[swatcoder]

The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world.

Just not as much for the nerds and curious professionals from “the West” that were playfully developing the internet like a quirky little collaborative art gallery.

The demographics of the internet were just very different then. I don’t think it’s so much a change in the character of the world that makes it different now, so much as that nearly the whole breadth of the world are staking claims in it, and thus a lot of the contention and animosity that has always existed in the real world now finally shows up here too.

[antod]

> The 90’s were rife with problems all over the world.

Yeah, I think the difference is how disconnected from the real world the internet/web felt in the 90s. It felt like a different dimension you entered - and "cyberspace" was non ironically talked about as a separate space, and culturally people wanted it to be a separate space with separate norms.

Now it kinda feels like the two worlds have encroached so far on each other they mostly overlap - and both seem hell bent on ruining the other.

[echelon]

The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure.

Sure, lots of people were using it. But many of them couldn't openly advertise their feelings or form social groups. It was a domain of the technical and the young.

There won't be anything else like that feeling.

[senko]

> The internet until around the time of Facebook felt magically obscure. [...] There won't be anything else like that feeling.

The name for that feeling is Eternal September: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

(note that happened around two decades before FB)

[saulpw]

*one decade