Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by OfSanguineFire | Hacker News Reader

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What I miss from those early days is the complete lack of profiles. People really were just screen names, there were no user profiles. Often one didn’t learn more about one’s fellows unless one arranged to meet up in real life (which was a thing back then). When people could not insist on a particular demographic identity or political wing, no one was looking for personal validation and discussion remained limited to the subject of the fora. Consequently, ideological battle was limited, and while flame wars were common, they usually involved nerd minutiae instead of society-wide polemics.

Compare this to later social media, where it has been taken to extremes: I’ve seen Mastodon users whose profiles are a long list of their gender identity, sexual preference, furriness, autism or mental afflictions (officially diagnosed or self-diagnosed), favored political party, and COVID masking status, and in discussion of any topic we are supposed to consider all this.

Many of us had geek code ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code ) attached to our sig files.

    -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
    Version: 3.12 GCS d- s+:+ a++ C++ U? P++ L+ E--- N M++ 5++ e++ h+
    ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

And it can go on from there to some rather elaborate ones ( https://www.joereiss.net/geek/geek.html ) - depends on how much you're interested in putting in there.

The permanence of forum account names was important. You developed an identity and a reputation that stuck with you. The long profiles you mention could be seen as an attempt to build identity in a more ephemeral environment.

People always were looking for some sort of profile to signal who they were. With Usenet it was the signature block. Intended as short contact blocks, they were often repurposed into oversized sword wielding manifestos.

https://www.lysator.liu.se/(v1)/etexts/iguide/chap4.bigsig.h...

Also .plan files!

> When people could not insist on a particular demographic identity or political wing

I’m not sure if your memory is playing tricks on you or what, but politics has basically always been a part of these forums once the internet shed its “nerd” status.

Heck, extremist politics found a safe place for itself in many of internets early forums.

The politics I remember from the early internet was idealism about alternative approaches, like libertarianism or communism of whatever stripe. Such internet-nerd politics were usually divorced from what was actually going on in mainstream politics, and therefore there wasn’t the exhausting, unescapable partisan squabble as found on social media today.

Those circles still exist.

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that such fora are out there. But a person becoming fascinated by computers and getting on the internet, will no longer encounter those fora as the default experience, unlike in the days of Usenet or BBSs. Moreover, post-2005, the software running phpBB-type fora usually borrowed features from social media.

(And “No” in the sense that, as one still reading various fora offering pre-social-media interfaces, there is no escaping that the participants are dwindling and graying. Moreover, the very thing driving people to hang around on unfashionable fora is an eccentricity that is often full-blown mental illness. Once forum activity has become dominated by a few outright cranks, you can’t expect quality discussion.)

If I open a forum and see it is Discourse, I immediately close it. What was wrong with distinct boards and clear categories?

And you can leave your endless scrolling on facesbook where it belongs.

Where?

I think you could argue that mainstream politics has borrowed more from internet politics than vice versa. I don't see Trump or Bernie getting nearly as much traction without the internet.

I'm very idealistic about alternative approaches, but in a "let's experiment on a small scale" sense as opposed to a "burn it all down" sense. I do wonder if widespread discussion of radical alternatives contributed to a "burn it all down" attitude. Yes, most real modern political systems are a mess of historical contingencies, but maybe democracy functions better if we ignore that and encourage everyone to buy into the system anyways. I miss the "Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" attitude.

The heaviest posted (non-binary) newsgroups with the in the late 90s were political, if I remember some analysis I did back then correctly. Something.politics, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, etc

Yes, by the late 1990s there was partisan American political battle, but only if you went looking for it, on the dedicated newsgroups you mention. If you did not expressly subscribe to them, you generally did not see those politics on sci.whatever, comp.lang.whatever, or alt.music.yourfavoriteband. And you had no way of knowing if your interlocutors held strident views about politics or posted elsewhere on Usenet about politics.

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