I remember the uncensored internet -it was vastly superior to what we have now.
Vastly.
Nowadays allow everybody to post anything and you will only see SPAM for the rest of you life, it will become impossible to see anything of value.
From my point of view it's less commercial vs non-commercial (though I think most of the problems either stem from, or are aggravated by commercial factors) as much as it is diversity versus consolidation.
Ten, fifteen years ago there was a greater number of varied forums and social gathering places with a greater number variety of viewpoints. Now while there's the odd vb bulliten board here and there you have fewer and fewer populated forums -everything seems to have coalescened (socially speaking) into twitter and facebook.
Basically, from my point of view, Social Media has consumed the rest of the social internet (meaning forums). I think there's more than one cause for that but that's what I see as the main thing making the past superior to the present -the ability to not just have your own place, but to have a chance at it reaching out to more people than just you and your friends.
There is a case where I'm pretty sure commercialization is the problem. Phone app stores are modeled on Linux repositories. Linux repositories are good. App stores are awful. The problem is the level of interest from bad actors, and the reason they're interested is the commercialization.
And Reddit and Discord.
It is a monumentally difficult task to create a forum these days, from a social PoV.
Keeping online identities separate from the real world worked both ways. It protected rational critics, trolls and shitposters alike.
The problem never was anonymity or freedom of expression. No. Social media is when life online went into freefall. Curiously, a pillar of its business model is melding real life with internet identity.
That is a very, very good analogy, however.
The internet of old had a wider variety of establishments that you could go to. If you wanted a rough-and-tumble dive bar experience it was there. If you wanted a polished experience it was there too.
The effect facebook and other social media has had on the internet is the same effect that walmart had on small mom and pop stores -you can still find one here and there but no, not really.
Incidentally, for all of the censorship and increased barriers to entry (for creating forums) your drooling meth head still presents a danger in the form of doxxing, inciting riots (Jan 6th, any one?) and harassing people.
Think of the scariest person you've ever met (really, take a moment and actually do it) and ask if he or she would have been online in 1995; the chances are they would not. But they are now.
Mountains of spam, porn, violence, etc
If you’d ever moderated anything halfway popular you’d know. Shadowbans are an essential tool.
They can be way overused. But there is a reason everyone used them. Constant arms race between sites and spammers.
