For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
Dont believe anyone on the internet.
Don’t pick up the phone if someone is online… I’m old
I’m a millennial, I learned this, and now I just don’t pick up the phone.
The modem made noises when connecting, but if someone picked up the phone, your internet would just stop working and they’d get their dial tone.
Now dot matrix printers, those were real pterodactyl sounds.
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.
Don’t feed the trolls.
Of course nowadays its nearly impossible to tell whos spouting racial slurs to get folks mad and whos doing it because they’re just an asshole.
Just assume almost everybody is an asshole online and you can’t be wrong. Because anonymity has granted them that capability.
The fact that people being assholes with their real names on Facebook tells me, anonymity has nothing to do with it.
I remember when it was just funny edgy humor that was clearly satirical for the most part because a lot of us were just dumb kids. It was abrasive and stupid but you had this feeling everyone was in on the joke.
But bizarre satire has turned to deeply held conviction.
I’m not just sad that the mean spirited trolling persists, but that it’s gotten more sincere and often must be taken seriously. :(
When you share something cool, link back to the original creator or where you found it from.
I’d argue this is the opposite of what was asked.
In the early days, no one would post sources or attribute “stuff” to anyone. We’d all just share what we thought were cool pictures.
Now, everyone gets mad when you dont post the name of the artist and their socials.
I would posit a big part of this is because early-net days were primarily for just socializing and sharing cool stuff (heck yeah, I miss it.) Artists probably didn’t make a majority of their living through the 'net. If something was shared it was likely just “I think this is cool, folks!”
Nowadays, to say the Internet is heavily commercialized would be a massive understatement. Every little interaction is monetized. Many people make their entire living through e-commerce. It’s just how things went.
Meanwhile you have a billion faceless sandfleas with repost-botfarms trying to hustle cash with the stupidest methods possible.
You’ll see entire channels where animations or paintings or whatever are circulated on socials like youtube, twitter, or tiktok with the artist tag conveniently cropped out (if there was one).
Some are outright stealing the work for profit (selling tshirts or something), while others are just using it to farm clicks, which is also a route to profit.
The artist who made the work is cheated, perhaps unaware, as some click-grifter gets all the attention. And that sucks. :( As an artist myself, I try to make sure I share the sources for stuff now, because recognition is a form of thanks, at the very least.
I miss the sharing internet…the attention economy has basically turned the internet into a sociological illustration of “The paperclip apocalypse”. :(
Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.
Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
a/s/l?
Facebook tried that shit with me. Ban until I sent verification of my ID so I sent a paystub photoshopped (badly) with my alias, it was accepted and it’s still there even though I left FB years ago.
I wish they would ban me. I haven’t logged in in over 15 years and even block several of their servers, and yet I still get mails that someone in there commented on something.
Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
And now it’s come 180 in that some see it as a red flag if you don’t give up that information. I had someone on a different social media site accuse me of being a bot because I wouldn’t give up the specific town I’m from. I’ve seen it happen to others too. It is both fascinating and insane how viewpoints have changed regarding identifying yourself online.
Not only telling your real name, you weren’t supposed to tell your real birthday, give away your phone number or where you lived, even just saying the city was a bit much. So filling in those things like on Facebook or LinkedIn feels very wrong but it would be even more wrong to have fake info there. So my new rule is, only add ppl I know irl to places I use my real info and everything else can I add anyone to.
Ugh, the world of “branded people.” Everything is like “Add a picture of yourself, or you won’t seem trustworthy!”
Yeesh. Some artists and such can make it using a pseudonym, but it’s rare in more professional circles…but now if you hope to be taken seriously as a professional, you’re expected to put your real super genuine self out there.
…and we get news stories of people being harassed and doxxed literally to death. It’s crazy…
Yes that picture thing happened multiple times at my old job. They kept pestering me about give them a pic to add to the “about us” page and I had to use my face in all channels (jira, slack email and so on) because “otherwise I can’t tell who is who”… my current job handled that much better, they asked for a pic (if I wanted to) to be used as reference for an artist (always the same) to make an avatar and that is now the avatar my coworkers and I use in presentations, systems, emails, webpages anything, we never use real image of our coworkers unless the person wish for it.
