What's wrong with the internet and how can we make it better?

You really struck a nerve with this one.

I, also, feel like I could write a book about this. In fact, [here is a 7 page paper I wrote for a class about facebook's moderation problems in 2019, if anybody wants a light read](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CAKoqAVLf0y4yUoFQhF61WMfP-YsSsWnH26ck-wtEJQ/edit?usp=sharing). I also recommend [Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41962923-behind-the-screen), "the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry."

I have so much I could say and want to say about this. I moderated online communities for 15 years, twice as long as I spent in the military. I've seen a lot of things go down and I've got some of my own strong opinions about moderation, but I know I can have a tendency to go on a little long, so as much as I can I'm going to try to break it down to some important bullet points.

There's way more I could say, and a bunch more I'm going to say.

I was a mod on an imageboard for over a decade, where instead of having 4chan's mostly laissez-faire system where only strictly illegal things were removed (very similar to the "impartiality" of social media) we had an explicit "mods aren't required to follow the rules all the time" rule. There was no expectation of fairness or impartiality on certain boards. We would use temporary bans as slaps on the wrists to drive away people we didn't want because most of them wouldnt come back after the three day ban was over, anyway (but thats not an approach that would work on a site with usernames). We would make active choices, sometimes as an individual and sometimes as a team, about what kinds of stuff we wanted and didn't want on the site, and while there wasn't agreement there was usually consensus about how to run things.

Eventually the traffic to the imageboard slowed to a trickle, and half the active users there were mods who had been there for years. Sometimes i believe that the way it existed there at the end of its life, even though it was extremely slow, was like the ideal form of forum, since half the users were also trusted "staff".

I'm going to talk about one more thing, that I talked about at the end of my virtual world posts: closed social groups. I believe that shit is the future. [Closed social groups are sometimes capable of so much more then the panopticon wasteland of social media](https://gizmodo.com/unlocking-the-mystery-of-paris-most-secret-underground-5794199). But the hard part is you need to be an attractive group for some reason, or sending out some kind of signal for people to find you. The [Pinchurch](http://mystickrewe.com/about/) thinks of itself as an "incubator", and charges members dues (which I'm by no means suggesting we do, but it's like how you might care more about being part of a torrent tracker site that invite only). The issue is that starting and running and sometimes even just being a member of a group like this is EFFORT. It's WORK sometimes. I feel like one of the reasons people took to social media in the first place is that it reduced the effort of organizing things. Anybody who's had to work around the calendar of 5 people in the same D&D group might know how surprisingly difficult that can be if people aren't committed to it.

Anyway, enough preamble (and oh my god is there more unending stuff I could say about this whole issue)

Lets look at these questions. These arent going to be perfect answers.

>

What do you think the internet should be? Is there a “higher purpose” for the internet? How would you characterize the current state of the internet in regards what you’d like it to be?

Ideally it should be a large collection of self-governed and self-directed communities and websites. @goonbag is 100000% correct that ["in name only, Cyberspace had its origins in science fiction: its historical beginnings and technological innovations are clearly military (from NASA's primitive flight simulators of the 1940s to the ultra-modern SIMNET-D facilities in Fort Knox, Kentucky)..." ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mounted_Warfare_TestBed) and that is an enormously complex and fucked up subject that I am still trying to figure out how to present to people in a way that wont make me look insane. As far as I know the "higher purpose" of computers and the internet was to create a virtual training space much cheaper than real training, and to have a robust networked computer information retrieval system. Everything else might as well just be a happy accident. And I'm not even going to talk about how thats been perverted today by social media, because I've done that plenty elsewhere.

>

What kinds of things do you do on the internet? What kinds of things do you wish you could do on the internet?

I read, I joke, I sometimes takes notes about a subject so that I can collate those notes into a more coherent thought later, but even just the act of taking those notes is often better than nothing since I'm always in use of a reminder of things from my past self. The way I use the internet has changes a lot over the past 5 years, in the last 2 I've heardly used my desktop for anything anymore and largely "live on my phone". I dont know what I want from the internet. That would be like asking me what my ideal perfect videogame would be like. I'd really have to think about it. Because designing a community is kind of like designing a game. Reddit's "rules" about displaying posts with upvotes higher, has an enormous impact on how the site is used. I do sometimes like to do "game theory" about different forum designs that dont exist yet as a idle passtime.

I do wish there was such a thing as a "local internet" that made it easier to get in touch with people in your area. Or a game that fostered real world cooperation like Niantic's Ingress.

>

What kinds of things did you use to do on the internet, but now can’t or won’t because it’s no longer fun/interesting/useful/safe?

Use an image board. I left 4chan in 2006 for my satellite board that still technically exists today but is so slow that it's not really the same. The past really do be a foreign country that you can never return to. I was never big on MMO's but I do miss playing games with friends. I was always a big fan with anything that had asymmetrical multiplayer but it's slim pickins when it comes to that.

>

What are some of your best internet experiences? What made those experiences possible? Are they still possible?

Me and like 6 of my friends in high school over the course of 4 years basically completely took over a phpBB forum called "Manga Academy" that had been set up as the official forums for a company that printed those "How To Draw Manga" books. It resulted a few long term romantic relationships for some people, a few interesting trips across thre country for me, free pizza one time when I watched their booth at Anime Expo for them once (the most I was ever "paid" for my services), and some life long friends I am still in contact with today, some of whom went on to work in animation professionally.

Is that still possible? Well, the last time I was able to find the "Manga Academy" forums a modern browser couldn't even load it, and as I look today I cant even find an internet archive capture of it. I was also half my age back then. So in some ways they are not, but I think keeping small traditionally structured forums like this one alive means that in some ways it still is.

>

What are some of your worst internet experiences? What factors led to those bad experiences happening?

As an internet user thats a long story, in general things were a lot meaner on the internet than they used to be, believe it or not, social media seems sanitized in comparison. As a mod, it was having to be the person responsible for taking out the garbage. In order for the most horrendous things to get removed, somebody like me would have to look at them first. I began to think of myself as a sin-eater.

>

Are there any recurring visual/ui trends or ways webpages are often structured that bother you/make you uncomfortable/make you not want to or unable to use a website?

I just hate how everything is upvotes now. I was a forum and imageboard user for a long time and I am so fucking sick of upvotes or things being ranked by their engagement.

>

What meaningful spaces used to exist on the internet, but are now gone? Why are they gone? What real life spaces has the internet destroyed without offering a suitable alternative? What could be done to support similar spaces now in the current state of the internet?

Well the Manga Academy forum disappeared because the company that was maintaining it literally forgot it existed and just let it decay into unuseability. As for what could be done:

>

Finally, can you think of any concrete (perhaps very small) things you (or someone else) could to do to make the internet better for you? For others?

Try starting a community sometime, and not just an online one. Put up signs and start a paranormal investigation unit in your town that meets twice a month and collects people's dreams and takes on cases or whatever, it doesn't matter. Maintaining an existing community is hard but starting one is neigh impossible. This stuff is _work_ and it can often be drought or flood, where either you suffer the slow death of traffic, until all of a sudden you get more traffic than you ever wanted. You can slowly cross pollinate with another community or you might experience a rush all at once due to a bunch of people migrating from another community because of some issue there.

I think its important we have more small groups and small spaces. Sometimes even exclusive, invite only spaces or something, if the interest is there. But operating and moderating those spaces takes work. And sometimes that work is easier when its shared among the members of the community. I like the idea of using this place to maybe try to incubate interest in something, but I have no idea what it would/should look like and I'll leave that part to someone else.

I'm open to answer any questions people might have about this because I could talk about this forever.

>

@Moon#21249 Maintaining an existing community is hard but starting one is neigh impossible.

This is why I have started the SAME community X number of times over 20 years, because I did it once, and I know it works. I started a necrosoft discord but had no idea what to do with it or what it's value would be, and it is predictably empty as a result.

>

@saddleblasters#21226 I have massive respect for people who had cool tastes in music in the pre-internet days. I listen to a huge amount of 80s and 90s stuff, but there is absolutely no way I would have found any of it when it was current had I actually grown up in the 80s.

New bands, new movies, gotta search and find a new thing to obsess over for 20 minutes! We had FOMO back then but just didn't call it as such. It's healthy to have desires and pine for things and it's okay to miss out on them too. It's difficult now to imagine limiting yourself in the age of dudes streaming themselves speedrunning every NES game ever. Are you happier with 20 of your favorite records or Spotify? What if you only had an FM radio?

The last time I had a feeling of discovering and sharing music with someone was when p2p file sharing was a thing. You'd search the ssk network for "aphex twin ambient" and then if you were lucky, you'd find someone with a shared folder of Warp Records music that was totally new to you. Sometimes you would even chat with the owner of those mp3s and recommend each other songs or whatever. That is the kind of person-to-person _interaction_ that is being turned into a _transaction_. I suppose Twitch/streaming does replace some of this but there needs to be one-on-one interaction or very small groups to have the kind of intimacy that feels meaningful, and therefore breeds community. But the platforms are pushing streamers to commodify themselves, to get subscribers, to drive engagement -- whereas a regular music fan showing you their record collection does not feel compelled to hardsell you [12 CDs for just a penny](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/44/129158190_cbda12f593_z.jpg).

>

@Moon#21249 I’m going to talk about one more thing, that I talked about at the end of my virtual world posts: closed social groups. I believe that shit is the future.

It's the past! We used to have fraternal orders and Tupperware parties and bridge clubs! Whether or not you're religious, one consequence of the decline of organized religion in modern life has been a decrease in social interaction and civic engagement. Participation in community groups has been falling for decades and was noted during the 1990s, before the internet had melted all our brains. There's a great book about this phenomenon published in 2000 called [Bowling Alone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone), which is both crazy prescient and hilariously blind to the incoming internet shitstorm.

>

@Moon#21249 But the hard part is you need to be an attractive group for some reason, or sending out some kind of signal for people to find you.

This is part of what I'm talking about with IRL subcultures, there has to be barriers to entry and gatekeepers. People want to be part of it but not everyone can. And there should be consequences of nonparticipation, even if those are just loss of social capital. The private torrent tracker analogy works, it's the same with the Order of Brotherly Elks; everyone needs to pay their dues and meet monthly, but there's also an open bar and you get free golf rounds and most importantly, there's implicit social benefits you won't get outside of the group. Which is where online social groups ultimately fail, they don't actually provide tangible social capital for most members (except as a possible pipeline into an influencer career, but that seems to be even more ephemeral than traditional celebrity).

We're all going to continue to be very unhappy unless we maintain our IRL communities, activities, and traditions. Offline engagement! Borrowing a cup of sugar from your neighbor might be a revolutionary act!

@bodydouble#21259 I wish there was some middle-ground between clicking “like” and leaving a meaningful reply, but I just want to say that I‘m vibing so hard with what you’ve been saying in this thread.

I'm pretty lonely, as I think a lot of us are, due to circumstances like getting old and covid precautions, but I think a lot about how, in the future, when I'm very old, I hope to be a part of an offline community of oldsters. Because I see elderly people congregating far more than I ever see younger people doing so. I inherently link a sense of community togetherness with being elderly, but that's not an automatic correlation. By the time I'm elderly, the idea of "community" may no longer exist.

Or, as I suspect and hope, maybe enough people roughly my age will finally get sick of being online all the time, and intentionally revert to offline, revolutionary sugar-borrowing community building. I'd like to see that happen.

@bodydouble#21259

I do know things like fraternal orders and bowling leagues are relics of the past and have actually read "Bowling Alone", but I think theres a possibility for a resurgence since organizing things in person at a physical location these days is not as much of a requisite.

Though yes something tangible like a VFW or something would obviously be more ideal and standard, I'm hoping we can think about ways to do this in our communities that dont have to look or work like a Masonic lodge. I think there might hopefully, potentially be some good ideas out there.

But the problem is those ideas are going to suck if they're just a new monitizable social network designed to return an investment. I dont think a new good idea is going to arrive in the form of an app.

this thread is incredible! these are ideas I have been grappling with for ages.

i have in my head an ill-defined concept of The Algorithm as shorthand for all corporate social recommendation, and have been trying for the past two or three years to think of ways to at least step out of it, if not avoid it entirely. i worry constantly that my wish to return to a wilder, weirder internet is just Nostalgia and I should Get With The Times but seeing the ideas presented here help a lot to give shape to my thinking.

i made a weird little project with a group of friends last year, trying to replicate the weird stuff you'd find back in the day digging around in unsecured FTPs or subdomains. half zine, half "box of files" delivered by RSS; a rar with some mp3s, some text documents (manifestos, reviews, recipes), some photos, some videos, maybe a game (i did not finish the game lol). don't promote it or put it in The Algorithm (i coded the HTML for the website by hand just to make sure), just encourage people to share it with an individual they think might like it. make it <50mb to make it easy to share. it ended up falling apart, as many unpaid projects with maybe too much ambition do, but I still like the idea.

if it were easier to discover weird things like that, instead of discovering some actor I really liked growing up is a racist or transphobe or something, i'd be a happier person.

The recent explosion of NFTs, people minting NFTs with stolen art or with other stolen “content”. The entire concept of “content” as a catch all term for any kind of media. The concept of being called a “content creator” instead of an artist, a director, a writer, a game developer. Having to click, for the 100th‘ time “Not Now” on a dialog that pops up and asks if you want to activate another algorithmic feature. It’s twitter deciding to ‘give some love’ to tweetdeck and thereby ruining something functional that people have built their livelihoods around. It‘s the nebulous concept of “engagement” that drives whatever constitutes value. It’s turning on noscript and navigating to a completely blank page. It‘s the creeping realization that no matter how many retweets you get, you won’t get a job out of it and you can't leverage whatever it is into something that will let you stop posting.

But sometimes it's a driver that lets you dust off your kinect and use it to track your torso in VR, so you can dance at a party with people you've never met. it's reading the entirety of the manga Bezerk on the internet archive. it's youtube pushing a video of someone playing a cover of Aphex Twin's "Avril 14th" on a harp. it's a shoutcast TV station that plays nothing but MST3K episodes that leads you to a pre-discord voice chat program where people riff on b-movies at a specific time every Saturday. it's a winding path of jazz and city pop videos that finally lead you to discovering YMO. it's a drawing you post online that gets someone to follow you, and years later you finally meet up. it's a Justin.tv channel that plays the movie "Foodfight" on an endless loop. Sometimes, the internet can be used for good.

>

@exodus#21165 very low tolerance for bigots and jerks (in the past I was too light with the ban hammer).

I came upon this thread right before bed and I'm gonna read and contribute when I can but I'd like to put some respect on this sentiment here, because it's a bit ugly to think about on a surface level but it's also way more important to the functioning of communities than most people give it credit for.

I was once a moderator for a Facebook group in what was then a nascent "Weird Facebook", which shall not be named (unless someone asks then I will immediately identify it). When I was a mod we had an extremely swift ban hammer. This was around the time trigger warnings and content warnings were being spread around common usage, so you can imagine what that might have been like. For whatever reason the group attracted a ton of attention and membership was growing daily. This meant most of us were banning some ignorant shithead who didn't want to play by the rules and didn't care to learn a few times daily. But eventually, this worked to create a low tolerance for bullshit as part of the group's reputation, and I'd say that it probably did more to teach people about the rules than anything else.

Eventually I split with the rest of the mods, though, not because I didn't want to do it anymore, but increasingly, there was a more moderate faction in the mod team who wanted to ease up on this aspect of the group moderation. Why? Well, to potentially sell some trashy vanity press coffee book table. This was in the middle of the 2010s when Website: The Group: The Book was something people wanted to buy for some reason (or at least people thought that people wanted to buy it). But pretty much ever since then and as well as other forms of far right ideologuing has infiltrated more and more of the online cultural consciousness, I have been convinced that the only real way to cultivate healthy online spaces is on one hand to loudly and proudly communicate that the community strives to be a welcoming, friendly, co-operative, and loving space, but also one with a membership who are also just as quick to turn hostile on bad faith actors.

By this I mean, whether they're doing it intentionally or not, no small number of people have inherited their sense of online conduct, with varying degrees of separation, from fascist failsons, and that is going to take a lot of time and effort to undo. Unfortunately one of the tactics employed by said fascist failsons, and spread out to other people by osmosis, is the expectation that one must tolerate someone so long as they are following the rules as written, or false appeals to free speech, even if they are clearly intentionally testing the boundaries of healthy social behaviour to the point of undermining them entirely by a clear and deliberate lack of respect for their spirit even if they can manage to maintain following them to the letter. So we got lots of people just out there being fascists, or having learned how to treat other people on the internet by fascists, who think because they aren't sending walls of text entirely comprised of racial slurs, they're not racist, even if they're clearly just barely managing to keep it on a subsurface level.

Now, if these people are just bad faith actors looking to intrude on a good time, that's one thing, but I'd say, even if we are talking about someone who is just, say, a bit casually racist, but isn't really willing to do much about it unless forced to, it generally becomes relatively unproductive to keep a discussion going, in my experience. Most people just aren't willing to change their mind or learn in that sort of setting, if they're willing to debate it with a relative stranger, it's more than likely that they're quite entrenched in the sort of thinking they're tying to defend. Especially if, say, in a group setting, it's one person trying to reason with them and putting in a lot of effort to engage in debate or attempt at educating someone, and the rest of the group is more or less spectating if not ignoring it. This can create a wrong impression of, say, racism or misogyny being up for debate, since, well, you're kind of doing it openly in public, in a protracted manner.

The antidote to this is, I think anyway, fostering a group culture where no one is afraid to call bullshit the moment they see it, and that they can feel confident that they won't be alone and they will be backed up by administration. One person going "excuse me, would you care to debate about how the thing you said was transphobic, my good sir" presents these things as opinion based, three or five people going "what the fuck did you just say, get the fuck out of here with that shit" with a mod coming in to boot if needed makes those things appear as far more than simply something that is a matter of debate but, as it should be, a concluded moral and cultural touchstone that the group expects everyone to meet. I for one think that anti oppressive practices should not be apologized for or be put up for debate, it's more a question of, allowing people to learn and correct a mistake if they are willing, but at the same time, risking people's emotional safety is not worth one person probably not caring anyway, even if presented with the most immaculate arguments. I know for sure I should be responsible for several dozen people no longer being racist if that were the case.

I relate it to stuff like the Popper paradox of tolerance or Maoist concepts of combatting liberalism or the isolation of bad ideas and the promotion of good ideas. You really don't gain anything by letting bad faith actors come in and be able to say their pieces as if it's worth talking about. And keeping even one fuckboy around because they don't completely break the rules just drags an entire community down around them, makes everyone feel like they're walking on eggshells if they want to post about something that might attract their attention. And that feels doubly worse if it's something good that they want to celebrate. The more overtly fashy ones are completely open about doing this sort of thing purely to waste people's time and wear down other people and sway moderates to their perspective anyway so at the very least making a loving community that is also actively hostile toward intolerance is a really important thing I don't see in the world nearly enough at all.

Building community takes active effort. It isn't always easy either, every community has conflict sometimes, an as well most of us have internalized at least some unhealthy, anti-social tendencies from being socialized in a very unhealthy, paranoid, individualistic, and vindictive social culture (see, the entire English speaking world basically, thanks colonialism and capitalism and whiteness and McCarthyism and etc.). But I also think a better way is easy once you try it even just a few times. Not being scared of expressing emotion, being wrong and admitting it, refusing to act in an adversarial fashion when you can instead co-operate, gets easier after the first time 'cause these things tend to produce extremely fulfilling results. But it takes some convincing and a whole lot of community co-operation and solidarity, and an established history of consistent conflict resolution and decision-making, to be able to not come off as idealistic or hypocritical.

>

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own.

I like the idea of promoting positivity instead of getting wrapped up in outrage over whatever the topic of the day is, but I also think relentless commitment to positivity can be alienating in it's own way.

>

@Syzygy#21287 and adopt cryptocurrency.

Well I don't agree with that part! First there are the obvious energy and environmental concerns, but even for the few that dodge that when something is primarily lauded and espoused by libertarian edgelords like elon musk you know there's a problem, and the stink of that is going to pervade its use.

Money is a construct of course but for the money to do practical/environmental harm on top of ideological harm is too much for me.

No, of course not - but if there‘s gonna be a new money system it should be at least slightly better than what it attempts to replace, and I don’t really see it except in theory, mostly spoken at me across bars in San Francisco

>

@exodus#21244 and @tombo yeah, I think you hit it for me - I used to go wild with my music searches on youtube, but then they made it impossible to find new things unless you are able to come up with a particularly curious word string.

This has also been my exact experience re: Youtube! It's interesting because the old recommendation algorithm was likely a super simple thing someone coded in an afternoon to serve up videos/music that people who watched the video you just watched also liked. The current algorithms are the results of decades of R&D, and they are absolutely useless for actual discovery. Not that the old algorithm was ideal or anything — but it did serve a purpose.

I have so much to say in response to what everyone posted on here while I was sleeping! I'll try to write something after I finish work (though I also have to pick up a new guitar I bought and then spend five hours messing around with said guitar, so it might not be until tomorrow)

@Syzygy#21287 ah, so things are yet again more complicated than they seem…………

Still thinking about these questions

>

What real life spaces has the internet destroyed without offering a suitable alternative?

Either because of where I grew up or just because of my age or some other circumstance, I don’t know what sort of real-life spaces I've missed out on (very interested in reading Bowling Alone). There were extracurricular clubs/activities at my schools, but those were heavily regulated by the school and not exactly what I wanted. If you were involved in those you weren't _responsible_ per se for what the group did/produced; I wanted something that made you feel like you mattered, where you couldn't just be replaced by another student doing the same thing as you, as was the case in e.g. the school-directed theater program, the school-directed musical groups. Don't know if I'm making any sense but somehow my dissatisfaction had to do with the idea of activities not being member-directed.

If the Internet didn’t exist there would just be... _more_ public activities/spaces/etc, and communities/subcultures built around those things, I have to imagine. The only really popular thing like that that I ever knew of growing up was the series of local churches. Those can be good, of course, but it would have been nice to have had more public activities which were specifically designed to be attended and returned to by a group smaller than 200 people.

just my experience but the internet has been good for organizing and enabled irl social things. It’s nice when the online side of say a film society serves to organize gatherings and provide additional conversation . And for political and community things it’s been invaluable. But I’ve always lived in a large city so I imagine that makes the real life->internet continuum work well. For people in smaller towns who have to seek community only online, I don’t know that the internet destroyed social gatherings in those cases because they maybe wouldn’t have happened anyway. Just not enough people and stuff, so online time is the only non onerous way to get at least part way there

This is such a great thread and I‘m loving the discussion here. This has been a huge sticking point in my soul over the last year. For whatever reason, I’ve just been trying to reinvent my Internet experience, mostly because a lot of the time I spent on it was getting to be pretty toxic and I wanted a change. I love the Internet for all that it can show me, but hate it for all the ways it gets me down.

One of the big ways I changed my Internet experience was to try to get away from big social media. I deleted my facebook and uninstalled reddit from my phone. Facebook because I was tired of seeing friends and family share far-right propaganda, and reddit because I felt the overall community there was kinda toxic and impersonal. On reddit, you'll post something you're proud of and because it's exposed to potentially millions of people who generally don't care about you as a person, responses were typically negative, or lukewarm at best (at least in my experience). People weren't totally anonymous like, say, 4chan, but there was still this impersonal wall that I couldn't get over. Now, some might say that that's not a bad thing; you're more likely to get completely unbiased feedback from a more impersonal audience... but the experience felt more like trying to interact with passersby on a street corner than to fellow members of a club or something like that, and it just didn't jive with me. Plus, there's lots of trolls and just plain assholes on reddit, no matter any amount of moderation. Bottom line, I felt worse off every time I browsed reddit.

So, I started to search out forums to join, maybe try to rekindle my Internet experience from 2000-2005 when I first started using it. I also became a lot more active on discord, because that sort of felt like hanging out in the chat rooms of yore. The thing I like about discord groups and forums is that the communities are smaller and more insulated. When you interact with a small group of people, the interactions become a bit more personal, so there's less room for "trolls" and shit-posting.

I was very delighted to stumble upon this show and this forum because this place is exactly how I remember using the Internet back when I was in middle/high school and I really enjoy all the discussions I have with you fine folks and have felt I have made some real, personal connections with some of you, and I never ever got that from reddit. So, thanks everybody!!

In essence, my whole point here is, in my opinion, smaller collections of Internet communities are good, big giant corporate social media is bad. The only exception to this for me, for some stupid reason I'm trying to figure out, is Twitter. I never got it, ever, and just a couple months ago I signed up and now I'm on it all the darn time. Maybe it's because of the way it curates my content? I generally avoid threads with thousands of replies and usually only partake in discussions where I know I'll be able to personally connect with whoever I'm chatting with, not just throwing words out into the digital ether. I dunno, it's weird.

As an aside, as far as my best Internet experience.... So, when I first joined forum communities back when I was 11 or 12, I hung out on this one particular Sonic fan forum. We were a very small, not well known community and we were real chums. That forum is now dead, but we have all banded together over the last 2 decades, going wherever the social media space would take us. I think we had a facebook group for a while, then we were on Slack, and now we have a discord that's still very active. And it's just like... 30 or 40 people max, around 20 are super active and we've all stuck together and watched each other grow up and live lives and we're still very active with each other. I really cherish those folks and wonder if we'll still be talking about Sonic the Hedgehog and stuff when we're old and gray looooool.

Oh yeah, one thing I miss about the old days of the Internet was that you didn't have a computer in your pocket that could access it at all times of the day and night. Accessing the Internet felt special and it was kinda cool logging into your favorite chat room at the same time as a friend, when being on the Internet wasn't a given for everyone like it is now.

I don‘t think much is going to seriously improve until we accept that there was never a magical golden era when it was just fun and games for all involved; the biggest difference between then and now is not much more than a combination of raw volume and time. The internet has never been safe for me and countless others to engage with in the way others do for a whole host of reasons, and until we collectively address all of these “missing stairs” it’s just the same old issues covered in a new lick of paint.

On a small scale I think the most effective personal actions are to shy away from spouting/sharing negativity ()not pretending everything's perfect or never highlighting issues, but more pausing and asking exactly when you last contributed something - _anything_ - positive to your chosen community), and to view your internet space with caution, like you're the new manager of a comic book shop - the two regulars who spend $10 a year and get into shouting matches over Batman may be happy with things as they are, but how many interested new people are coming up to the door and walking away?

Really diggin the conversation and points being brought up. I don't think I can even add anything to it myself.

Anonymity and accountability are kinda consistently at odds with each other. People just need to honestly be as thoughful (maybe not) as they are in real life as they are online. This is my first real forum I've joined for community sort of purposes, because of my general skepticism towards forms of online interactions. People can just be downright idiots and take no consideration for the things they do or say in the digital realm.

Maybe a lot of problems on the internet have everything to do with _free speech_ and the inherent problems that can come along with that. And I guess how do you police that? I think at the end of the day we all try to interact with people who share similiar interests and ideas and hopefully we're all good to each other.

>

@milo#22751 We were a very small, not well known community and we were real chums.

I like these also! I have a forum I've been going to since... 1998? something like that - it's only about a dozen people now and there are still obnoxious fights and whatever but it's kind of fun to just know the same people for that long! And I've met and befriended a bunch of them (some aren't even on the site anymore of course), and that kind of small community of dedicated people really can show what's nice about the internet. getting to know people, turning those e-friendships into real friendships, etc!

>

@Kimimi#22821 I don’t think much is going to seriously improve until we accept that there was never a magical golden era when it was just fun and games for all involved; the biggest difference between then and now is not much more than a combination of raw volume and time. The internet has never been safe for me and countless others to engage with in the way others do for a whole host of reasons, and until we collectively address all of these “missing stairs” it’s just the same old issues covered in a new lick of paint.

I don't say this to diminish at all what you're saying here because it's really important, but I just want to get into your point about things not being hugely different now apart from scale. I don't think that's quite right. There is a qualitative difference now with the big social media networks/apps because their monetisation **depends** on the active encouragement of bad behaviour (engagement is the number one priority and safety barely rates a mention). For this reason I am pessimistic about the prospects of 'fixing' the facebook/twitter model - I think this is a fundamental, fatal flaw.

On the other hand, I think this place is a great example of how smaller, more organic communities can learn from the mistakes of the past - going back to what @exodus#21165 was saying near the top of the thread about the realisation that maintaining a healthy community means moderation that stands ready to deal effectively with 'missing stairs' when the time comes.