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Comment by bdw5204 | Hacker News Reader

> There's not much that's bad on the Net

Given the EFF email address, I think that's probably a quote from the same Mike Godwin of "Godwin's Law" fame. In other words, somebody who would have known what he was talking about. It'd be unimaginable for any informed person to say that about today's internet.

I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world, how much of it is due to the internet becoming more popular and how much of it is due to certain platforms that are designed in a way that encourages their users to act badly. If we could take the internet back to 1990s levels of interactivity but with everybody still having a web browser in their pocket, would things be better or is today's internet worse because society as a whole is worse?

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The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world.

Just not as much for the nerds and curious professionals from “the West” that were playfully developing the internet like a quirky little collaborative art gallery.

The demographics of the internet were just very different then. I don’t think it’s so much a change in the character of the world that makes it different now, so much as that nearly the whole breadth of the world are staking claims in it, and thus a lot of the contention and animosity that has always existed in the real world now finally shows up here too.

> The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world.

Yeah, I think the difference is how disconnected from the real world the internet/web felt in the 90s. It felt like a different dimension you entered - and "cyberspace" was non ironically talked about as a separate space, and culturally people wanted it to be a separate space with separate norms.

Now it kinda feels like the two worlds have encroached so far on each other they mostly overlap - and both seem hell bent on ruining the other.

The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure.

Sure, lots of people were using it. But many of them couldn't openly advertise their feelings or form social groups. It was a domain of the technical and the young.

There won't be anything else like that feeling.

> The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure. [...] There won't be anything else like that feeling.

The name for that feeling is Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

(note that happened around two decades before FB)

*one decade

> life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world

They were definitely there, you just couldn't see them or they weren't happening in your country or to people you knew. But there was a period of relative peace from the end of the Cold War to 9/11, and a great deal more "consensus". This was achieved because there was nowhere for people outside the consensus to get heard.

> society as a whole is worse

To the extent that this is true - and I don't think it applies to all of today's society, many of whom are more tolerant and better informed - is it an effect of the internet on society?

I think most of today's problems are due to failures of the consensus in the 90s and 00s. The consensus interfered in Russia's 1996 presidential election (alienating Russia from the western world), allowed China to join the WTO on the assumption that capitalism would eventually lead to democracy in China and invaded Iraq in the name of spreading liberal democracy. The consensus also stood by and did nothing or even cheered as corporations shipped working class people's jobs to countries where they could pay next to nothing and decided that they were "multinational" with no loyalty whatsoever to their home country.

What I meant by "few real problems in the world" is that compared to global pandemics, terrorist attacks, the return of 70s style economic malaise, aging populations (in the 00s, this was a Japanese problem but it is now becoming a global problem) and the possibility of a nuclear WW3 if the tensions with Russia and/or China escalate, whatever problems people perceived in the 90s were trivial in comparison. Even the problems that remain unsolved from that time (like climate change) are generally much worse today because of decades of inaction. Its really hard to take seriously "problems" like the president having an affair with his intern or a famous football player getting acquitted of a murder that most people think he committed when you live in a time where the end of the world in the near future is a plausible outcome.

>> I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world

What? Life was certainly worse in the 1990s compared to today on almost all axes except for how much people complain about it online.

Yes you are absolutely right. Even after a worldwide pandemic life expectancy and living standards are better everywhere.

It is better in some things and worse in others. It was better in some places and it's now worse in others. Why does every comment about how some things are getting worse has to be met with the same "rational optimism" automatic response?

Certainly "There were few real problems in the world" is such a naive and irrationally nostalgic take that it absolutely deserves criticism? (One datapoint: the Rwandan genocide occurred in 1994.)

Just as naive as 'the 90's was certainly worse.'

Were you in Rwanda in '94?

Oh, I misread it, I thought GGP meant the other way around x)

Some of us actually remember the 90s, and not this nostalgia-tinged "hey I was young and had no responsibilities so it was better." It's not like I lived in some third-world hellhole. I lived in Los Angeles. Murder rates were quadruple what they are today. Gang violence was totally out of control. Every single night there'd be some story on the news of a girl getting shot while standing in line at an ice cream truck. Always an ice cream truck. The LA Riots happened, and unlike what people in the US call a "riot" today when a window get smashed and trash cans are lit on fire, 63 people died. The LAPD was in the middle of the Rampart Scandal, planting evidence left and right and brutalizing people. My middle school got shot at in drive-bys three separate times while I was there. A black girl in my neighborhood was tied to a fence and burned alive. We weren't allowed to wear red or blue because the school district was so afraid of us getting shot. Medical care was so great that my best friend died from touching a cat when she was 12. Teachers were still getting fired for being gay. Guys like Matthew Shepard were getting tortured and beaten to death. Freedom of expression so great that 2 Live Crew was getting banned by US district courts and the Satanic Panic was still happening in a lot of places. AIDS was still scary as hell and not easily manageable with known medication. We were getting malathion dumped on us from the sky all the damn time because of Mediterranean fruit fly infestations.

But I'm sure it was a much better time on the Internet I didn't yet know existed because my family couldn't afford a computer until my senior year of high school.

The 1994 Wired article in which Godwin introduces the concept of Internet memes and recounts engineering the Nazi-comparison "counter-meme" is a short, intriguing read, with many quotes that are interesting and/or amusing to review in today's context: https://web.archive.org/web/0/http://www.wired.com/wired/arc...

The bar for getting online is so much different we just get a full cross section of society. Many homeless people have internet access via a smartphone today, and in the 90s it was basically just upper middle class, rich people, and university students.

The technical bar was higher - the article itself had notable people seemingly proud of (with a little trauma?) getting their SLIP connections working. And how that itself seemed a step up towards greater access. Pretty sure namby pamby PPP was my first connection hehe

Consider that “Don’t ask don’t tell” was a progressive policy in 1994, and reassess whether even in the US things were better for most people then than they are now.

The quickest way to contextualize this article is that it’s like asking crypto true believers to write about crypto a few years ago, just as it was becoming mainstream. Of course someone said there were no real problems on the internet.

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