Generally, people weren’t dicks or trolls online quite as much at the time. The internet wasn’t for everyone in 2001. Most people got their news from TV. I had a family member call me to turn on the TV.
The lack of decency part was how quickly the anti-Arab sentiment came out of the woodwork. With a lot of people still sort of attuned to it from the first Iraq war, it was easy for a lot of people to fall back into that. Tons of racist cartoons and photoshoped images sent around, mostly by email. Lots of email forwards. To be fair, people were extremely pissed, and since it was not a nation-state doing this, it was hard to have someone to blame in the traditional sense.
But, in general, people were more shocked and terrified. Especially as the anthrax stuff happened a few weeks later, rampant speculation and conspiracy theories ramped up. All of that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” started within days. A lot of “woah, I can’t believe it” stuff. It took a few days before things got back to normal.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 8 hours ago
For people who only know the internet past 2010, the 2001 internet would be unrecognizable, so the question doesn’t really make sense. The world was an entirely different place before modern algorithmic media. There were trolls, and there were decent people, but the whole context of the world changed after the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Arguably for the orders of magnitude worse. It’s not really fair to compare then to now.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
There just wasn’t really user-submitted content back then. If you wanted to post something on the internet, you had to create a website.
There were tools that made a website a bit easier to create (most notably Geocities), but it was still a fairly technical task to simply get text that you typed show up on a website accessible to all.
Simply being able to reply to someone else? That wasn’t really on the web, although by 2001 there were a few attempts to bring that kind of forum functionality to the broader web on actual http/www webpages (when it was previously on Usenet and BBSes and mailing lists and the technologies known as the internet before and separate from the world wide web). vBulletin was the popular one, and I think phpBB was fairly popular, too, but those projects started in 2000 and weren’t that popular in the first years. Web hosts actually offering a full blown LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for hosting, and the technical skills to administer that kind of service, even on free software, was a pretty big hurdle to adoption before 2003 or so.
In 2001, almost all of the web was static content, with no method of interacting with the content other than simply viewing it. You’d click on links to retrieve another piece of content. By 2005 the web 2.0 revolution was underway, and websites had become interactive, with dynamic content drawing from relational databases under the hood. But in 2001? No, the web was pretty static.
Your description of the rise of the social algorithms is part of the story since 2010, but even that leaves out the period of time in between.
Jg1@lemmy.zip 1 hour ago
Fark.com was around. People were definitely less trolly right after, for a bit.