Comment on I was on social media before web browsers existed. I am Legion.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Anybody here remember Plastic, circa 2000? It was a forum kind of like Reddit, although I don’t remember if it had upvotes or not.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
upvotes and gamification of human interaction ruined the internet and are directly responsible for the extremity of discourse today.
The internet was so much better before that shit.
Which is also the era before social media, because as far as I’m aware, social media introduced those addiction driven gamification mechanism for what should be, by now, clearly obvious reasons to even the most thick skulled individuals.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 1 day ago
No, you’re looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the “bump” phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.
Forums before slashdot just weren’t that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 1 day ago
and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice. It was never a problem, much less as egregious as you try to paint it to be.
and I’d still take that any day, over the toxic miasma of gamification, advertising, and multibillionaire control we have now.
Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.