Americans were turbo racist is all i remember
For people who only know the internet past 2010, the 2001 internet would be unrecognizable, so the question doesn’t really make sense. The world was an entirely different place before modern algorithmic media. There were trolls, and there were decent people, but the whole context of the world changed after the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Arguably for the orders of magnitude worse. It’s not really fair to compare then to now.
There just wasn’t really user-submitted content back then. If you wanted to post something on the internet, you had to create a website.
There were tools that made a website a bit easier to create (most notably Geocities), but it was still a fairly technical task to simply get text that you typed show up on a website accessible to all.
Simply being able to reply to someone else? That wasn’t really on the web, although by 2001 there were a few attempts to bring that kind of forum functionality to the broader web on actual http/www webpages (when it was previously on Usenet and BBSes and mailing lists and the technologies known as the internet before and separate from the world wide web). vBulletin was the popular one, and I think phpBB was fairly popular, too, but those projects started in 2000 and weren’t that popular in the first years. Web hosts actually offering a full blown LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for hosting, and the technical skills to administer that kind of service, even on free software, was a pretty big hurdle to adoption before 2003 or so.
In 2001, almost all of the web was static content, with no method of interacting with the content other than simply viewing it. You’d click on links to retrieve another piece of content. By 2005 the web 2.0 revolution was underway, and websites had become interactive, with dynamic content drawing from relational databases under the hood. But in 2001? No, the web was pretty static.
Your description of the rise of the social algorithms is part of the story since 2010, but even that leaves out the period of time in between.
Fark.com was around. People were definitely less trolly right after, for a bit.
laughs in IRC
Correct. There was no reddit or Lemmy like things. The closest we had were BBS forums.
I was a mod on a pretty major one: IGN, and it was definitely dark after that happened. Not many posts at all. People all just unplugged from the internet for a bit to watch the news. Which was the style at the time.
Found this interesting Pew study about the internet from 1 year after 9/11:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2002/09/05/one-year-later-september-11-and-the-internet-2/
Take it with a grain of salt, I think it comes off as a little overly optimistic, especially given some of the dire things it talks about (massive support for giving away our freedoms, etc).
I did just see at the bottom that there’s literally 8 pages, and I was basing all that on just the first page so maybe I’ll read more or at least skim through the rest.
Edit: holy shit (from pg 2):
I believe the internet was much smaller then. It existed, but most social hadn’t really begun yet. I still only had dialup.
9/11 was 2001, Facebook was 2004. So definitely a different place.
Broadband was around. The signal to noise was much better. We had Usenet, IRC, and our own home pages.
Maybe around, but I don’t think it was ubiquitous? Even then, ADSL was pretty bad, and I wouldn’t call it broadband by today’s standards. But that could just be Australia lagging the world :)
We had a lot of fourms back then. Myspace wouldn’t happen until '03.
I don’t count forums the same as modern social media. The are social places of course, but much more tight-knit, much less algorithmically ratfucked. Even 2003 Myspace and 2004 FB were much better places than what they have metastasized into.
forums dont really count, they are pretty niche, i think the closet one would be e-world, and the Y/a. I happened upon a location specific forum, and they go back to late 2000s.
Many of us warned about the knee jerk reactions of our government, especially usapatriot and the kickoff of the wars. Same shit. Different decade.
The Internet was awesome before 9/11/01
Now any idiot can use it.
The death of the Internet started in 2004, when Facebook launched, and fucking died in 2007 when the iPhone launched.
The Endless SummerEternal September began inthe late 80s and early 90s…1993.
I remember there were a lot of memes about it, most of them were incredible islamophobic or in bad taste with the victims.
Social media didn’t exist for the most part in 2001. There was LiveJournal and Something Awful. Most online discussions happened using instant messaging between people you knew or on discussion forums that usually were focused around an interest or niche topic.
All of those platforms had trolls but they were much more benign than they are today. Islamophobia spiked and there were spirited debates, but nothing like the vitriol we see today on even the most banal posts. The communities were much smaller to the point that most regular posters knew each other and had interacted many times, civility was maintained by that familiarity like it would be in a real community. The anonymity that comes from massive userbases were you’ll never encounter the same person twice is really what created the naked hostility we have today. There was a forum called Storm Front, which I believe is still around, a literal nazi forum but you had to be deep into the Internet to even know it existed.
After 9/11 more conspiracy theories started popping up and making their way to more mainstream sites as sort of proto-memes and it was a bad time to hold an opinion that wasn’t pro-US nationalism, but again nothing like the horrific things we see today.
It wasn’t anywhere near as big a shift as 2016 when we realised that a lot of the people doing ironic nazi jokes were not, in fact, joking about having awful nazi beliefs. I was mostly on UK forums and IRC in 2001 though - the Americans would never have tolerated anything less than a reverential tone. There was a lot of conspiracy talk and concerns about further attacks and conflicts breaking out.
I found a popular thread from the day of 9/11 here if you want to look at it: https://m.slashdot.org/story/20235
Most of it isn’t all that different from what you would see today but I should warn you that there are some “edgy humor” trolls using slurs that you’ll run into early on.
It destroyed my friend group. One person was angry at basically all Arabic people, and her racism started lots of fights. I couldn’t get through to her, and didn’t know how to handle it. Everyone had a different reaction. We all just stopped talking.
Performative patriotism
Wasn’t really on the internet back then, but we joked about it in school the very next day.
2001, dint really have an internet per ce, forums dint really exist in large numbers yet. the biggest news aggregate dint exist for another half a decade. . reddit dint really take off til 2010-16ish. there was a news aggregate forum that existed in the late 2000s, got replaced by reddit, and Y/answers.
There was usenet.
Dude there were way more online forums in 2000 than there are now.
I belonged to many movie message boards, gaming boards and etc. Its all consolidated and controlled now.
No idea, I only used the internet for messenger with people I knew irl
