It's probably apparent that I came online during the Web 1.0 days (as evidenced by the fact that, as of this writing, I still haven't bothered doing even the most minimal of visual design for this site.) I'm not a true dinosaur who frequented Usenet or even used something like Prodigy, but compared to most people I've been around forever. Thus when I came online not only did the internet look very different, but the culture surrounding it was also different. In particular there was a lot of advice given to new internet users, particularly kids, about how to act online. The advice has since been dropped, but in most cases it is only more relevant today. For example:
I remember a big part of the "welcome to the internet spiel" being "pick a 'handle' that has nothing to do with your real name and use that exclusively." Today we have plenty of phone posters who rant about "cowards" who "are afraid to use their real names" but back in the day using an assumed name was just part of being online. Back then there was probably not a whole lot of risk to using your real name; at worst your online activity consisted of some embarassing nerdery and if someone was mad at you maybe they'd look up your number in the phone book. I'm sure there were cases of predators or whatever moving to IRL stalking, but in most cases you would have to endure mild embarassment or some lewd phone calls. Now most people post nearly everything about themselves online: not only a phone number but a detailed account of where they work, who they are friends with, what times they are home or on vacation, etc. It's trivial to use this information to cause some real harm, but people are still willing to post all sorts of dumbassery under their real name.
What makes things more bizarre is how much of a crime "doxxing" is considered in and of itself. Back in the day it was rare, since people usually didn't give enough to work with (especially since the public databases you would need to search to verify the information were harder to access.) And if someone did post enough to be easily tracked the thought was "he brought it on himself," a bit like if someone leaves his wallet on the front seat of his car with the windows wide open and is surprised to see it stolen. But now people will get mad at getting "doxxed" when someone looks through their facebook profile to find where they work, live, etc. and they will be shocked even when this happens in response to a post they made on facebook. The fear has increased, but this hasn't led to a corresponding increase in precautions taken.
There's some crab bucket mentality going on here too. You especially see this with people who do political commentary for a living, and so have to do things under their real name in order to work their brand. These people complaing the most about the problems with having a public identity, but will also complain about people who dodge those issues by maintaining their anonyminity. The reaction is "I got screwed, so everyone else deserves to get screwed too." And if it was just those idiots doing it we could sit back and laugh. But the sad truth is that zoomers and younger come into the internet believing that it is an extension of reality and that the purpose of the internet is to attract clout under your real name. (Though to be fair to the zoomers, in most cases their parents posted all their personal information online before the zoomer in question even knew what the internet was.)
You'll see that piece of advice in every old guide to finding information online. Back in the day it was necessary because search engines honestly kind of sucked. They fell into two categories: curated and webcrawler. The curated engines would hand select pages, so there would be little absolute trash, but they would also only cover a very small sliver of the internet. The webcrawler engines (including the eponymous Webcrawler but also most "modern" engines) would automatically find sites, but often did not index them in any good way and so finding good or relevant results was a crapshoot. Thus any individual search might fail, but if you did a bunch you could usually find what you were looking for.
This advice ended due to Google, of course. To their credit they did create a very good algorithm with some clever techniques that other engines of the time didn't use (such as taking into account what term were used in links to the page, regardless of what was actually said on the page.) Within a year or two Google essentially became the only search engine, to the point where "just Google it" is still a phrase used to say that you should search for something
All this was well and good while Google worked well. But over time it got worse and worse. There are a variety of reasons for this, which probably would take up an essay in and of itself to develop properly (in short, Search Engine Optimization, deliberate attempts to control data from Google's end, and the fact that the people working on the algorithm no longer understood how it worked, especially with the way that searches were personalized.) As a result most Google searches are crap these days. This is especially true if you are looking for something obscure, and even moreso if you are unfortuante to be searching for something obscure which sounds kind of like something more mainstream. Bing and its offshoots are better (though barely more than marginally) and there are other options such as Brave Search, Yandex, etc. But each has some pretty big blindspots meaning that the only way to reliably find anything is to use multiple search engines with a variety of search terms. Yet how many people even attempt ths?
Of course, many of the oldschool tricks for search engines no longer work. In old search engines using quotes would mean that the exact phrase was required on the website; this only works sporadically on modern engines. You could use + and - to say that a term absolutely had to be included or that a term couldn't be included; in my experience modern search engines ignore this 90% of the time. (Even when they do follow them, they will often allow synonyms to appear instead, which often defeats the point since I most frequently use those operators when searching for an exact title.) Boolean operators like AND, OR, etc. are right out. (Up to a couple years ago Yahoo of all places had an advanced search option which allowed those operators, but it has since vanished.)
The only thing that seems better with mdoern engines is the ability to use site: to restrict results to one site. Unfortunately this is often needed only because of websites with poor design that rely on searches for everything and which have a piss poor in-site search engine.
Okay, this was a piece of advice that many people ignored even back in the day. Everyone got e-mails like "Bill Gates needs to test his e-mail system. Forward this to ten people to help out. Once ten thousand e-mails are forward each person who participated will be given 20 dollars as compensation" or "CRAZY STORY: YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHAT DANGERS YOUR KIDS ARE BEING EXPOSED TO AT SCHOOL (FORWARD TO YOUR FRIENDS!)." However, there was a very strong negative attitude towards people who habitually forwarded that crap. And there still is, when it comes to e-mail.
But when we get right down to it, the majority of social media is jsut forwarding spam. Whether it's posting stolen content to Reddit for updoots, responding to the latest TikTok craze, retweeting some dumbass take, etc. the modern internet is set up for people to do nothing but further pollute the internet with content devoid of useful information. And sites are set up to encourage that behavior. Have you ever tried to have an actual conversation on Reddit? Even in a small community the layout sucks for it, and the second you start having a larger community the karma system will highlight only a few major posts and hangers on. If you are lucky the the highlighted posts at least contain some useful information (ex. a translated script for a linked video that was in a foreign language.) But more commonly it's just stale memes. Most people will complain about this, but everyone loves getting the endorphin rush of seeing those numbers go up. Even here while I know that I haven't posted any content that justifies having a following, I get a rush when I see that a had a day of (relatively) high hits.
Everyone's made the comparison, but it really is like a drug. This can't be good for me, but I feel great! And surely just one more hit can't hurt, right...?
This circles back into the earlier "Why Use Neocities" essay. While a page like this is not immune from the temptation to post empty content to watch numbers go up, at the very least it is possible to do soemthing other than that. What can be done on twitter? The very format means that you can only post very short content that will be buried in a few days (or even sooner if people's feeds are getting tinkered with.) Even if you were to right an insightful essay that was of use to others, no one would be able to find it in a couple of weeks. Thus your only hope is to post "viral" content that gets lots of retweets and responses. This means that either you will need to post spam, or your followers will need to respond to you with it. It's baked into the system.
That's it for now. This could easily become a continuing series. (For example I was just reading through a 2003 Computer Help book which gave the advice "when making a website, do everything you can to minimize download times;" a laughable piece of advice in the modern world.) But I can only do so much ranting in one sitting.
July 27, 2022