Some (most) people want to easily talk to their friends or interest groups without having to worry about it.

I do consider it a feature, in hindsight. Learning to program by asking "dumb" questions was great, because chats were ephemeral, nobody cared if the same question was asked for the 10 millionth time or risk of embarrassment being like 12 years old and asking greybeards for help.

Nobody also felt bad saying "RTFM" because, whatever, it blows over in a minute, there's no permanent record of having a harsh moment, more free to just move on.

The same old questions being asked due to no search also provided more opportunities to answer those questions, so, newbies could start to learn by teaching.

So, yeah, I think something beneficial was lost, even if I wouldn't go back to that approach- it's more of a tradeoff than a definitive improvement

> I do consider it a feature, in hindsight. Learning to program by asking "dumb" questions was great, because chats were ephemeral, nobody cared if the same question was asked for the 10 millionth time or risk of embarrassment being like 12 years old and asking greybeards for help.

I pity the new generations for not having this kind of opportunity: the opportunity to make mistakes, say dumb stuff and goof off with all these things vanishing in a matter of minutes, hours at most.

I miss the old internet: at any point you could pick a new nickname and get a fresh and clean new email address from many of the webmail providers and just start a new online life.

And it was considered normal. It was actually a "best practice" to never use nicknames.

I miss the old internet.

This approach simply doesn’t work when users are allowed to vote or have any sort of scoring mechanism. Since bad actors will also create multiple “online lives” and manipulate those systems with a few clicks

Remember when phrases like "Never use your real name online" used to be near universal? Yeah, this is something I also miss about the old Internet.

Like, even back then you could absolutely tie your IRL identity up with your online identity, but the difference of course was that it wasn't a requirement of existing online, like it is now. Like yeah, you can stay anonymous but a) it's super difficult since the modern day assumption is that you're not doing that and b) that you're up to no good, because why would you be hiding who you are, unless you were doing something shady. And now even "normal" people lament just where we went wrong and what happened to online privacy. To the aware, privacy dying like this was clear as day, but I suppose most just didn't hear, or chose to ignore, the alarm bells.

And now everything is logged, analysed, and associates with the people who produced the messages and other sundry content. There is no ephemera, we need laws just to be forgotten by services (as an EU citizen, I'm glad about law existing here, but it shouldn't need to be a law, it ideally should be assumed), and we're constantly getting watched by both states and surveillance capitalists alike. Not actively in most cases, mind you, but passively, with our movements, our interactions online, and just what we do, just getting aggregated into these humongous data sets of Big Data, to train statistical models on. Mostly to surveil us even harder, or to manipulate us in the form of advertisement, which can be even more insidious in some ways.

I'm sure that stuff like the Cambridge Analytica fiasco could have occurred even without this destruction of privacy, anonymity, and ephemeral content, but I posit that it would have been way more difficult had people not been encouraged to put everything about themselves into services that would log them and build evermore complex models about them and their thoughts. And now this kind of stuff can be used to destroy democracies, and as alluded to earlier, manipulate for example our spending habits. And now we all wonder just where this all went wrong.

I miss the old Internet.