[anenefan]

The biggest thing for what plagues the net, society in general, did occurred in 2007 / 8 - it was not the phones - it was what the US govt did in response to Facebook's rather dire lack of real mods over "bullying" ... the move to ban anonymous people arguing and flaming - this flowed though eventually via the new terms of service US based software for forums, boards, and hosting sites required to abide by the new laws. Many forums I used to frequent slowly disappeared being unable to adapt to different software and hosting sites that were happy to ignore US laws.

A real name when challenging the status quo unfortunately attaches the risk of retaliation from either the intended organisation or person, or their fanboys, via direct or creative sets of problems designed to waste time and / or money. Sadly the internet is a bit more fuzzy when it comes to trouble and those dishing it out. Social media of course, had welcomed the new rules, and any anonymous account speaking out against a popular idea could be quickly reported and thus indirectly permanently banned until they complied with real life details.

[AJRF]

I made this site, and I am not wedded to the idea that smart phones are the only reason these trends started to turn weird.

I try to say as much on the site - and while maybe I place a lot of blame on the relationship between the iPhone -> Increased adoption of internet usage -> Social Media usage going up == lots of detrimental effects I think you've an interesting thread i'd like to pull.

Do you have any more information or reading I can do on this and I can add it to the site?

Something changed between 2007 and now, there is just too much evidence to support that, and I think there is a very strong claim Smartphones are a very large contributing factor, but as you will be aware, the causes are very hard to extract.

[anenefan]

Smart phones probably allowed a greater saturation of a person's time with the internet, esp social media areas purposely stoking engagement with the user. I personally know too many people in real life practically married to their phone who recite any number of things from someone they absolutely believe, wholeheartedly accept the person has some apparent title of expertise, rather than the facts as per a well accepted book or area of printed knowledge. It's perplexing but I know the same ... er ... tool with their apparent title were saying the same in an area back in 2004 for instance, they'd be rubbished via a fairly active discussion vetting most of their inaccuracies - some people used to just have nothing better to do at nights than fix up BS.

I wish I could find more and clearer discussions in regard to when this came in and why. ( I lament the lack of a decent search engine present time - there were at least in 2007 numerous discussions in regard to the changes made in the US at the time, the follow though with software updates in regard to terms of service etc.)

Turns out it started in 2006 [1] [2 - is a bit fuzzy but] ... I though should recall the time as I was following the proceedings and when the decision was announced I was frankly appalled and ranted numerous times when the subject came up at various discussion boards lamenting Facebook seemed to have buttered up the legal areas to save them a lot of money on real live moderators to manage disagreements.

But 2007 seems stuck in my head though, as to me it was 2007 when the real fallout started when it started to roll various discussion sites that engaged in freer speech with robust discussions, occasional flames - to the point forum admins and staff of various message boards, forums using software such as phpbb had to decide the best approach to keep everyone happy and not end up dealing with legal threats.

Now getting back to noted decline in common knowledge and people more readily believing BS and why this law changed how dynamics of how fact challenges worked in Facebook. Once the anonymous common intelligence fighter might have posted factual informative links on someone's facebook wall that's ignorantly alleging total BS ... or maybe by purpose running a scam ... and factual challenges generally irritated them and blocking didn't generally work in the long run as it wouldn't be long before someone else was offended by their sheer lack of fact checking ... but after the rule change - the honestly deluded, the scammer or the bullshitter merely had to hit the report button on the anonymous users comment ... and that anonymous account was more or less gone, not a threat to challenge any BS on Facebook until they legitimised their account. Again it was 2007/8 I recall a number of former Facebook users expressing their dismay they'd lost their anonymous Facebook account, given they preferred their relative anonymity.

[1] https://forums.matrixgames.com/viewtopic.php?t=84680

[2] https://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_01_08-2006_01_14.sh...

[BoredPositron]

Doesn't make any sense if you look at provided data points. The IQ, test scores and sleep quality of people fell because they couldn't have anonymous flame wars on Facebook? The laws you imply happened in 2007-2008 were all introduced in the 2010s. Facebooks real name crackdown happened in 2014...

[anenefan]

Echo chambers are not a recent phenomenon, but social media turbo charged it refining the engagement factor. The fact moderation by and large in social media platforms were able to utilise a report button and a script, rather than live human moderators was all thanks IMO to the changes as per 2006 (see reply to AJRF [OP], 2007 is when iirc I started to notice the stark changes to the rest of the discussion areas and occasion angry ex Facebook user. The near humanless moderation apart from the occasion cookie cutter, was particularly conducive for designing algorithms to exploit people, especially young impressionable people.

Additionally no one was really closely monitoring the sleep quality of those who frequented the net, or those who were really engaged (near omni present) on the net pre 2005, but I don't recall thinking the conversations had back then were anything as borked as some ... most of the crud in some social media areas. I'm left with a sense, sensibility was much higher a couple of decades ago ... or one knew that they were going to be called out on whatever they said if it was in error.

[pas]

Google+ already enforced their real-name policy in 2011

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars

Of course the ultimate cause is that the Internet changed from this mysterious third place full information to where we live our private and public life, where there's an unending torrent of things that affect us.

Smartphones and low-latency high-bandwidth ubiquitous wireless networks with large enough data quotas are the vector that facilitated this.

The nature of content changed from funny image macros with silly cats to weaponized out-of-context news videos (and reports, and studies, and data). From mostly boring IRC chatrooms full of cold quasi-autistic greybeards (or sometimes neurotic drama queens and kings) enforcing their idiosyncratic rules that allowed fun little interactions that were collection worthy on now almost forgotten websites (bash and qdb) to public Facebook posts and now to private group chats.

All this in front of the backdrop of global economic growth in its downturn. (The upsides of the China shock - and of globalization, in general - already reaped and now we're left with the boiling resentment coming from those who feel they were defrauded, who are attracted to narratives that dish out blame to elites and everybody close and far away in space and time.)

Previous presidents, infamous and obscure international organizations, and of course vague shadowy groups and half of the population all at once. Beancounters, the MBAs, real estate developers, private equity, CEOs, big pharma, WHO, toxic masculinity, LMBTQAI+, MAGA, and of course the DNC that caused all this by not letting Bernie became the nominee.

When people grow up with expectations that they'll live better than their parents and then that doesn't happen, we don't take it well.