• Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    163·
    19 hours ago

    Brutally true.

    A lot of people don’t want to admit how deeply white and cisgender man 80’s/90’s internet was, and that if there ‘was no racism’ it’s because there were so few non-white and non-cisgender-men. It’s literally why the whole “there are no women on the internet” thing still persists memetically even though it hasn’t been true in probably over 20 years.

    While there were indeed many nascent communities for the LGBTQ+ communities, they were small and often brigaded by trolls and jerks.

    I remember around 2010 or so it being revealed that more women played games online than men, but “manly gamers” decided that the fucking droves of women playing Bejeweled and Peggle didn’t count because they weren’t “real games” (once again, according to all the cisgender gaming men who thought only war-games count). That was one of the first moments I realized the men around me were really full of shit.

    I’m a white cisgender man and yet I just don’t have the same happy memories of the internet at that time period that a lot of people do. I saw a lot of bullshit back then, and people wonder why it’s so prevalent in the tech community now: because it was back then, too.

    Emphatically, we were the problem all along.

    • AnIndefiniteArticle@sh.itjust.works
      4·
      15 hours ago

      I wasn’t around for the 80s/90s internet, but the 00s/10s internet was best where it grew in the structures created by the 80s/90s internet instead of the new corporate web2.0 scams being hawked.

      Where the internet grew in the structures of the 80s/90s internet was a lot more diverse than the echo chambers that were the alternative and flooded the world with hate and misinformation.

      The structures of the 80s/90s internet were egalitarian, and were just missing a diverse population for the first few decades. The problem is that as newcomers joined, they got fed into gatekeeping and abusive platforms that kept people segregated into echo chambers. Corporate takeover of the web killed the egalitarian dream of the 80s/90s internet.

    • maegul (he/they)@lemmy.mlEnglish
      51·
      19 hours ago

      Hear hear!

      The whole thing about early internet nostalgia is definitely interesting and pertinent for the fediverse! While I think there’s something to the pre big-algorithmic-social internet, I think your point is very well made … there was plenty of trashiness too, and as you say, problematic homogeneity.

      Meanwhile there’s a lot of “let’s just get back to the original Internet” energy on the fediverse … and yea … I’ve felt for a while this was a doomed mindset. Not just because there’s really no going back, but because it almost certainly is rose tinted glasses, which becomes apparent once you start assessing its libertarian premises, and how they failed, critically (again, as you say!)