this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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I just look fondly back on the times when there was a slightly higher barrier-to-entry to those that wanted to access and use the internet.
This makes me wonder how many "teenage edgelords" that bought into "the manosphere" would've been able to go to such an extreme if they'd been forced to access every website through a shared family computer, in a room that others frequent, the way many Millennials had to do at their age.
Relatively-guaranteed privacy only happened on rare occasions (I came from a large household), and I had to share the one computer with all of my siblings. My parents weren't the type to go out of their way to monitor my internet activity, but just knowing they or my siblings could appear at any time, look over my shoulder, and ask me what I was looking at, made me think very carefully about what I put on that screen.
We wouldn't have been able to entrench ourselves 24/7 in toxic muck the way people can today.
I hadn't thought about it until reading your comment here but I accidentally raised my GenZ kids this way. If I hadn't done this I never would have seen my eldest heading down the misogynist edgelord path and intervened.
The only decent computer in the house was in the living room, and they had clunky retired elementary school computers in their rooms running Linux and Open Office so they could work on homework (no internet, USB drive to save homework and send from family computer). It wasn't because I sought to keep them from using the internet privately, it was because we couldn't really afford better.
August 1993?
Ah yes, the halcyon days when only upper-middle class techbros had access to such beacons of internet liberalism as 4chan and Albino Blacksheep.
Bring back Powerline Blog! Bring back deeply homophobic Starcraft voice chats! Bring back spending 30,000 bitcoins on a pizza! I miss the days of three horny Harvard kids putting together an online Hot-or-Not image ranking of their female peers. I miss Googling "Waffles" and getting John Kerry's campaign website. I miss downloading an .mp3 of someone reading erotica in a Daffy Duck voice on Napster! You know, when the internet was normal and sophisticated and good.
Retvrn To Tradition!
You're thinking too modern. We need to go back before Eternal September
Yep, still sounds better than our current enshittification.
I mean at least there wasn't a subscription for literally everything back then.
You say that like that isn’t better
It isn't. It's just older - often past the point of living memory.
The modern era has far more in common with the '00s and '80s and '60s than modern Americans are willing to accept.
When you’re older you’ll understand that mass propaganda campaigns and truth control are worse
Trying to believe this, but I've got Chinatown playing in the background and it's drowning you out.
But sure, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond were winning elections based on facts and logic. Newt Gingrich and George Bush Jr never went on the TV and told lies. Censorship during the War on Drugs and Crime and Terror is a myth. Nobody in America was being poison pilled with red scares and satanic panics before 2016.
We’re talking about the internet
These predate the Internet.
But also, omg the post 9/11 Internet was black pilled to the gills