unleashing social media on the world at large was like inflicting smallpox on immunologically naive peoples. Only psyches scarred over by endless stupid flamewars on usenet or IRC were truly ready for it
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was about to say "scarred" is a bit harsh, its more like inoculation, to play along with the original metaphor, but then i remembered the smallpox vaccine leaves a lil scar on you. touche
Yeah and if you got into it past a certain age I think you just couldn't build the immunity. Plus it was a lot more potent by the time most olds even took a look
Around the mid nineties, before virtual machine cloud servers were a thing, I ran email discussion reflector lists on Linux with Majordomo and Sendmail using on a cronjob that dialled up the modem connection to collect and distribute group email 4 times every 24 hours.
I'm maintained for years that it isn't nuclear weapons or some new advancement in military hardware that'll lead to our demise. It'll be unmitigated, unguarded mass communication technologies in the hands of largely irresponsible and ignorant humans.
It was Fox news that bought out and killed MySpace. They guaranteed that social media would develop in the most harmful, malignant way possible. It's not the medium's fault, it's the owners' intentions.
What really amazes me is that no web forum/social media app has yet caught up with how well my usenet client handled threading almost thirty years ago. This was literally a solved problem _in the 90s_! Why does everyone suck at it?
Usenet had 3rd party tools that made blocking useful. Everyone who spent any time on Usenet can probably still rattle off the top 5 assholes on their Thunderbird kill-file.
IRC took a lot more work, unless one was an actual IRC administrator, which still meant lots of work, but you plonk people.
It sounds like a form of gatekeeping, but I think having the hurdle of learning how to configure dialup, clients for groups and code html for websites was a good barrier of entry to ensure MOST people who were online weren't absolute morons. Most. But that could be rose colored glasses speaking.
I came prepared for the hell that is social media today.
Member of: Lunarstorm, Skunk, Flashback, Twitter, IRC, Facebook, Reddit, and a bunch of newspaper comment sections...
Remember when stuff like Lunarstorm had premium features where you had to use premium SMS to subscribe, because it was the only widely available way to pay small sums online?
All I had to do was to run an electronic bulletin board, spend years on usenet, witness the fire and fury of Google's politics list, become a micro micro celebrity for telling the NSA to fuck itself, then become an augmented reality warlord with max_group_chats on telegram and not fall to 0 SAN.
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A GenZ Hamas simp calling me a "genocide supporter" just makes me laugh.
https://prince.org/msg/100/188778
This endless, repetitive spew of lies and disinformation is not 'free speech', its a method for programming youth.
Write
'I will not throw rocks at Sally'
100 times.
Just sayin'
IRC: check
Moderating a community forum for a video game: check.
This is so on point it’s scary.
— Republican Party Platform, 2025
IRC took a lot more work, unless one was an actual IRC administrator, which still meant lots of work, but you plonk people.
We weren’t and still aren’t built to handle this much tech, connectivity and responsibility.
And the rate that tech is advancing is only gonna get higher. Even more growing pains to come.
Yes. Including being limited to the amazing 5MB quota of webspace that came with my dialup account.
Like something about even MySpace made people understand what this was
Member of: Lunarstorm, Skunk, Flashback, Twitter, IRC, Facebook, Reddit, and a bunch of newspaper comment sections...
* Basilisk, MLM meme god, or doing nootropics at an art show in the desert and end up plotting the downfall of democracy and/or bank runs.
😜
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭
Used to regret having wasted so much time and energy on that, but lately it's felt like getting the covid vax a year before almost anyone else