I’d rather accidentally stumple onto pain olympics or lemon party than accidentally stumble into a black mirror episode
You can also tell who’s been online for a long time, when they’re just tired of some snarky troll’s shit to block them when their shitty responses are read to your posts and replies. We see things these idiots think nobody else sees.
Only newbs block.
I’ve been online since before Mosaic existed, and I’m blocking your dumb ass. Check and mate.
i remember going to ogrish.com and rotten.com and thinking “wow the internet is fucking great,” and trolling people on AIM chat before anyone called it “trolling.” then i grew up
Being 12 and visiting rotten.com with your friends after class was our passage to adulthood ritual
Rotten was my go to site for checking whether my connection was working. No idea why.
I showed my grandmother that picture of the 12-foot long fecal impaction in a bathtub that was on Rotten and she almost died laughing so hard.
There were some absolute gems on rotten.
That was a passage of some sort.
yea, weird to think i can’t really look at that kind of stuff anymore. even the charlie kirk murder–i watched the uncensored front row footage and said “ok, i never need to watch this, or anything like it ever again”
The early Internet had a few simple rules:
- Never feed a troll
- Never trust anything written online
- Never tell anyone your real name or address
- There are no girls online (i.e. people are not who they claim to be)
- Online is not IRL
And most people knew these rules. The proliferation of the Internet has brought a lot of people who don’t understand these rules in to the fold and it has made the Internet a worse place. “Normies” seemingly think the Internet world works like your normal social interactions - it does not. The anonymity of the Internet brings out the worst in people. We really need to bring back the rules of the early Internet for the safety of everyone.
Feel free to comment more rules if you remember any.
As much as I miss the early Internet though, I genuinely do wish I’d had more protection from the seedier sites. I am not better off for having seen the gore and shock sites.
The eternal September brought new people without end who never acclimated.
Broadband reached rural communities.
Not broadband, it was when dial-up internet access became broadly available.
That’s what Eternal September means.
Translator note: keikaku means plan
- Use a nick (handle, username) that doesn’t give anything away
The people who came after me didn’t know that one and started putting their birth year, hometown, etc. into their usernames.
One time I was chatting with a woman who told me she was single. I’m still not quite sure if she was, but she had a kid with the claimed ex. However, the ex - or whatever he was - found out I was talking to her and left a voicemail threatening me.
I don’t remember what he said exactly, but I do remember one detail. She and I had only talked online and over the phone. I never gave any really location specific information to her, just my first and last name and phone number. In his voicemail, he said “I will find you. I will Google your ass!”
Even now, if you Google my first and last name, you get results about some CEO, not me. I’ve never tried googling my phone number.
I’ve never tried googling my phone number.
Send me your phone number and I’ll Google it for you.
Even better - you give me yours and I’ll call you so you don’t have to type it.
How thoughtful, (202) 456-1414
The white house? Probably shouldn’t talk to this guy online, might not be safe.
Ah, I was expecting the rejection hotline. It never occurred to me that the White House has a general contact number, but it makes sense.
Yeah, there are people who search for themselves and want an ego boost. I search for myself and hope to find nothing.
Indeed. I know roughly what’s going on because back before I cared about privacy I set up a “Google Alert” for my name. Since my tastes developed, I’m glad he’s there to distract from anything notable about me.
Never tell anyone your real name or address
more importantly, if you do know the real identity of another participant, don’t reveal it
I always hated that, when bringing friends into whatever online space and they’re using my real name. Especially if they’re used to online etiquette
I’m 40, and I’m not even sure if I learned these rules in school. I definitely didn’t learn from my parents. But somehow, I managed to not get scammed, radicalized (I think), or diddled by predators.
I dunno how millennials did it, but many of us managed to stay tech/media literate. The Canadian house hippo probably played an important role.
NGL, I saw the gore and shock as well - stileproject, rotten, marsonline, ogrish, bestgore… and even WPD on Reddit in the early days and it really did give me an appreciation for safety first! in almost everything I have done since.
The biggest rule was proof/cites linking to legitimate sources, (not conspiracy sites or your friend “Sally” on facebook) or it didn’t happen.
Yeah I think it’s actually pretty healthy and good to see and read and watch horrible horrible things. For most of human history, people were exposed to such things from a young age. It strips away a harmful naivete. I know so many people who, when they see the ICE shootings, say stuff like “I can’t believe a human could do that to another human”, and I’m like…seriously? People think that atrocities are in the past just because they don’t see them. People think that humans have changed or grown up or lost a capacity for viciousness, but it’s absolutely still there. Actually watching ISIS slit someone’s throat and seeing how the people around them react, or seeing someone kicked to death in the slums, I’m not saying this stuff was pleasant by any means - but it gave me a much more realistic and accurate understanding of humanity and our world. It’s one thing to hear about it, it’s another thing to see it, imo. The point sticks with you better.
Indeed it does.
I learned a few important lessons. Cars, trains, knives, guns, angry people, power lines, and falling are dangerous. Treat them with respect.
Nothing makes you properly understand a daily or work hazard like watching some one get ripped in half by one.
+100 for the power lines. Saw some scary things happen to people that were not paying attention.
I’m an elder Gen Z furry. These rules are ingrained in me so hard it took genuine effort to stop defaulting to assuming everyone online is a “he” to avoid accidental misgendering (“they” works just as well).
I wasn’t here for the very earliest parts of the web, but I was just in time to watch it die and remember that it used to be a better place. Still, I often reference the Rules of the Internet today and it sucks seeing how many people just don’t get it.
But I think it’s harder to for normies because they mostly cling to the corporate internet, believing it to be their safe haven, when it is, in fact, poison that actively promotes breaking the original rules (especially “don’t feed the trolls”) that kept people safe for the sake of engagement.
“There are no girls online” also means that does not matter if is a girl or not. just treat all people equal, like a human being.
but when it is a girl, we make her our queen
“Pics or it didn’t happen” doesn’t really work anymore.
And most people knew these rules.
Prior to Gore asking to open up the Internet to the general public, most users were either academics, government employees, or students mostly on newsgroups. That most were on 56k dialup modems, and therefore their time online was limited. Fringers were then really on the fringes, instead of the other way around today. Yes, indeed, there was then etiquette, and in some places was strictly enforced by mods, either in BBS, newsgroups or IRC.
The proliferation of the Internet has brought a lot of people who don’t understand these rules in to the fold and it has made the Internet a worse place.
Once access became normalized and widespread as ADSL, which pretty much lowered the bar, most people just went straight online with complete disregard of what dark side they could run into later on, some even only starting the first time getting their web-only email addresses made such as Yahoo Mail or Google, before making their accounts for MMORPGs, online forums, Napster, Myspace, and later Facebook. That in some places, inept people have total disregard for their own online privacy, so bad they ended up being hacked or their personal identity stolen for fraud and other crimes.
I just got my 20 year cape on RS.
That’s the only reason I logged in, mind you, but man it brought back some memories.
I just got my 20 year cape on RS…
Dude I just looked that up. That is a sweet cape!
No girls online was pure misogyny though. And if your username was girl sounding, you got harassed … ASL, pics or GTFO, etc etc etc… this hasn’t changed either… but now girls know to use male or non gender names.
Feel free to comment more rules if you remember any.
If it exists there’s porn of it.
Nowadays people are too afraid to write “fuck” even on lemmy.
This is like asking people to put on formal attire when traveling by air. Ain’t happening, unfortunately. Society has stopped caring.
We really need to bring back the rules of the early Internet
- There are no girls online (i.e. people are not who they claim to be)
Nah, I think some things should be left in the past
Just replace it with “on the internet everyone is lying about who they are and the person goading you on is either 15 or a fed”
Add I understand it, the real meaning of that line is not exactly what it sounds like. It meant something like “in this anonymous place, only your thoughts matter, not your identity.” If an idea was good, it was good, and it didn’t matter who had the idea. Very egalitarian.
Of course, we have since realized that isn’t really true. Sometimes it’s important to know if a thought is coming from a woman, who has had different experience from a man.
Still an idea that need to be left behind, but not the one you probably think.
Add I understand it, the real meaning of that line is not exactly what it sounds like
As someone who was around at the time, I think people meant it exactly as said. Partially it was an observation that most online spaces were really male-dominated. Partially it was a “no girlz allowd” sign. A lot of places were extremely hostile to women. The best that someone who admitted to being a girl or woman could hope for is a flood of messages from horny boys. That also made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Girls would either stay away, or they’d pretend to be male just to avoid the drama.
I was around at the time, too, but young and still liked to think the best of people.
Oh absolutely, I also believe that growing up with dialup was great, it meant that being online cost money, giving parents incentive to monitor the time spent online by children, and gradually getting used to being online.
I remember asking and being allowed 30 min online, every few weeks.
It worked well as we hadn’t transitioned to an online first society.
Then later in school there were a few shock sites being sent around, goatse was never huge at my time in school, for me the most prolific shock site around school was lemonparty.
Even later in school, I started realizing how much gore and weird crap you could find, and a morbid curiosity took over forna few days, I remember finding a picture of a guy who got beheaded after falling on a spiked fence, you could see the head on one of the spikes, and another time when I saw the aftermath of a guy being sucked into a jet engine, that one was quite mild as the result was too abstract and you only saw a red paste, so it never bothered me.
As it stands now, I think there is a value of mild supervision of kids and teens when online.
I mean mild in a way that full access is allowed but only on a desktop in a shared space.
And at 16 they can move their computer into their own room, and at 18 any admin account on their computer that the parents have should be removed.
I had dialup, but we had 2 phone lines and our phone company was the ISP so a local number with unlimited access. I’ve been terminally online for way too long.
Unable to log off, praying for an end
If someone sends you a link check it VERY carefully and don’t click if it isn’t exactly what it seems to be. I remember there was one shock site called nimp.org or something, and you could structure the link as [anything].on.nimp.org and it would send them to a shock site of (I think violent? But can’t really remember) gay sex video, change the size of your browser window, have it move around the screen so you couldn’t close it easily, and play at max volume “hey everyone I’m looking at gay porn”. It quickly became a game trying to structure the sneakiest links that would trick eachother, like wikipedia.on.nimp.org , hiding links, tricking eachother into clicking on shady stuff. I learnt to be very careful clicking on things long before rickrolls existed.
This is great advice and why I find URL shortening services really annoying. I really do want to see what I’m clicking.
“You rage, you lose.” was one of the rules people tried to adhere to back in the IRC times, I recall.
I was watching my own foot surgery the other day (local anesthetic) and even the surgeon’s assistant had to cringe a bit at a certain spot while I was happily watching. She said most patients have to look away during these procedures but after growing up with unrestricted access to the internet and an at times unhealthy amount of curiosity I’ve seen it all. Should I have watched those isis beheading videos? Probably not. The production value was insane though.
Back before TLC was trash they had a show called The Procedure where they showed a full surgical procedure, uncut and uncensored. Just a camera pointing down at the table or video from inside.
I was the only one in my family who could stomach it thanks to the internet.
i watched the video of them cutting that guy’s head off too, and i’m the opposite now. in fact i’m trying to figure out how to not faint and piss myself when i get a blood draw. i fucking hate it, it’s so stupid, i get tattoos and i’m fine, but if i even think about anything going past a certain depth to my insides (blood lab, surgery, injection), it triggers vasovagal syncope
Same, it’s something about the precious bodily fluids
getting drunk before a shot seems to somewhat help for me, at least for injections, but that would be ill advised for surgery, since it thins the blood
Also sounds bad for a blood draw, or getting to/from the facility.
yep
KennyLauderdale! I follow him on Youtube and Bluesky, he’s made some excellent videos about anime and other Japanese shows!
The only thing that continually surprises me about the internet is how young y’all are.
I’m 61 and feel like an absolute fossil out here most days.
The kids are just babes…
Anyone remember when CompuServe had these chatrooms or channels that were basically collaboration websites before Geocities blew up? I liked those.
What digital horrors?
instatwittoksnapbookcord
when us old people were younger, preteens weren’t dying from social media “challenges” and/or cyber bullying
kids were dying for stupid reasons, as they always have, but none of those reasons were digital horrors
Are those things really that bad?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6278213/
if you were never bullied (either irl or online) as a kid, then it seems like something you could shrug off. but no, it’s pretty bad
Today’s internet is way worse than the old internet.
I remember when I got my first 4800baud modem upgrade from my 2400baud modem. So I could connect to my friend’s house who had a sick BBS server.
Old internet:
- Lots of fun places to visit
- “So, first I visit thisite, then click that other link, then click the 3rd link on the right from the bottom up”
- Oh fuck, no, don’t go in THERE
- Hey, another toolbar for my IE toolbar collection!
- Wait, what was that site again?
- Ugh, why won’t this image load?
- No mom, I’m not keeping the phone line busy!
- One login for this forum, another for that forum, another for that other forum…
- Wow, email sure is neat! Instant messaging with anyone in the world!
- weird noises when the mouse hovers certain elements
- BOOBIES!
Current internet:
- tiktok, instagram, google, facebook, amazon
- ANIMATED BOOBIES!
I’m proud to not use any of those current products. Except for google because of google login.
Can I ask what you use instead of youtube?
Well shit. I guess I don’t use their search engine.
You can tell Kenny Lauderdale has no idea what he’s talking about because he using the internet.
I feel the opposite. I’m “C-64 dial up BBS” years old. I’m far, far more concerned with the internet today. It’s become destructive on so many levels. The corporatocracy takeover, the enstupidification, AI, troll farms, bots, outright lies, echo chambers willfully and ignorantly forming realities outside of objective truth…
The modern internet is an awful conflagration that everyone is trying to manipulate and control while throwing more fuel on it in an attempt to profit from it.
Goatse is nothing compared the dumpster fire that’s happening.
I’m not fine with it at all.
Agreed. Been on FIDO, been on BITNET before I went on the internet - way before the web. Way before the eternal September. People today cannot even start to imagine how the net was back then. Forget “six degrees”, maximum distance was maybe three. You basically knew everyone, or you knew someone who did.
I’m that many years old too… 1970 represent!
I liked it better when it was just random people coming together to talk about whatever random shit you were into. It felt so much more inclusive. Like no matter how weird your hobby was, somebody out there was into it as well… or sharing very funny stories like the creation of overly engineered toasters. Or putting a camera on a coffee pot to check if there was fresh coffee. Or the stories of the BOFH.
Now it’s too controlled, monetized, enshittified, homogenized, etc. It’s not about people connecting anymore or creating content that people actually want and learn from. With all the AI generated bullshit, it’s likely not even created by people anymore. At least with goatse, tub girl, or lemon party you knew that was actual people… not sure if that’s better or worse actually. But somebody created it for others to “enjoy”… well experience might be a better word here. But you get the idea. It was people coming together because they wanted to. They enjoyed it. Now it’s all scams, rage-bait, and algorithms created to drive engagement. It’s almost like it isn’t fun anymore.
But there are places that still remind me of the old internet. Lemmy for example. It’s not exactly the same but it shares its DNA.
It certainly was more egalitarian. Geocities or MySpace were kinda examples. Anyone could make their own space, often for free.
Most content today is crap, and the rest is someone stealing or reacting to that crap, ad nauseam. Though TBF if anyone remembers the early days of youtube or other platforms it was full of stupid stuff too, but it was “lookit me, lol!” for likes rather than ad-riddled garbage that somehow people expect to be taken seriously for.
Goatse or 2g1c was our clickbait, and nobody tried to sell you anything or make it any more than it was. It was garbage and we knew it.
Budd Dwyer
