Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

▲ toast0 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

IMHO, it's more about being a community of choice rather than elitism.

When I joined, nobody was there because they had to be. Including vendors. That's a totally different vibe than now. There was also excitement and optimism of something new, and i was youthful.

▲ fluoridation 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.

That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.

▲ thegrim33 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>> The point is not the consumers of the Internet

A) They're not just "consumers"; people produce a huge percentage of the content, via facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc

B) The people of a society define its culture. When you change the people, you change the culture

▲ dlkasajiewo 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The new users stopped reading the FAQs. They stopped lurking. They wanted things spoonfed to them, so the producers started spoonfeeding. The modern walled-garden system is the ultimate result of that. Is it the fault of those users? Not in any moral sense, it's reasonable to want a more structured presentation. Things change.

▲ bananaboy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

They also started top posting!

▲ doublerabbit 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Spoon feeding isn't inherently bad. The issue is that the spoon went from a small pile of sugar to full spoon. Then when someone really needed help, they got lynched by a mob for asking for help because it was seen as spoon feeding.

The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being. "Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"

That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.

By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".

Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.

▲ fluoridation 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's rose-tinted glasses. You're not describing a trend of the Internet, but of individual insular communities. It happens in every community that eventually people get tired of answering the same questions over and over again. I was part of a C++ forum for a long time, and I lost count how times I answered that both template definitions and declarations must be visible at the point of usage, and then of mentioning that I'd answered that exact thing many times already.

PS: Though I will agree that SO moderation was simultaneously excessively aggressive when it came to subjective or borderline off-topic questions (or worse still, impossible-to-search questions) and remarkably inconsistent.

▲ iamnothere 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

SO’s policies always seemed like a valid, but failed attempt to “solve” this part of the human equation through policy. It was genuinely useful until it outgrew itself.

Language barriers also didn’t help, you had people who could barely speak English asking questions, and unable to understand the answers. Then those people started giving answers too. I wonder if things would have been a little better with today’s improved translation tools.

▲ doublerabbit 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You think a teacher gets fed up of having to teach the same units of education every year?

"How can I read a file and split the line obtaining a pipe symbol and send it via a socket server" but the angst of "WHY DO DO YOU WANT TO DO THAT", "You shouldn't do that in X-Lang" ... well maybe because I wish to execute commands on the socket server when based on the value of the pipe.

   [lindex [split $variable "|" 1]

▲

fluoridation 3 hours ago | parent [-]

A teacher gets paid to do their job.

▲

doublerabbit 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Bad analogy on my part, but my point still stands. That was the experience I encountered on the early net. Now everyone can use ChatGPT and SO is a coma slowly being leeched to death so you know you no longer have to worry about being asked or tested on your skills.

	▲	someonebaggy 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		FYI SO is dead. Not dying, dead. The rate of questions now is lower than its first month of existence when barely anyone knew about it, and they've recently tried to rebrand themselves as a forum for agents to talk to each other.

▲ sieabahlpark 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

▲ hnlmorg 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

“Change” is just the state altering. It can be the producers and it can also be the consumers that alter that state.

The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.

▲ dasil003 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How can you separate those things? The changes happened because there were more people, and those people were valuable to market too. Hosting and moderation became more expensive, so that created a form of pressure as well. It's convenient to blame the producers (I hate Facebook as much as anyone), but I don't think it's terribly useful to try to hold them accountable.

I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.

I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.

▲ colechristensen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's not elitist. It's just nostalgia.

"The change I was part of when I was between the ages of 15 to 25 was the best!"

"The change of the next generation that wasn't recognizably my peer group was bad and ruined everything :("