[pests]

> the thought of requiring others to show their faces never occurred to me at all

I know you meant as a service provider, but as a avid IRC (and an online game that conventionally alt-tabbed into a irc-like chat window) chatter as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends that I would not discover what they looked like IRL for decades, some never. People I was gaming with in the 90s, for the first time, I would see what they looked like over FB in a group made for the now-almost-dead game in the 10s. It was like "swordfish - man, where are you now? I don't even know your real name to find ya. shardz - you look exactly like I would picture ya!."

Just some musings.

[tuoret]

In the early 2000s, the biggest social media (though we didn't call it that back then) in Finland was IRC-Galleria (IRC-Gallery). It was originally made for IRC users to upload pictures of themselves and see what fellow IRCers looked like. You'd create a profile, add pictures and tag which channels/servers you were on.

Since there were no other websites like that back then, it was eventually overrun by non-IRC-users and transformed into what we'd now call a more generic social media platform. Something like the eternal September I guess. People started calling the gallery "IRC" as shorthand, which royally pissed off the original userbase. Fun times.

Then Facebook appeared and everyone moved there.

It's still up, but it's more of a historical relic these days. Not sure who, if anyone, still uses it: https://irc-galleria.net/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC-Galleria

[miki123211]

It's weird how different and hyper-local the social media landscape was back then. It's not just that every country had their own thing, it's also that they were all very different concepts and ideas.

Poland's social media of choice was "Nasza Klasa" (lit. "Our Class"), the American alternative was called "Classmates" as far as I know. It was intended as a service that let you re-unite with your old classmates, designed with the way the Polish school system worked in mind. It was used for far more than that though, and was quite popular among kids who were still at school.

We're still in that era with messaging apps somehow. WHile the local alternatives have mostly died out, the world is now a patchwork of WhatsApp, Messenger and Telegram, with islands of iMessage, Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat thrown into the mix. Most countries have basically standardized on one of these, but they can't agree on which one.

[joe_mamba]

>as a young preteen in the 90s and 00s, I made a lot of online friends

As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s, and preteens today easily share footage of themselves to those adult weirdos, which didn't happen in the 90s because mostly limitations of technology.

BUt if you look at tiktok live it's full of preteen girls dancing, and creepy old men donating them money to the point where tiktok live is basically a preteen strip club. We can't ignore these obvious problems just because we grew up with internet in the 90s and turned out alright.

We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow even though i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity but a solution is inevitable even though it will be faulty and unpopular and people will try to bypass it.

[supermatt]

The solution is parents using the parental control feature on their children’s devices.

If laws need to be made about something it should be to punish those parents who neglect to safeguard their children using the tools already available to them.

If the parental controls currently provided aren’t sufficient then they should be modified to be so - in addition to filtering, they should probably send a header to websites and a flag to apps giving an age/rating.

[wafflemaker]

Chat rooms in early 2000s were full pedos.

And they didn't even try to hide very much.

Look at the story from darknet diaries, where the interviewee talks about setting up an AOL account with girlie name and instantly getting flooded with messages, 9/10 of them being from pedos.

https://darknetdiaries.com/transcript/56/

Don't have any examples myself because I was a spectrum kid at that time, quite oblivious to the idea.

[vladms]

> but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s

Without some data analysis I honestly don't know. Even before Internet (ex: FidoNet) there was plenty of very bad stuff out there, I don't see any clear reason why the pedos and groomers would have avoided it.

> We have to separate kids from adults on the internet somehow

I think what is much worse than in other mediums is the actual lack of a community that observes. In real life, for many cases, you would have multiple people noticing interactions between kids and adults (sports, schools, parks, shops, etc.), so actions might be taken when/before things get strange. On some of the social networks on the internet it is too much one-to-one communication which avoids any oversight.

So, for me, the idea of "more separation" seems to generate on the long term even more problems, because of lack of (healthy) interactions and a community.

[palata]

> i distrust age-verifications systems as they basically remove your anonymity

I think it's technically possible to build a privacy-preserving age verification. I also think it should be done by the government, because the government already has this information.

[throwaway_53123]

> As another 90s preteen, sure, but the internet today has a lot more pedos and groomers online than in the 90s

There were not fewer pedos and groomers online in the 90s, you were just lucky to have avoided it.