I feel as though there was a "good old days" of the internet. Don't get me wrong, it was a complete shit show, but it was anonymous, anyone could say anything that they wanted, and there would be few if any consequences. There were ads, but they were generally garbage animated GIFs at worst.

It wasn't perfect, but we were free to do what we wanted on the internet, with little to no bearing on our daily lives.

Now, it's almost expected that your online activity will be tied to you specifically. In most cases, your legal name is attached to it for everyone to see. If you try to go around without your legal name on everything, then generally you are either severely limited, or outright removed from the platform. Sigh

[–] tygerprints@kbin.social 2 points 11 months ago

That's true enough. I started working around the time computers were even a thing - back in the 70s and there was no internet, just basic DOS green screens that were very basic. It wasn't until the mid-90s I even had a computer that had rudimentary internet access - and it was so new, there was only maybe a handful of websites you could find.

There were no cookies or trackers to watch what you were doing online, but then again, there wasn't anything much to look at anyway - porn wasn't even there yet.

So I feel we definitely have it both better and worse today. To me, the better outweights the negatives - I mean it's so much nicer today to just be able to search anything and get a million different answers. But that's also the downfall of everyone being interconnected - being buried in bullshit much of the time.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

and there would be few if any consequences.

Meted out by human beings who had to read the thread in aggravatingly linear order - so they were more likely to say 'you were being kind of a butthead' instead of 'how dare you call anyone a butthead.'