“Legitimately the Internet was a better place before …” it became more like TV and a corporate shopping mall, and less like a Library and a village fair.
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socsa@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Legitimately the Internet was a better place before conservatives figured out how to use it.
Digit@lemmy.wtf 3 weeks ago
djsoren19@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
so…never?
just because they weren’t old boomers doesn’t mean the nazi 14 yr olds were somehow not conservatives. If you could find any of the old longbeards from early unix forums and asked them their opinions on minorities I’m sure you’d get fun responses. They were always here, the difference is that they didn’t feel legitimized.
chunes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Before nerds made it easy enough for conservatives and normies to use it. We did this.
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I joined a fb group in 2004 protesting the decision to open it to people without an edu address. Fortunately fuckerberg made the right decision and nothing bad has happened since then.
chunes@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I remember making a facebook account right after he made that decision, lol.
Quetzalcutlass@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They got in early. I remember researching the Holocaust for a school assignment in the late nineties/early aughts and the top result was a conspiracy theorist/Holocaust denial screed. An openly racist one with slurs and epithets throughout, no less. The early internet was wild.
There was also Stormfront, a white supremacist forum with hundreds of thousands of members where racists openly detailed their plans to infiltrate police precincts and federal agencies by having fellow members already employed there vouch for them, with the goal of creating a network of supporters throughout the entire law enforcement apparatus to protect them. Looking at the news, it’s not hard to imagine they succeeded.
Noel_Skum@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Fucking Stormfront. What an absolute abomination. I haven’t thought about them for years…
Sometime probably around the turn of the century I was emailed a link to like a Q & A or advice section on the site.
This nazi had to learn a second language and wanted to know where people drew the line as acceptable foreign languages.
Some said English only… but that Danish, German, Polish, Russian etc were kinda acceptable. Spanish, Italian, French etc was shaky ground and best avoided. Anything outside of Europe you might as well kill yourself before we do. That was the gist of the answers.
It was hilarious, terrifying and pitiful in equal measures…