cmg_xyz's comments

> I think what happened is a lot of people in our cohort figured out how to use the trolling techniques honed on forums and in flamewars on the general public... I think what screwed the pooch was a massive influx of boomers into social networks, and everything that comes from having a bunch of non-digital natives suddenly being given tools they weren't ready to handle.

See, I think this is where we didn't apply lessons that we should've learned. A good moderation policy and good moderators are arguably essential to the life of a good forum, but Twitter is and always has been disastrous at it. It's a global forum thread or IRC channel where the trolls have completely free reign.

One answer to “What happened to the old internet?”

We did. I’m 35; a little older than you, and (maybe pertinent?) close in age to Mark Zuckerberg (though I’m neither wealthy nor successful). I have a lot of the same fond memories of the 90s internet that you do. The online walled-gardens that are now displacing the web, were in many cases founded by _our_ generation. The firestorms currently ravaging culture and politics? In many cases _we_ started them.

I feel I’m just verbalising the zeitgeist here, but we could’ve done better. We should’ve done better. There’s a solid argument that we weren’t to know, that nothing like the connection enabled by the internet has ever happened before, but as arguably the first “digital natives”, this happened on our watch.

If the egalitarian ethos of the early web was indeed born of the values of the 60s and 70s, then what values from the 90s created the web of today?