
Moms Who Were Extremely Online in 1993 - zdw
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/05/moms-who-were-extremely-online-1993/588562/
======
blahedo
As someone who was also on the internet already in the early 90s (I expect
there are many of us here), I've long found it interesting how much of a
social shift it's undergone. In the 90s I had online friends that I had never
met in person, through various kinds of online games or interest groups. Agora
Nomic, the CONLANG/AUXLANG mailing lists, rec.arts.int-fiction, the list goes
on. I learned a lot about the world and about people different than me—the
line in the OP article about diverse countries and religions felt deeply
familiar to me for this reason.

But, in 2019, I don't really have anything like that anymore. The internet's a
bigger place, but my corner of it feels somehow smaller. With very rare
exception, I don't accept friends on FB unless I've met them in person. Sites
that I actively participate on are either very large (so they might be diverse
but aren't small-group-of-friends-y) or very small and comprised entirely of
people I already knew irl.

Time marches on and the world changes, I know. But when I reflect on this line
of consideration, it really feels like the internet didn't live up to its
promises.

~~~
INTPenis
I'm a bit younger, was a teenager in the late 90s going on IRC and various
message boards but I've often mused on the same shift in internet culture.

To me it seems like these groups still exist but you have to stay within your
age range. For example I hang out with 35-45 year olds on IRC still. And we
all have Jabber with OTR or Signal. None of us have much of social media
accounts.

The kids today still have these little communities, they use group chat just
like we use IRC. It might be Discord, Skype, Snapchat or something more
obscure but it's still the same old rules of the group chat. It's a tight knit
group and the rules that have applied to group chats since forever still do
apply.

So just because you don't have those connections anymore doesn't mean the
culture is all that different. Kids still feel like the main part of the
internet (fb, ig) is shallow and meaningless so they band together in their
own little communities around special interests or through school and their
IRL community.

I envy kids today because I see how new trends spread virally between schools
just because they have these group chats with each other. For example recently
the kids in my town were hacking e-scooters through some trick that was
spreading on their group chats. I still have no idea how they did it, I'm out
of the loop.

------
kilroy123
Reminds me of my mom. She was _super_ into the internet between 1995 - 2000.

It's weird to think about now, but she was in IRC channels all day. She was
really into the early pirate music scene. She even started dabbling in web
development.

Eventually, she just lost interest when life got to busy and over time she
become less and less technical.

Which I think is a shame, that would of been so cool if she became a
developer.

~~~
vostok
Some times it blows my mind that my grandmother was a software developer.
Humans have been doing this stuff for a long time.

~~~
kortilla
No offense, but 50-100 years for a profession is absolutely nothing.
Engineering fields have been around for hundreds of years. There’s even arcane
shit in the Bible about punishment for engineers of houses they approve
collapse on people.

~~~
shoo
Similarly, going back another couple of thousand years: Code of Hammurabi (c.
1700 B.C.E.)

228\. If a builder build a house for a man and complete it, (that man) shall
give him two shekels of silver per SAR of house as his wage.

229\. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction
firm, and the house which he has built collapse and cause the death of the
owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.

230\. If it cause the death of a son of the owner of the house, they shall put
to death a son of that builder.

231\. If it cause the death of a slave of the owner of the house, he shall
give the owner of the house a slave of equal value.

232\. If it destroy property, he shall restore whatever it destroyed, and
because he did not make the house which he built firm and it collapsed, he
shall rebuild the house which collapsed from his own property (i.e., at his
own expense).

233\. If a builder build a house for a man and do not make its construction
meet the requirements and a wall fall in, that builder shall strengthen that
wall at his own expense.

[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Hammurabi_(Harper...](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Code_of_Hammurabi_\(Harper_translation\))

[https://fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-code/](https://fs.blog/2017/11/hammurabis-
code/)

------
mruts
I was on an IRC channel hosted by this guy. Maybe 5-6 people all 13-15 back in
2007. They were/are my best friends. For over 10 years we talked. The guy who
ran it worked for the CIA and got arrested as the person responsible for the
Vault7 hacking tools leak. Now the server has been taken by the FBI and I had
to have a very interesting conversation about all the shit we said over the
years. Now he’s going to spend the rest of his life in prison.

Hits me hard everytime I think about it...

~~~
orhmeh09
Joshua Schulte? Here’s a recent story:
[https://www.cyberscoop.com/vault-7-joshua-schulte-
wikileaks-...](https://www.cyberscoop.com/vault-7-joshua-schulte-wikileaks-
civil-rights-violation-50-billion/)

~~~
bredren
How do you have this different view of the world and work deeply for the CIA.
Is talent that hard to attain rn?

~~~
mruts
People change over time. Working for the CIA probably makes you change faster
than most jobs.

------
ScottBurson
I met my wife on Usenet in 1993, in alt.psychology.personality. Funny, I was
just thinking about that yesterday. I guess all the Usenet couples who will
ever exist have already been formed.

~~~
yostrovs
Save any related data. They'll have a documentary on Netflix about you in a
decade or two.

~~~
codingdave
There were a decent number of couples who met online, before meeting online
meant a dating site. There were BBSes, Usenet, and some early discussions
sites. I'm sure people could compile a surprisingly large list of ways people
met. A few years later, I even met my wife on LiveJournal, before that went
weird(er). So while someone certainly could do a documentary on such things, I
don't think any specific couple from that era should be holding their breath
for it.

~~~
Razengan
It’s notable for being the first time in human history when people found mates
across the globe without leaving their homes.

That definitely deserves a documentary.

~~~
kortilla
I’m not sure. There used to be some late night ad things that would show a
recorded video dating profile and you would call in if interested. The
internet wasn’t the first to that.

~~~
phil21
True, but the "friction" of meeting and interacting with remote people was
greatly improved, if that makes sense. Thus you simply met more people,
especially at a time where folks interested enough to get on the Internet were
probably very similarly minded to you - which was quite rare for the time at
least in my neck of the woods.

Some of the first BBS' I remember from the late 80's/early 90's were dating
oriented or at least had an active personals section, so it certainly was a
constant evolution.

------
CalRobert
My mom was a science fiction author and always shared discussions from the
Heinlein Forum on Prodigy with me, ca. 1992-1995. Those forums were small
enough and focused enough that people built real friendships and eventually
had a few gatherings.

I miss that sort of thing. I don't know where to find it now. The small,
close-knit community thing is actually a benefit of walled gardens but I don't
know where I'd look now.. The Well? I understand it's moribund at this point.

------
clamprecht
When I got my first PC around 1981 or 82, one of the first games I played was
Microsoft Adventure, a text-based game. My mom recognized the game. It turns
out that in the late 1970s, she and her friend had played and solved the game
-- entirely over a teletype printer & modem (no screen). She knew all the
hints except for one -- the extra point for Witt's End, which I think
Microsoft added when they bought the game.

------
criddell
I was thinking about some of the things I did online in the late 80's and
early 90's. One of my favorite things was late night chatting on Mars Hotel at
mars.ee.msstate.edu.

~~~
marsrover
Nice to see another msstate graduate (I’m assuming) here.

~~~
criddell
I was in the comp sci program at McMaster University. Until I got to the
university, I had only ever connected to dial up BBS systems. Once I got on
the internet, I was hooked and Mars Hotel had lots of very fun and friendly
people hanging out late at night.

------
kazinator
> _It was called Usenet_

Still is. Mind you, last I checked my subscribed newsgroups was this morning;
maybe it's gone now?

~~~
tomjen3
Out of curiosity, which groups do you follow, and what do you use for access?

The dorm I used to live in originally had their internal discussion forums as
private news groups, but must have switched over to a forum in 09 or so.
Apparently normal people couldn't use usenet.

~~~
u801e
> Apparently normal people couldn't use usenet.

There are many posts here of people who used usenet and IRC years ago who
didn't necessarily have technical backgrounds, yet now people state that
services like usenet and IRC are too technical and most people aren't capable
of making use of them.

What happened?

~~~
tomjen3
>What happened?

In this specific case? Only the nerds used it, and most people didn't even
know it existed. We could have educated them about it, but making a forum and
sending out an email was easier.

~~~
kazinator
No understanding of what happened with Usenet is complete without the
important aspect of how it came to be used for sharing massive amounts of
binaries, most of them copyright infringing.

~~~
u801e
Even so, it wasn't until a lot of major ISPs got rid of their usenet servers
that it was more of an effort to access. Verizon had theirs up to about 2008
or so, yet binaries were commonplace well before that.

------
gbacon
NUTS talkers on speedway.net and elsewhere

------
hoistbypetard
I liked the piece, but I cringed a bit when I read:

"It was called Usenet, which was kind of like Reddit today"

~~~
enobrev
I've used both at length, and still use Usenet to this day. Besides reddit
being centralized, how are they dissimilar? Is it really that bad if an
analogy for a readership that likely have no clue what Usenet is?

~~~
derefr
Reddit: community moderators can delete spam from the group and stop flame-
wars in their tracks; a lot of the noise posts don't show up for most people
because most people are looking at "hot" instead of "new";

Usenet: it's on you to create filters and mute threads that you don't want to
see. Everyone is their own moderator. (Pretty much exactly in the way that
you're the moderator of your own email inbox, smart recipient-side filtering
and DNSRBLs notwithstanding.)

It seems like a small difference, but I feel like it's actually responsible
for large social differences in the resulting communities.

In a Usenet group (or, equivalently, an unmoderated email list), the spam and
flames are visible to everyone, and everyone is forced to engage in at least a
bit of the work of moderation—even if it's just to copy and paste a blacklist
from an FAQ message into their NNTP client's config. This, IMHO, makes people
less likely to overreact to negative/offtopic/trolling/spam posts—they're
_inured_ to them, in about the same sense that an immune system that
frequently interacts with real threats is less likely to get an auto-immune
disease; or about the same way that people who live in the projects are less
likely than people in gated communities to call the police just because
someone they don't know is walking down the street.

~~~
rat9988
That's not enough of a difference to cringe at the comparison though.

~~~
pferde
Actually, being able (or not) to plonk a user on your own, instead of relying
on moderators, is a night-and-day difference in experience.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_(Usenet)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plonk_\(Usenet\))

~~~
hoistbypetard
I agree. Many of the mechanics that grew up around dealing with NNTP made for
a very different experience compared to web forums. And I think we've lost
something as we've moved on from it. (It was also a right pain in the ass in
several ways... I just prefer the balance that made us strike to the dynamic
that grows in a web forum now.)

------
aetherson
I recently (like, a year or two ago) got onto a slack group that's just maybe
a dozen people, all of us men in our late thirties to early fifties, and man,
it's nice. You forget in this era of very large social media sites how small,
closed groups feel. Reminds me of corners of the internet 20 years ago.

~~~
jvagner
I want reddit, but on given topics, but without newbies. Age might be a nice
filter, but being able to chat about {fitness,
running,travel,entrepreuneurialism} away from the crowds that barrel in with
"Does anyone else ever..." or "Where/how do I..." 1st year stuff.

~~~
irl_zebra
Ugh, yes! I'm really into, running, for example. I go to Reddit running
subreddit, and it's all just "I completed a 5k and lost 50lbs" or "I'm just
getting started, here's a picture of me I'm so proud." Great, but not anyone
who regularly runs it's a drag and annoying. Would love some more advanced
topics with people like me who run 60+ miles a week, and are objectively a bit
fast.

~~~
pferde
Have you tried just starting threads on what interests you? Just start
talking, the people you are interested in might pop up, and a group might
eventually self-select.

I've actually never been on reddit, but that's how it has worked in pretty
much every online community - including the rKids group from this article.

