[ryandrake]

I can kind of understand having that kind of optimism back in the Internet of, say, 1998, before we saw how vampiric venture-backed winner-take-most tech companies would be. But by 2012, it would be incredibly naive of tech employees (of any company) to seriously believe they were some kind of force for good.

[Klonoar]

This take feels very out of touch with how tech was in 2012.

It was evident where the trends were heading, but that optimism that was heavy throughout the tech boom in the late 2000s was definitely still there.

[throwaway314155]

There _was_ backlash. It just didn't operationalize very effectively. For instance, news organizations mostly saw FB and Google as a way to undermine and ultimately replace vetted news with unvetted, unprofessional hot takes. Anyone above a certain age likely saw these viewpoints and agreed with them but not enough to start a movement.

When facebook became generally available I was maybe 14-15, and even back then I remember thinking "this feels very much like it's going to ruin some young womens' lives". But what the hell was I going to do? I mean - the platform _was_ used as a sort of early Tinder, where sexual attraction could play out in a semi-anonymized way.

This comment is in no way exhaustive either.

[com2kid]

The problem regarding news orgs is that they have previously sounded the alarm about bloggers, insisting that the sky was going to fall down now that any random person was allowed to just say anything they wanted and have other people read it!

But many of those blogs (which now take the form of subscription newsletters) had incredibly valuable insight and perspectives that were otherwise not being reported on. The news media's alarmism about bloggers was (IMHO rightfully) ignored.

So when a couple of years later they started freaking out about Facebook/Twitter/etc, well, same old story, new platform.

The difference this time was that FB and Twitter algorithmically fed articles to people, instead of articles naturally spreading virally from person to person.

Not that the platforms were that bad at first! Remember that in the early 2010s Facebook was largely a platform for Farmville! It was drowning in spam for free to play social games, but the feed was still largely a timeline. Twitter only released their Apple client in 2010, and there were still a large number of third party clients in 2012.

A few years later Facebook would become inundated with political spam and vitriol, but 2012 was still an insane time of growth and optimism.

[throwaway314155]

All I'm saying is that there were people who would have called it naive to be optimistic about such things- and that they were ultimately correct even though they didn't have the numbers or a proper movement.

[Klonoar]

> There _was_ backlash.

RTFC:

> It was evident where the trends were heading

I'm stating that tech in general still held the optimistic viewpoint, not that outside groups weren't tiring of techs optimism.

[throwaway314155]

That's a fair point, I would just contend that I imagine a cohort of techies shared my views on the subject although i can't prove that and I wasn't old enough to be employed by a tech company when these issues were around.

[ben_w]

I was that naïve in 1998, owing to that being roughly when my pocket money first stretched to buying a modem. Almost the first thing I stumbled into was a flame-war.

Yet even today, I see people regard the lack of moderation on certain sites as an unadulterated axiomatic good. Is that blindness really naïveté, or is it just a political stance like all others? If so, I would not call that naïveté even if the effect is the same, for it is a thing all suffer from, it's the blind spot in our thoughts, no matter how experienced and sophisticated and pragmatic we may otherwise be.