You know what we did when someone was obnoxious during the glory days of BBS and IRC? We banned and kicked their sorry arse off the server. So everyone behaved. Kinda. And everyone..even kids..acted like adults. Or we dealt with it.
And you know why it was glorious. The Internet was truly free. There was no money to be made there.
IRC was/is notoriously unfree because of that, i dont think it claimed any free speech creds, because its realtime nature means that spam or bad faith had to be removed immediately. plus the 'acted like adults' thing is not true, more like everyone acted like kids but at least fun kids.
I do agree with the Twitter thread that there is a generation gap. Those who remember the internet from quarter of a century ago weren’t treated like children. Even children.
In the past 25 something years, young adults have regressed to looking for approval by authorities and PTBs because of their infantalisation at school and then college and then at work.
No adult wants to adult anymore. Because their every need is being catered to by some kind of corporate power, they don’t even know that they are free to let go of the teat.
I find all of this horrifying and depressing and infuriating. If one hasn’t had any agency in their adult life, how will
one know when to shut up and when to protest.
The cancel culture is the product of the state run education system…it is the utter helplessness and impotency of entire generations who had never had to make an independent evaluation or decision or judgement call.
There is no redemption for this current generation and I dont see how the future generations can be rescued from this dismal fate. This also seems to be an uniquely American problem…Altho sadly it’s spreading to other parts of the world..mostly because of the internet and social media.
Literally..who can be against free speech with a straight face? America‘s young generation..it looks like. The country has officially self destructed on the very values it stood for..very sad.
What the right calls "cancel culture" is the product of 25 years of tech companies removing any and all ways for users to moderate their environment.
On IRC I can select whose messages I see. I've got ignore. I can throw people out of my rooms with /kick and I can ban them long term with /ban. All rooms I'm in are rooms I've selected myself to be in, so rooms have regulars that know each other. If a banned user returns, it's easy to ban them again, or ban by IP, etc.
Tech companies removed this power from users. I can't say “hey, I only want to see tweets from these people, only they should be able to interact with my tweets, etc.” Because if I could, I could also just ban advertisers from my circles.
If I want to avoid interacting with someone on Twitter, not even blocking the user works. And even if I did block the user, my friends have to repeat it, there's no way of throwing a user out of your entire friend circle.
So the only option available is petitioning Twitter to remove the user from the entire platform. So of course that's what people do.
The methods you give users define their social interactions. Reddit has less of an issue with this because Subreddit mods can rule however they like. But in return, Subreddits have a reputation of being run by power hungry autocrats just like IRC rooms had.
You can 100% mute and block people on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, most main line social media platforms. Hell you can even mute keywords on Twitter and never have to deal with seeing another tweet about Will Smith slapping someone.
Should one user be able to decide if another user should be expelled from a platform? That leads to a lot of sticky problems, so no, they shouldn't have that power. Should a user be banned if they violate the terms of the platform (roughly what mods on IRC would do when a user was banned)?
Yes. Yes they should. And they do. It's a liability for platforms to not enforce their own rules.
The issue is that with twitter, you can only ban a user from interacting with you, or from interacting with the entire platform.
Traditionally, there used to be something in between: Ban someone from your small sub-community.
And moderators on most social media platforms only take action if they have to, preferring to stay inactive, while in most social circles people would proactively make sure a new member is a good fit.
Currently, people share block lists to accomplish the same. On Facebook groups, WhatsApp groups, IRC channels or even BBS you also had some users with the ability to throw trolls out.
On Twitter, there’s nothing like this. There’s no way for someone to make a group, post content only to that group, and add/remove users to/from the group.
For millennia, most human conversation happened in such groups. Our social mechanisms haven’t changed quickly enough to hold pace with the technological mechanisms of posting an opinion and having literal billions of potential readers – and commenters.
I guess people will tell you you’re a paranoid old person with a selective memory. But FWIW I hear you and feel your pain on all points. I have but one upvote to give.
I wonder if things are too centralized nowadays - you are either on Twitter or not on Twitter. Whereas in the case of a BBS or IRC, you could be ban from one board/channel/server but not another, so everyone can have their own standard of free speech.
I guess this is still kind of the case for reddit? But given how concentrated moderation power is on reddit, and reddit's ability to de-platform whole communities, I don't know how true it still is.
Yes, it was truly free. Because: My house. My rules. Anyone can build their own house.
I also find the whole following culture creepy stalkerish. A lot of times I feel obligated to follow back and end up discovering that person’s entire whole icky persona..and wish that I could just have superficial friendships maybe.
I would still vote IRC over BBS. It was the right amount of cozy and distance. Just what you were willing to implement.
Also..I often think about the Dunbar Number. Even when I design small farm systems, I use the Dunbar limit and cluster to determine how many people can cooperate either as farmer collective or even as customer base(as in they are willing to share/barter).
Human beings are better in small groups. The small groups in turn can interact collectively with other like minded collectives. It seems like we haven’t studied human behaviour and psychology sufficiently to suit the really fast paced growth of social media and it’s interactions.
The internet was truly free because creating your own IRC network was both acceptable and commonplace. Creating your own Twitter on the other hand... Mastodon may just solve this though.
And you know why it was glorious. The Internet was truly free. There was no money to be made there.