[krapp]

The creeps arrived long before SV, startup culture, walled gardens and "quick cash." Internet (at least web) culture was born in the cesspools of SA and 4chan, rotten.com and the like.

I appreciate the effort to reform "nerds" into quirky elfin innocents but even USENET was full of creeps.

[rsolva]

You are right, but I had the creeps that sought power in mind. Internet was for sure inhabited by countless other kinds of creeps of various flavours, but none of them had such a negative impact on human civilization as a whole as the power hungry creeps. They effectively captured and curtailed the promises of the early, distributed web.

Maybe it was destined to develop the way it did, given the permissionless nature of the web, and that the ideal of an open and distributed web would be choked out at some point anyway, as a natural consequence of collective human behaviour.

And maybe, if the web could have had a few more years without the power hungry forces we now know, we would have developed a stronger immunity against such behaviour? We will never know, I guess.

Non the less, I'll forever hold a deep grudge towards the power hungry creeps for the catastrophic effects they unleashed on the world and for ruining the potential of a truly open, diverse and vibrant web. In a generation or two, I do think we will look back at the founders of Big Tech companies as creeps that harmed the world in unthinkable ways, just as we do with brutal powerful people in earlier history.

They shaped the world in countless ways, and the negatives are just now beginning to gain space in the collective consciousness.

[bityard]

Not just Usenet, although it's the most well remembered example. Anywhere people could congregate on the early internet had its share of dark alleys where people would trade porn, warez, and political diatribe. IRC especially but also on the web if you accidentally strayed too far off the beaten path.

The modern Internet is basically less like a city and more like a shopping mall now.