Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.
Oh, man, I both agree AND think this post is one of those things.
See, people around Mastodon keep saying “everybody is nice, like in the early Internet”, and my memory of the Internet is full of drive-by porn and gore, weird political takes, illegible websites and malware.
Apparently some study recently flagged zoomers as being worse than even boomers at spotting online threats, with millenials being best, and that checks out to me for the reasons you list.
People looking at the past through rose-colored glasses? You don’t say.
Yeah, the early Web was ass. No Wikipedia, no Internet Archive…oh, and it took forever to download anything.
Fuuuck you just made me remember the first time I encountered Wikipedia. It was a recommendation from a teacher in my first class of middle school to read some articles about the topic before writing an assignment. It was a literary life changing moment for me. All this knowledge… for free?
Not that there was anything much to download. But there was a good FTP site FAQ floating around. (for those that remember what the original FAQ files were)
We had to be good at spotting online threats. There were no systems, ai, or algorithms to detect child porn or extreme violence. If you were lucky there were mods. You had to be smarter. I still remember in detail the first time I watched a video of a child cutting a man’s head off. Plus if you broke the only family computer, may God gave mercy on your soul. That’s why I became as good with technology as I am, I broke the family computer and had to have it fixed before anyone woke up. Computers just work now. Remember when devices wanted the same memory so you had to somehow remap it. It was the wild west.