For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
Don’t Feed the trolls
Stay anonymous
Don’t be a dick.
Don’t believe everything you see. Actually I was taught that about TV, but for some reason the old folks forgot about it being applicable everywhere in life, not just on TV. They also forget about it on TV too.
Make sure you use the right type of search engine for the type of information you want.
Since when this was a rule rule??
Before Google dominated you had a different search engine for blogs, mp3s, warez, link pages etc. You also had directories where the content of the web was neatly organised by topic.
Never lived on this era but this feels life a fresh breath of peaceful life.
Bottom-posting eMails and Usenet posts.
Fuck you, Microsoft. Bottom-posting replies is the correct way to reply.
Is bottom-posting some kind of kink I’m not aware of?
Maybe it’s in the following example, or the inverse?
Citation
Reply to citation
German here, I remember teaching people email etiquette and reminding them: “No TOFU” (Text Oben, Full quote Unten).
Means sth like “text above, full quote below”
Quote above, reply below was the eMail and Usenet standard from the 70s until Microsoft introduced Outlook, and more importantly, bundled Outlook Express with Windows in the mid to late 90s. Those were the first products that automatically top-posted by default, and especially on Usenet, you could almost always correctly identify an Outlook Express n00b by virtue of them top-posting.
1.0 ratio is the low bar, leech
There always have been the nick picks. But now sometimes there is barely any connection between the post and the comments. Like two people with multiple strokes distributed between them having an angry teams call.
*nit picks
the rule should be that you don’t use your name until you’re like 35 and understand how to use it properly
The first rule of usenet.
Dont believe anyone on the internet.
I don’t believe you
I don’t believe you
I don’t believe that you don’t believe me
That’s my favorite Charlemagne quote
Don’t pick up the phone if someone is online… I’m old
That, together with: I’m online, watch out for the ca… “No carrier”
I’m a millennial, I learned this, and now I just don’t pick up the phone.
It’s weird when someone calls me and it’s actually a live one.
I’m a gen z and I can’t put down the phone
Now try and call someone with it. I’ll wait
Feel free to call me whenever, it only costs you $69 a minute.
Don’t call them, it’s just them screaming " NOT THE BEES!" Over and over again for a minute, weirdest wank ever.
Hot damn! Where’s my wallet!?
I can’t remember. Did it make pterodactyl noises or is that just faxes?
The modem made noises when connecting, but if someone picked up the phone, your internet would just stop working and they’d get their dial tone.
Now dot matrix printers, those were real pterodactyl sounds.
Modems can still make noise. As recently as five years ago I still had to work with modems. A lot of them now have silent mode though
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.
Decades ago, I saw a (one of many) "you might be a geek / nerd if … " list (referencing “you might be a redneck”). As of this moment, the only one I remember is “you leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you think it sounds like the ocean - the perfect sound for surfing the web!”
- Squeee
- Whale song
- Chunkachunks
- Teeth grinder
- Buckbuckbuck
- They’re here
Ah, another Poltergeist fan, I see. :p
oh yes it made the noise.
You come from a nice family. My family disconnected each other all the time
I used to get hella annoyed that my mom would be online all afternoon so I would pick up the phone and blow into it for a few seconds until I heard AOL man say “Goodbye.”
I’m not that old but was dealing with that in the mid-2000s before my parents finally switched.
Don’t feed the trolls.
Of course nowadays its nearly impossible to tell whos spouting racial slurs to get folks mad and whos doing it because they’re just an asshole.
Don’t feed the AI
Just assume almost everybody is an asshole online and you can’t be wrong. Because anonymity has granted them that capability.
The fact that people being assholes with their real names on Facebook tells me, anonymity has nothing to do with it.
Facebook has no anonymity though. So it’s different. You are sole responsible for who you allow yourself to add that now may know your real name.
I think people being assholes on FB with their real names makes filtering a hell of a lot easier.
More recently, this behaviour is known as “driving engagement”
I remember when it was just funny edgy humor that was clearly satirical for the most part because a lot of us were just dumb kids. It was abrasive and stupid but you had this feeling everyone was in on the joke.
But bizarre satire has turned to deeply held conviction.
I’m not just sad that the mean spirited trolling persists, but that it’s gotten more sincere and often must be taken seriously. :(
When you share something cool, link back to the original creator or where you found it from.
I’d argue this is the opposite of what was asked.
In the early days, no one would post sources or attribute “stuff” to anyone. We’d all just share what we thought were cool pictures.
Now, everyone gets mad when you dont post the name of the artist and their socials.
What people are really mad about us the fact that artists are (and always have been) starving. We throw so much food away, let the artists cook for fucks sake.
This might be more of a blogosphere-era thing I guess. Even when most people blogging did it for pleasure rather than work, it was always considered polite to “hat tip” (h/t) the source of a given link, if you happened to find it on someone else’s site.
I would posit a big part of this is because early-net days were primarily for just socializing and sharing cool stuff (heck yeah, I miss it.) Artists probably didn’t make a majority of their living through the 'net. If something was shared it was likely just “I think this is cool, folks!”
Nowadays, to say the Internet is heavily commercialized would be a massive understatement. Every little interaction is monetized. Many people make their entire living through e-commerce. It’s just how things went.
Meanwhile you have a billion faceless sandfleas with repost-botfarms trying to hustle cash with the stupidest methods possible.
You’ll see entire channels where animations or paintings or whatever are circulated on socials like youtube, twitter, or tiktok with the artist tag conveniently cropped out (if there was one).
Some are outright stealing the work for profit (selling tshirts or something), while others are just using it to farm clicks, which is also a route to profit.
The artist who made the work is cheated, perhaps unaware, as some click-grifter gets all the attention. And that sucks. :( As an artist myself, I try to make sure I share the sources for stuff now, because recognition is a form of thanks, at the very least.
I miss the sharing internet…the attention economy has basically turned the internet into a sociological illustration of “The paperclip apocalypse”. :(
Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.
Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
a/s/l?
Aight, I put on my robe and wizard’s hat.
RIP bloodninja.
We were all 18/f/cal come on man…
Haha true
Facebook tried that shit with me. Ban until I sent verification of my ID so I sent a paystub photoshopped (badly) with my alias, it was accepted and it’s still there even though I left FB years ago.
I wish they would ban me. I haven’t logged in in over 15 years and even block several of their servers, and yet I still get mails that someone in there commented on something.
Oh I get zero notifications, but the only real reason I haven’t taken it down is that my posts from IG are cross posted there for the business, which I have to have to advertise our specials because of the boomers that use it daily.
Can you not unsubscribe?
Shit, I provide every single service with randomly generated data, unless legally required. Just doing my part to pollute the training data.
Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
And now it’s come 180 in that some see it as a red flag if you don’t give up that information. I had someone on a different social media site accuse me of being a bot because I wouldn’t give up the specific town I’m from. I’ve seen it happen to others too. It is both fascinating and insane how viewpoints have changed regarding identifying yourself online.
Not only telling your real name, you weren’t supposed to tell your real birthday, give away your phone number or where you lived, even just saying the city was a bit much. So filling in those things like on Facebook or LinkedIn feels very wrong but it would be even more wrong to have fake info there. So my new rule is, only add ppl I know irl to places I use my real info and everything else can I add anyone to.
Ugh, the world of “branded people.” Everything is like “Add a picture of yourself, or you won’t seem trustworthy!”
Yeesh. Some artists and such can make it using a pseudonym, but it’s rare in more professional circles…but now if you hope to be taken seriously as a professional, you’re expected to put your real super genuine self out there.
…and we get news stories of people being harassed and doxxed literally to death. It’s crazy…
Yes that picture thing happened multiple times at my old job. They kept pestering me about give them a pic to add to the “about us” page and I had to use my face in all channels (jira, slack email and so on) because “otherwise I can’t tell who is who”… my current job handled that much better, they asked for a pic (if I wanted to) to be used as reference for an artist (always the same) to make an avatar and that is now the avatar my coworkers and I use in presentations, systems, emails, webpages anything, we never use real image of our coworkers unless the person wish for it.
