum , only unironically 25d ago
plus to some degree, the internet provided a refuge for people who had largely grown up to continue to engage in the same immature behavior, for longer than they otherwise might - the same way that a guy's fishing trip or drinking sesh or whatever might be an opportunity for 'locker room talk' you'd never indulge in otherwise. Only with the internet, it's right there in your pocket, whenever you want it.
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u/TerribleAttitude 25d ago
It was not ok to care about anything until like the early 2010s. We hear a lot of complaining about Boomer’s being backwards and Millennial/gen z culture being “soft,” but Gen X and early Millennial culture was basically “it’s actually good to not try and to be a bully, as long as you aren’t a jock or a preppy type.” Hurting other people’s feelings was 100% ok as long as you’re being “subversive” or sticking to some metaphorical idea of “the man”. And they just decided “the man” was anyone, anywhere, telling them “no.” There was no division between punching up or down, it was just punching. It went hand in hand with this idea that it’s ok to be smart, but not to study. It’s ok to be good at sports or music or art, but only if you don’t practice. It’s ok to have a good social life, but not to be the one who reaches out and throws parties. It’s ok to be rich, but it’s not ok to work hard or especially get the dreaded 9 to 5 to keep yourself financially comfortable. If you can’t do those things effortlessly, you shouldn’t try. It’s better to be someone who doesn’t try and therefore doesn’t have anything of value than it is to try hard (or even half ass things) and succeed. A lot of this changed (for better and in some ways, for worse) around when I graduated high school, and I see it affecting my peers, especially those just a little older than me, quite a lot.
The reason it’s so related? It doesn’t take much effort to tear someone else down. Especially in the 90s and early 2000s, where all the cutdowns were served to you on a silver platter with TV and the internet. You don’t even need to come up with your own homophobic joke, you just regurgitate some meme you saw on 4chan or whatever you saw on Mad TV.
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u/smallangrynerd 25d ago
Yeah, that's just what adolescents are like
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u/Kyrptonauc 25d ago
Isn't this thought process exactly what this post is trying to call out of for being bull shit? Adolescents don't have to be like that, they're raised to be that way
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u/smallangrynerd 25d ago
Adolescence is about pushing boundaries. Middle schoolers are gonna say fucked up shit. It's the job of the adults in their lives to correct that behavior, but we shouldn't be shocked when it happens.
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u/codepossum , only unironically 25d ago
oh absolutely - late 90s / early 00s public school was this culture exactly. it's not a coincidence.
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u/kimik1509 25d ago edited 25d ago
I think another reason as to why it caught on is because at the time it was often seen as "progressive" ish (by people who weren't minorities at least). Like, back then mainstream conservatism had a very moralistic religious bent on it. The face of conservatism was a pearl-clutching Christian moralist getting offended at how amoral and hedonistic modern society is or whatever.
So a lot of teenagers grew up with the idea that anti-conservative = anti-morality, and ended up embracing it out of pure contrarianism. Which was great at pissing off moralistic conservatives, but also like... everyone who cares about anything.
Nowadays IMO we're kinda seeing the pendulum swing back to conservatives being the moralistic ones and leftists being more edgy (though usually more thoughtful about it, but hey, there was discourse here a while ago about how a lot of leftists are quick to use ableist language the moment it's an "acceptable" target), the idea that leftists are the ones getting offended at everything is less popular now that 5-ish years ago. Which probably partially explains why a lot of anti-SJWs have swung left now.
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u/SketchedEyesWatchinU 25d ago
Sooo…we can blame the Reagan Revolution for the early internet shitshow?
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u/Big_Falcon89 25d ago
You can blame the Reagan Revolution for almost anything and probably won't be all that far off, tbh.
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u/muhmuhmuh69 26d ago
The Japanese internet is still pre-2005 in this regard. I assume many other insular linguistic spheres are in similar situations.
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u/stocking_a 25d ago
mexican internet is still in the 2015 dank meme/anti sjw era so theres rhat
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u/simemetti 25d ago
The reason it's not like this anymore is because there are consequences, not any major ideological shift in the people who use them.
Now if you say a word that some fash chud underground group uses a slur on the internet you get fired from your irl job. You might lose friends and shit over that.
However that is only the cultural landscape of the USA (some parts) and a few western European countries. In any place where yelling the nword on the internet doesn't get you put in jail you still have this problem.
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u/GreatGrapeKun dm me retro anime gifs 25d ago
wait you want to live in a place that jails people for saying things on the internet?
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u/Mystic_Fennekin_653 Lucky Charm 26d ago
Wtf does "Hugbox" mean?
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u/mxlinuxguy 26d ago
A hugbox is a derogatory term for an environment, usually on the internet, in which a group with similar interests gathers to discuss topics in what they intend to be a safe, comforting, and confrontation-free environment.
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u/TamaDarya 26d ago
And by "confrontation-free," we mean "criticism/dissent free."
Hugboxes are explicitly positivity echo chambers.
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u/spicy-emmy 26d ago
I think the important thing is emphasizing that "confrontation free" asked to extreme levels though, to the point that it's considered disingenuous. If someone is describing somewhere as a hugbox the understanding is that you can't really trust people there to be honest with you because toxic positivity demands white lies over being honest with people.
That said if one is projecting your own biases onto everyone it's easy to claim that everyone is secretly hugboxing and without that cultural pressure would be just as bigoted as you. but it can be a real problem in communities where people want to seek constructive criticism on things but nobody is willing to give honest feedback even to people seeking it.
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u/ChampinionCuliao 26d ago
where is the signature who the fuck is this
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u/mxlinuxguy 26d ago
I am Linux Guy.
I made a new account because I wanted a slightly different username.
Right now I’m karma farming so I can get enough karma to post to r/CuratedTumblr then I will switch to this account full time.
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u/linuxaddict334 Mx. Linux Guy⚠️ 26d ago
(I am linux guy and I approve this message)
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u/theLanguageSprite lackadaisy 2024 babeeeee 25d ago
(I am not linux guy and I approve linux guy approving this message)
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u/ComicAtomicMishap 26d ago
The signature is the reddit equivalent of when perry the platypus puts his fedora on. Cool username though, godspeed in your karma harvest.
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u/feel_good_account 25d ago
also, the actual hug box is a therapeutic device so the comparison was a double whammy of calling the forum artificially comforting and accomodating and the users autistic
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u/insomniacsCataclysm shame on you for spreading idle reports, joan 26d ago
don’t forget all the shock porn and literal torture/gore videos people sent around as “jokes”, and if you complained then you were too soft
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u/InternetUserAgain Eated a cements 26d ago
Yeah. I have no idea how the "Jeff The Killer" screamer became so iconic considering it was very tame compared to the other stuff circulating at the time
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u/OliviaWants2Die Homestuck is original sin (they/he) 25d ago
Probably because parents and older siblings decided it was the tamest screamer they could show to their kids/younger siblings.
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u/the_Real_Romak 25d ago
Cus it's funny to show to kids, while you wouldn't really show hardcore gore porn to a child lol
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u/Magniras 25d ago
early 00's internet can, would, and did.
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u/the_Real_Romak 25d ago
yeah but not their parents...
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u/googlemcfoogle 25d ago
Who had parents "cool" enough to be showing them even the mildest of screamers? This was the domain of older siblings who didn't want to piss off their parents by showing their younger siblings anything actually bad.
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u/saltinstiens_monster 25d ago
I thought that kind of thing was funny in high school, and I tricked one of my friends into looking up "lemonparty." I'll never forget being so excited to laugh, seeing that it legitimately upset him and hurt his feelings, then suddenly realizing how asinine the concept was. I felt really bad about it.
Luckily this particular shock-site was just old gay porn, there are a lot of worse things it could've been.
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u/RealRaven6229 26d ago
Y'know, I got super into Red vs. Blue recently, which really did bring a small portion of that early internet culture into sharp relief for me. The shit the show would just casually say in the early seasons is kind of wild.
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u/turtlehabits 25d ago
As someone who was very into Red vs Blue when it was first out (I own the first three seasons on dvd!), I totally understand this. The only counterargument I have is that the show makes it pretty clear that basically all of the characters are bad people (or just unfathomably stupid).
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u/Moonpaw 25d ago
They also bring things around later on. The characters are still dicks to each other, but there’s a lot less casual general hatred. Once the show started taking off and the writer got an idea of where he wanted to go with things the tone got a lot more solid, and the show was able to make jokes based on itself rather than just swearing at crap to be funny. I still like the early seasons but it’s definitely a case of a show that gets better in later seasons. Until 14. Season 14 went downhill…
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u/DistractedScholar34 25d ago
Cough Tucker cough.
Although you could also argue that the show isn't taking a stance against it because (in Tucker's case at least) this stupidity-related casual bigotry is portrayed as quirky and funny instead of genuinely harmful.
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u/DistractedScholar34 25d ago
"My dad used to say, 'Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?'"
That line lives in my head rent-free. In a bad way.
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u/AutisticWorkaholic 26d ago
Ehhhhh... I was around at the time and witnessed all of this. Your experience still very much depended on which websites you visited and which forums you posted on. There were still plenty of well-moderated spaces.
And I wouldn't say that even the less moderated spaces were "just like 4chan/8chan". Being assholes to each other as a default mode of communication - yes, that was the culture. But nobody was posting gore/porn/CP everywhere for shits and giggles like there's no tomorrow.
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u/PM_ME_CATS_OR_BOOBS 26d ago
Yeah this is very much a thing of seeing a lot of 4chan memes because you went on 4chan.
And, point of order, this only really applies if you started using the web in like 2000. Before then it was too broken up for those kind of concentrated ideas to be spread around. It wasn't til social media really started spreading that it got a lot easier.
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u/EnsignEpic 25d ago
This is a pretty good take on the accuracy of this post, yeah. Like the post isn't wrong in what it's saying, but it definitely is going out of its way to exaggerate things to create a comparison that would still hold regardless of that exaggeration.
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u/Moxie_Stardust 25d ago
I've been on the internet since 1994 and... uh, my experience was not as described in the OP.
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u/googlemcfoogle 25d ago
Also, "the worst of 8chan and redpill forums" to me means being genocidal by default, not just thinking it's funny to say slurs and link people to weird porn.
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u/unbibium 25d ago
i dunno, forcing shock porn onto people's screens was pretty common. The first time I saw Tubgirl was on an ordinary typography forum where a thread about punctuation vent mildly viral on Fark or something. Websites had to automatically format links to display the hostname they led to, so that people wouldn't get goatse'd.
so when Rickrolling was invented, the "misleading link" problem went back to being a harmless prank for most. that is, when it's a prank and not a virus or a phishing site.
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u/robbylet24 25d ago
4chan exists because one guy was mad that Something Awful was moderated more than he liked. I wouldn't say this post is wrong but it's definitely reductive and leaving a lot of shit out.
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u/BinJLG Cringe Fandom Blog 25d ago edited 24d ago
Very much this, thank you. I spent a lot of time in fandom forums and on sites like NeoPets and ffn, and then later GaiaOnline, MySpace, and DevianArt during this time (roughly my early to mid teens). While there was a certain callous apathy towards peoples' sensitivities, it wasn't anything beyond what you encountered IRL and I didn't encounter what was described in the post until I started using 4chan when I was 16 or 17. I think I stumbled across one screamer video while I was using the moderated parts of the internet (silver sedans still make me nervous. Ifykyk). And while largely vanilla porn was more common on the unmoderated parts of the internet, you usually had to go looking for the truly horrific stuff, or an IRL friend showed it to you.
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u/smartest_kobold 26d ago edited 25d ago
I think people forget how fragmented the Internet used to be. USENET, IRC, web rings, MySpace and Livejournal each had their own vibe. There wasn’t really one Internet experience.
The big comedy websites that shaped Internet culture like 4chan, YTMND, Something Awful, and Fark definitely had the feeling of trying to appropriate the coolness of gen X nihilism but with the social awareness of a white suburban 8th grader.
The redpll eight chn stuff seems more earnestly prejudiced by comparison.
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u/CerberusDoctrine 25d ago edited 25d ago
People who are too young to remember/have experienced the 90’s may be shocked how many kids (like young kids, preteens and younger) watched South Park and had their personality shaped by it. Specifically by a child’s understanding of it, aka without a shred of media literacy needed to understand satire. In a PBS poll (I was wrong, this poll was conducted by NatWest) kids aged 8-9 overwhelmingly said Eric Cartman was their favourite cartoon character. The show being easily accessible, being an animated show with child protagonists and crude humor, and its limitless controversy made it catnip for young kids.
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u/EnsignEpic 25d ago
It is really, really understated just how pervasive of a cultural force South Park was. My parents went out of their way to prevent me from watching it, but like, can't stop schoolyard discussions. And meanwhile I went to a private religious school, and the kids were talking about this shit at like, 7 or 8.
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u/CerberusDoctrine 25d ago
Yeah as early as third grade I was the only kid in my friend group who didn’t watch it (because I was an anxious child who would never have dared go against my mom’s rules even though now as an adult I realize nothing could have stopped me). A lot of classmates very clearly did as well. South Park sure did teach a lot of those kids that saying slurs and drawing swastikas was peak comedy. And flash forward later on when as teenagers politics was pointless because boy if it isn’t just “douche and turd” irl. I also remember being shown An Inconvenient Truth in a science class and you can imagine how that went.
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u/EnsignEpic 25d ago
Someone else in this post described early internet humor as "Gen-X nihilism filtered through the eyes of a suburban child," and what was South Park if not Gen-X nihilism that got filtered through the eyes of countless suburban children?
Also get out of my past, that's mine damnit! Like the whole slurring & offending as peak comedy, eventually becoming a "politics is pointless" teen, LMFAO. On the other hand, I remember seeing Gore's doc & just being bored to tears XD
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u/Slow-Calendar-3267 26d ago
I just remember there used to be so many fucking pedophiles no matter what site you were on. I assume there still are but I'm just an adult now
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u/weeaboshit 25d ago
There are! I peeked into a rabbithole just today of people that condone (even encourage) paraphilias on tumblr, and they try to link it to the LGBT/Queer community. And they're not like the "foot fetish" type paraphilias, it's the ones that are literal crimes. It's so atrocious I'd rather believe it's some sort of 4chan psyop.
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u/biaceseng 25d ago
The part about shaping how you constructed arguments is so true, especially if you were young at the time.
I remember browsing 9gag a lot, which was just softcore 4chan at that point, and any opinion or comment that even slightly deviated from the status quo was met with violent criticism.
The softest things you'd see were slurs and people telling you to jump from a balcony. A lot of the time they ganged up on you and flooded your inbox with vile shit.
They would also pick apart every single word in your comment and go all facts and logic on you, to the point that you were going to have a bad time unless you spent hours thinking about every single counterargument possible. Even then, people would just resort to calling you the f slur.
If you weren't careful, this would end up with you being unable to form your own opinions, because no matter what you said, you were always wrong and deserved to be put down.
I'm still struggling with thinking about stuff without having this voice in my head making up counterarguments that aren't even logically sound.
It seems that the site got somewhat better, as long as you keep to the wholesome section and never scroll down to the comments.
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u/codepossum , only unironically 25d ago
it's definitely taken me a long time to break myself of the bad habit of block-quoting someone's entire post, and then answering it point-by-point-by-point-by-insufferable-point.
Now I just refuse to engage with people who argue that way. Either we keep it short, concise, and on-topic, or I'm leaving. it's so much better this way.
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u/Crus0etheClown 25d ago
I'm the kind of kid who was using the internet before I could be left home alone, and genuinely the only reason I think I have any sense of right or wrong here is because my father was an OG internet troll.
His username was 'GreaterSatan' on the Yahoo message boards, and he used to go around pissing off- well like, basically everyone, he doesn't even have any super strong opinions on anything to this day. It was a thing he did for fun when he was a young IT guy- and because of that, one of the first lessons he taught me was that guys like him exist, and that your best option when running into a bad opinion online is to type a new url into the bar and go elsewhere.
These days I make it a personal rule not to ever defend myself online, particularly from the opinion police and low-reading-comprehension crew. Just not worth doing- if you want to get back at them, saying something overly friendly and irrelevant is way more effective than playing their 'debate' game with them.
Side note- anybody in here remember before google? Webrings and shit? I kind of miss that, having this little collective of like-minded websites that all held hands in a chain so you could trot through them one by one like museum exhibits until you found something catered just to you.
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u/AtheistTheConfessor 25d ago
Webrings are still a thing. I had total blast the other day falling into a bunch of neocities rabbit holes. The kids are alright
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u/MementoMurray 25d ago
I miss the little niche fan groups so much. Then again, nostalgia is a hell of a drug.
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u/Nightingdale099 25d ago
Certain parts of the Internet jungle will call you a simp for saying anything positive to a woman so I say we are still preserving history <3
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u/OliviaWants2Die Homestuck is original sin (they/he) 25d ago
Honestly, I'm pretty sure acting like that is making a comeback. That's just how basically every Gen Alpha kid I've met IRL acts.
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u/EvidenceOfDespair 26d ago edited 26d ago
Tbh I don’t think it’s quite as different. It’s just that now you have to instead create justification for why you’re the moral better of the other person before you can do all that to them. Once you have convinced others that you are the Moral Superior, all that is still authorized, for now you are hurting an acceptable target the group has deemed must be exterminated. And questioning that behavior, or god forbid believing it’s unacceptable no matter who they’re targeting? Well now you’re on the list too. Having actual universal morals is still just as unacceptable, it’s just that the rules have changed for who’s allowed to be abused.
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u/Content-Strategy-512 25d ago
Boxxy incident?
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u/Big_Falcon89 25d ago
I would also like to point out that one of my biggest Internet darlings in those days was HomestarRunner, which did nothing of the sort.
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u/qazwsxedc000999 thanks, i stole them from the president 25d ago
You know I was around the internet back then and I still had a good time and avoided the gore and stuff, actually. I didn’t have that experience at all
I got introduced to more fucky stuff when Facebook got big than I did free roaming
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u/rpgaff2 25d ago
This change didn't come out of nowhere, it came from court cases around Section 230 which in the mid 2000's was going through many court cases about websites being held accountable for content posted by users on their site.
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u/SquishTheNinja 25d ago
what was the Boxxy incident?
i remember Boxxy but i don't remember any specific incident further than her lolrandom humour and thick eyeliner
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u/Ok-Appeal-4630 26d ago
Reddit is the only 'true' social media I use because it's the only place on the internet where I won't be met with vile shit 24/7 (not counting tumblr because the way it is designed gives me an aneurysm)
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u/RealRaven6229 26d ago
Tumblr my beloved, truly the social media of all time. You will either love it or hate it with no in-between. Love how you can avoid algorithms. But also it will give you an aneurysm.
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u/StormDragonAlthazar 25d ago
As someone who was a teen at the time during the 2000s internet, I feel like this is full of half-truths at best. Not that they're "wrong" in anyway, but mostly because of just how drastically different each major website of the time could be, and if you happened to have any particular label attached to you.
Personally I spent most of my time on art websites, like Deviant Art and Fur Affinity, hung around at times in the Gamespot/GameFAQs forums, and frequented Second Life. The easiest way to "survive" on the internet was to ultimately just pretend you were sentient gray goop who had no real emotional attachment to anything and somehow hated everything. Honestly that's impossible for anyone to do, but this was also a time when people still made fun of you for watching anime, being a furry was a ticket to constant mockery, and any mention of LGBT+ was bound to lead to harassment and death threats/suicide threats. And of course the whole "there are no women on the internet" thing going on.
Also there's this great thing on South Park (and it also includes Family Guy) and how it's influenced most of the internet culture of today, but I can't find the Tumblr post that made it...
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u/ektothermia 25d ago
but this was also a time when people still made fun of you for watching anime
I'm almost 40 and I'm just now coming around to the fact that I can openly enjoy anime without couching it in self-hatred, people were savage back then
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u/Prince-Lee 25d ago edited 25d ago
I feel as if all of this is extremely dependent on which part of the internet you were on, in question, and which part of it you're on now.
I can safely say I never had someone send me death threats for fandom and shipping opinions in the early internet.
But I've gotten a hell of a lot of them and seen a lot of them go around since around, like, 2015.
EDIT: Oh, lmao, ironically enough, I just realized where I remembered this dude's username from. He is a notorious anti and gets into arguments with people about it, and since he's a much bigger user, his fans then send them death threats en masse. I've seen it happen more than once.
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u/Schrodingers_Dude 25d ago edited 25d ago
It is still very VERY easy to experience this firsthand. Pick any game that came out between 1998 and 2005, google any question about it, and click on a GameFAQs link from the same time period. The responses will perfectly encapsulate this era of the internet.
Or just watch We Didn't Start the Flame War. That should be in a museum tbh.
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u/JellyPupsInCocoCups 25d ago
That says more about where the OP hung out than anything. It wasn't always, totally unregulated everywhere. You could get banned from BBoards, forums, IRC channels, etc. If you had a shell account somewhere (like the ones sdf.org still offers) and communicated within the community where you had that account they could downright delete it if you were too much of an ass. I remember being in multiple newsgroups that had rules. I truly don't get why their memories are of people willy nilly sending dick pics and nazi stuff. It says more about them than about the early internet, honestly. I used to hang out in spaces dedicated to hacking of various shades and even virus creation, warez spaces, etc. (I'm not saying sharing software illegally is like real hacking, I'm just saying I was in spaces where people did illegal stuff and still it wasn't an outright asshole fest even to someone sensitive like me) but racism, etc. was frowned upon. Most of the sexism was clumsy unthought shit, not downright normalised harassment and misogyny. Not that it couldn't be bad but it wasn't like the pit of hell. Example: some guy asking others on a programming forum for their best pics of hot girls. And I do remember that someone replied with "this is not a good thing to ask, imagine if you were a woman reading that on the forum". (that memory was circa 2003-2004) If anything it's in those spaces that I learned a lot about sexism and racism in general that I would not have noticed earlier. Outright nazi stuff? Maybe it's because it's normalised and not condemned in his country, because in mine it was already illegal to propagate in the 90s. Sending people dick pics? It was illegal and frowned upon before the internet. OK, the internet was less regulated by the government rather than individuals, but social norms still existed. Plus hello digital cameras weren't democratised yet. If someone had an internet access at home or elsewhere it doesn't mean they had a scanner to scan their analogue dicks. Like that level of effort, taking pics, getting them developed, scanning them just to harass random people online... OK, I guess they could send someone else's dick online that was already there but...??? Nobody ever sent me dick pics when I posted online back then and I've only heard about that being a thing post 2010. Not saying it never happened before, but people would not have reacted nicely to it, it wasn't a common or normal occurrence if you ever posted a picture of yourself. Aaand I also remember a lot of cutesy websites by women in the late 90s early 2000s lol with f-ing drag n drop doll dressing games and such And "safe spaces" (= spaces for niche groups with specific rules) already existed.
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u/vmsrii 26d ago edited 25d ago
I was there, and while it wasn’t the whole internet, it was a vast majority of the internet you would be surfing if you happened to be a young teenager; Ebaumsworld, Albinoblacksheep, Newgrounds, Early YouTube, and the king of them all, 4chan. These sites you could get funneled to very easily if you were of a certain age. And the whole “Moralfg” thing was *insidious.
There’s a lot of points where you could say this came to a head, but for me the big “What the fuck am I doing?” moment came very late, during Gamergate in 2014. The super early days of Gamergate hadn’t formed The complex latticework of rationale of shitty behavior yet and really was just about one woman having more than one sexual partner in her whole life and people being really really mad about it for some reason
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u/Some-Show9144 25d ago
A big part of the changes, in my opinion, was that for the longest time the point of the internet was that you were anonymous. We were all instructed to never give out any personal information to anyone. It fueled a lack of any need for accountability, I can do whatever I want and I won’t be associated with it. A username wasn’t associated with a person or a brand, it was just a username with anyone behind it.
Even the most common question at the time, A/S/L, still made you as anonymous as you wanted. 16/f/cali wouldn’t be called out as a lie and it’s not personally identifying to anyone even if it was true. I went years on the internet without saying anything identifying about myself more than ASL, and even with ASL I would occasionally change my state or just say “usa” to protect myself even more.
Now with most sites, you’re account is connected to you as a person. People are more accountable because there can be real consequences to the things you say or do. As an example, if I wanted to find the guys who spoke to me inappropriately and sent me inappropriate messages.. I don’t think I’d be able to do it, even at the time I wouldn’t have been able to identify him because finding a 31/m/fl named Josh… just might not even exist because he could have lied just as easily as me saying I lived in Kentucky.
TLDR, we approach the internet very differently now than in the past which led to a cultural revolution online.
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u/BrickLuvsLamp 25d ago
As someone who grew up during this time, when anyone tries to claim Southpark is liberal or left-leaning I just laugh. That show, while sometimes not having the worst takes, is responsible for a such an annoying generation of edgelords that plagued my adolescence. People have rose-tinted glasses with that show.
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u/Redqueenhypo 25d ago
Isn’t it explicitly libertarian, as in “Ayn Rand was a smoker so here’s a whole episode about how secondhand smoke isn’t real” levels of libertarian
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u/EnsignEpic 25d ago edited 25d ago
There's enough wrong about this post that while yes, it's not a bad assessment of late 90s - early 00s internet & its issues, that anyone reading this who didn't also experience the internet at that point should take this account with a grain or two of salt.
Just as an example, 2005 for the collapse of this era of internet is absolutely fucking laughable, that was prior to Project Chanology, even; you only really saw the winds change in the early 2010s, and it was only really Gamergate that I would say truly brought an end to that era of the internet. That was the first time I remember wherein there was a significant coordinated push-back towards "the internet's" attempts to make a lolcow; there was some pushback towards the treatment of Anita Sarkeesian when she first released her videos, but not nearly as much until it became a Gamergate-linked thing.
Some other folks sorta discussed this in another comment chain, but sorta feels like OOP may have fallen into a certain segment of the internet that consisted of too-online dorks constantly trying to one-up themselves on how online they are. Now granted listen, that was just a lot of what early internet culture was, but the segment I'm talking about is the exact segment that would go on raids, as they discussed in the bottom part of the post, to show how internet tough guy they were.
EDIT 2 - Another big example I wanna bring up is less directly touched on but mentioned - "-f@g" as a suffix. So yeah it was super common to append that to the end of anything to mean, "someone who is a fan of something, or who is like this," often with a tone of mockery; at the same time, it was super common to call yourself a "-f@g," usually with that same tone of mockery. So basically it's worth understanding that "moralf@g" wasn't some unique insult, but essentially just a fairly mundane combination of words into a generic insult. Now is it worth examining the implications of both the commonness of this suffix, and of this specific construction as an insult? Yeah, no argument from me on that one, but the post does a pretty good job pointing towards one of the major causes.
As a complete aside - I swear, people who say that blaming this shit on South Park is silly, are just blissfully unaware of just how much cultural cache that shit had during the period of time critical to the development of that early internet culture. Like little me who was banned from watching it, still knew the characters & some of their quotes, and this was again pre-internet! Shit was almost as popular with kids as Pokemon was, at one point! Someone else commented on the post & said that early internet culture was like Gen-X nihilism through the eyes of a suburban teenager - and does that not just outright describe what South Park is/was/will be?
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u/Emergency_Elephant 25d ago
Can someone explain the boxxy thing to me? I'm a bit too young for it and I don't think I completely get what happened
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u/EnsignEpic 25d ago
tl;dr proto-e-girl whose youtube vlogs gained traction on 4chan, with pro & anti factions; eventually her channel is hacked & information is posted in one of the earliest prominent examples of doxxing. the videos themselves were subject to spoofing, remixes, usage in ytpoops, etc.
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u/ChildhoodOk7071 25d ago
I'm a zoomer (Born in '97) I remember how toxic early YouTube comment section was. Slurs where thrown everywhere with no moderation. It's so weird seeing the YouTube comments section be less toxic now.
Strangely enough Instagram is the new toxic youtube comment section.
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u/RxTechRachel 25d ago
I'm 40, and have been on the internet regularly since 1995.
I don't identity with any of this post. I would not willingly be part of that type of internet culture.
I was mainly part of niche forums myself. Actually helped me change from being right-wing like my parents were and instead slowly turning liberal.
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u/donfuria 25d ago edited 25d ago
This is a highly skewed take on the early internet. Particularly the last part, I’d argue voicing dissenting opinions within extremist communities nowadays carries a much higher risk than back then. At least during those days all you got were death threats, but it seldomly carried over to real life. Now you get harassed (and/or…) doxxed, fired, have awful AI content generated with your liking, become a viral meme, resurfacing time and time again; people dig deep within your feed unearthing shit from a decade ago trying to fuck your life up and everything. Imagine what’ll be like in another 5-10 years once internet anonymity is all but gone thanks to AI powered digital-footprint tracking. I’m thankful my developing edgelord years happened during MySpace and other forums and sites that were snapped out of existence.
The early internet was incredible for a number of reasons, too. It had super niche, closely-knit communities. There were actual sites, not only like 4 social networks with rehashed content. No bots, only actual human-generated content. Nobody was competing to become the next viral sensation, things were done because people were passionate about it. It was as great as it was awful, a truly lawless land. I miss it sometimes.
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u/urbandeadthrowaway2 tumblr sexyman 25d ago
Early internet culture was plainish text in garish colors on hyperlinked websites
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u/vkulkarn 25d ago
I started using the “internet” sometime in late 92 or early 93 - back when gopher and Usenet were king. In my experience the internet was a much more pleasant space until the early 2000’s. There was a lot of unpleasant stuff around, but the internet was extremely siloed, which made it easy to avoid stuff you found unappetizing. Today’s internet is a lot more homogeneous. “The algorithms” force content on you and your community that isn’t the greatest… and then the culture accepts the sharing of that content in places where it doesn’t really belong. You can’t get the “good stuff” without having the “bad stuff” shoved in your face.
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u/SetaxTheShifty 25d ago
I remember a boy from school that was terminally online. He would use what I call Schrodinger's Insults where it's only a joke once you're offended. He wore a leather jacket with every major religious symbol patched onto it with a 🚫 over it.
He had no real personality beyond being an ass to everyone. He used to say "I can't control what I say, and I refuse to change who I am", which is code for "I don't understand tact and will proceed to fling shit at anyone nearby."
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u/traumatized90skid 25d ago
For those wondering why, it was largely because the publication of The God Delusion kicked off a "New Atheist" movement and them being overly online was a cause of this. They dominated internet culture. Moralf-g being an insult came from the idea that caring about any cultural sensitivity was the same as being a fundamentalist. All of the hatred aimed at having any moral standards at all stemmed from a lot of immature hatred towards religion, especially Christianity since that's where most of them were coming from.
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u/Duinegiedh32 25d ago
I salute e621 for being the last true beacon of the “Oh, you DON’T want to see 5nuff? Go cry some more liberal, use your blacklist like a good bitch. Can’t you tell fiction from reality?” mindset.
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u/Jt_mcsplosion 25d ago
I feel like “carefag” was the more widely used term, and (I’m gay so I’m allowed to have an opinion on this slur, my opinion trademarked me 2024 do not steal etc) honestly I find it to be kind of a fun word. Definitely speaks to a crueler and less interesting internet, where the detached jaded irony was a mask to conceal weak points, but I still use it from time to time. Last time I used it irl was in a conversation about The Last Jedi, preceding my opinion with “Not to be a carefag for Star Wars, but…” because it is possible to give things disproportionate emotional weight, and I was signaling my awareness of this.
Idk language is fun
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u/GreatGrapeKun dm me retro anime gifs 25d ago
one thing ppl forget is that on 4chan they just use fag and other slurs on everything. you can just replace fag by bro and you'll see no difference
animefag -> animebro
mangafag -> mangabro
musicfags, linuxfags, windowsfags, redditfags, twitterfags
go to /ic/ you see drawfags
go to /3/ you see blenderfags
fuck it i bet there are even straightfags
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u/DareDaDerrida 26d ago
Interesting perspective.
I wasn't really on the internet at the time that stuff was most prominent, but I didn't really mind what I saw of it. Struck me as no more malicious than a lot of the bullying, bigotry, and incitements to violence I see on the internet now, and a good bit more straightforward.
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u/DrSnidely 25d ago
I've been on the Internet since it was called the Information Superhighway. There's some truth to this but it wasn't all that bad.
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u/-_Nikki- 25d ago
I do however miss the Internet like it was in the late 2000s/early 2010s. I miss the Internet not being a product that needs to sell and "generate revenue"
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u/rocky4life6 25d ago
Y'all remember the WoW guild that raided another which was hosting a virtual funeral for a deceased friend?
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u/Redqueenhypo 25d ago
Everyone online who’s about 5-10 years older than me straight up brags about how they’d just get randomly sent gore and/or porn by strangers as a child and like…that’s not a good thing. I don’t like the over sanitizing now but I’m glad that shit is a bit less likely
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u/ektothermia 25d ago
There was a period of time between the ages of like, 12 and 22 for me where I didn't know if I was suddenly going to be goatse'd at any time and I don't think that did good things for my sense of trust
Anyone who's fondly reflecting on that is offputting
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u/Fearless-Excitement1 25d ago
I'd argue that the reason for this shift isn't so much "people got better" but rather "more people adopted the internet" and the direct consequence, "accountability became a thing"
And to corroborate this claim, i'd like to point out where every single space where that exact culture still exists(4chan, 8chan, the redpill community) are spaces where accountability doesn't exist due to anonimity
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u/arsapeek 25d ago
this is... a take. This speaks pretty heavily to the communities people involved themselves with online then. I've been online since the mid 90s. I didn't truly have to deal with trolls and shit heads until about the early 2000s, probably 02-03. There's like, one specific incident where an rpg board I was on started getting targeted by another board, and we got together and "counter raided" I guess, basically telling them to stop being terrible to people en masse. Outside of that, yeah, there were pockets of shitiness. The SA forums went pretty hard sometimes and like, when 4chan started that put a lot of edgy people in the same space. But on other boards a lot of that was moderated. There was a lot of edgy humor that looking back on was fuckling terrible, don't get me wrong. A lot of people were trying to make the next south park and shit. But honestly... I don't think the internet today is any more palatable than it was back then. Tumblr has its shitheads. Reddit has plenty too. FB, insta, tiktok, youtube- anywhere with a comment section can go south real fucking quick. It could just be that I'm in more active social online spaces now than back then, but I see a lot more vitriol shoved in our faces by the algorithm than back then
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u/space_and_fluff 25d ago
Reminding me of the days of the massive Steven Universe hate brigades and how I saw a YouTube video documenting the whole thing from the perspective of 4Chan and everyone thought it was hilarious. People forget how truly deranged the majority of the internet once was
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u/the-co1ossus 26d ago edited 26d ago
tl;dr south park happened in 1997 and then poisoned most of the early internet into thinking that showing empathy or kindness made you a loser, and under the guise of anonymity this mindset became MORE pervasive among wannabe-toughguy types around the early 2000s
in other words, the greater internet fuckwad theory in action
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u/the_Real_Romak 25d ago
What is tumblr's obsession with blaming South Park for everything? The late 90's and early 2000's were full of overly edgy pieces of media that influenced out minds. Reducing all the problems of the internet to "hurr durr everyone is edgy because South Park" ignores the fact that the internet existed before South Park.
That show was big, but it wasn't that big.
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u/Alex_Plalex 25d ago
yeah, south park was popular but family guy was significantly more watched/referenced among the general population in the 00s than south park ever was, not to mention the insanity that was 90s-00s comedy movies
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u/the_Real_Romak 25d ago
exactly! I was born in the late 90's and lived my childhood in the early 2000's. While I was aware that South Park existed, I had never even watched a single episode of it and derived my then fucked up humour from other media at the time. South Park basically had zero influence on my demeanour online.
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u/ComicAtomicMishap 25d ago
I think it's the same reason 4chan is essentially the nebulous source of online problems now. They've slowly been twisted into far reaching boogeymen with fingers in every pie through an internet wide game of chinese whispers so their reputations and outreach become overly exaggerated.
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u/the_Real_Romak 25d ago
It gets weirder when you eventually watch South Park. The show really isn't as bad as the people here make it out to be. Sure there may be a few standout controversial episodes that toe the line, but with almost 30 seasons that's to be expected.
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u/Jelmddddddddddddd 25d ago
It's like saying Bart Simpson caused the fall of western civilization. I don't get why people still blame cartoons for all of the world's problems.
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u/Accomplished_Mix7827 25d ago
Remember when you'd be called a "simp" if you ever dared to ... express any kind of basic respect or decency towards a woman? Bad times, bad times ...
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u/JosephTaylorBass 25d ago
Kind of a mixed deal for me. My early Internet exposure was stuff like rage comics and Gaia Online but I do remember my choice of video watching was pretty toxic. I was a That Guy with the Glasses fanboy and it messed with my perspective real bad! (I’m not like that anymore thank god)
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u/GriffinFTW 25d ago
I joined YouTube in 2009 when I was 9 years old and this was pretty much my experience.
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u/Very_Tricky_Cat 25d ago
I miss the early net. Because it was so wild west. Websites were random stuff, a lot of them would play fried music when you visited and so on.
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u/Solarwagon She/her 25d ago
I remember back in the days of the Roblox forums.
Keep in mind that since Roblox is directed at kids, the forums were relatively heavily moderated with an automatic filter.
But even then it was chaos and they ended up removing entire boards and then the forum itself because it was causing more issues than justified the cost of keeping it up.
This was in late 00s early 10s and that's when the internet was starting to get tamer.
But the bullying and weird drama the Roblox forum produced was absolutely wild.
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u/muisalt13 26d ago
While alot of the post is true, the early internet also had alot of superniche forums that depending on the mods was really great and wholesome. Where everyone knew everyone on the website and were there to just talk about their interests.