More hostile as in... you open some random webpage, you get 3 popup windows with porn ads playing at full volume? And when you close them, infinitely more open, like a hydra, until it locks up and you have to reboot.
Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
This was my internet experience in 1999. I think the derangement has been a constant over time.
It's true that the internet was already well down that road in 1999, but it has become much worse since then. I'm really comparing it to internet earlier than that. It was about 2000 when I started considering the internet as effectively dead in terms of being able to provide the value I used to get from it.
But "more hostile" includes not only advertising and tone, but spying, overtly hostile actors such as crackers and other criminals and so forth.
> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you
I don't count this as part of the general degradation of the internet, though. That's more about the online gaming community. Things were that way before the internet was the most common method of online gaming.
Wait do folks not remember the "I get to tell my wife 'sudo make me a sandwich'" jokes on Freenode into the early 2000s? "Pool is closed due to AIDS" from Habbo Hotel?
I think this "genteel internet" that came pre-Web was much shorter lived than the periods after it. It reminds me of crypto where the initial halcyon period of Bitcoin seemed full of hope but once the technology had to scale it just couldn't keep its initial values due to both technological and social issues.
Interesting. My frame of reference for the internet started in 1998, after "eternal september" and the earlier culture. Which makes me curious about baseline expectations.
I agree many aspects are growing... overtly bad. I think LLMs are well on their way to rendering the mainstream internet, search, and social media effectively worthless. The signal to noise ratio is unfixable.
I still get value from my habits, which haven't changed for decades: niche forums, personal websites, blogs, podcasts, youtube. I would be satisfied as long as those remained more or less intact, the rest can go. Requires a lot of curation though.
> Or you drop into a public game of CS, and a dozen teens start screaming at you over low bitrate compressed audio streams, to logoff and kill yourself because you sound like an n-word.
I do have a strange nostalgia about those days. It was a culture that didn't exist in meatspace, and there was something fun about that.
However, when covid hit and my wife and I started playing games, I quickly learned my wife severely disapproves of typing "kys" to others in games, and now I try to only say positive things. It is a better experience, but then again I'm now a parent and hoping to spare my children from interacting with college me.
It's what the Internet is for -- a place where things don't matter and where you could go to blow off steam. The Dionysian night to real life's Apollonian day.
Needing to be polite in every aspect of our lives because of this stupid demand to collapse down to the lowest common denominator of humor or mental fortitude is ruining the Internet and making the world and media less fun. It's also Orwellian. There's people who want to dox you and make sure you get fired or never get hired for being mean in a CoD lobby. That's psychotic. Those people are mentally ill, and we've let them run the show and tell us what to do. And of course, it's symbiotic with corporations and advertisers who want things as anodyne and rated E as possible since that makes the most $$$ (if only we can collectively accept more mediocre art and experiences as we forget what better ones we had).
I'm glad the pendulum seems to be swinging back as people are figuring out that having had less for fun for the last 10 years accomplished absolutely nothing worth caring about.
