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The internet became normalized not in the sense that it was taken over by "normies" but in the sense that it ceased to require effort and investment to post anything.
At the risk of being that old man shaking his cane while he breathily shouts "back in my day..."
What happened was that ability to jump into a forum and comment on anything became routine, and from that moment the net as it had been was fucked. Reddit sucks for the same reason government housing projects suck. When people start taking something for granted, they stop taking care of it, and it descends into a vicious spiral. People who actually give a shit about their health and their environment don't want to live in a space that no one cares about so they get out, leaving only the shitbags and the truly destitute who have no other options.
Being one of the few guys here who is old enough (if only just) to remember the before times I feel like I've always had a conception of what an internet account is and how it ought to work from most others here, including the mod team. On one hand a key feature of the internet from its' inception was anonymity (or more accurately the divorce of the online presence from the physical). As the old Steiner comic says, "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog". On the other hand, true anonymity is fundamentally incompatible with accountability and extremely socially corrosive. From my perspective the development of user handles was sort of work around or compromise to address this.
The thing about a post from an anonymous user is that it could be literally anyone. That is after all, what "anonymous" means. There is no way to tit-for-tat an anonymous user and thus no incentive for them not to turn into total fuckwads. The only way to escape this trap is to have an identity/voice that persists through multiple encounters. An identity that can both gain and lose reputation.
The handle @HlynkaCG is a little over a decade old now. I started using it in 2012. It's obviously not my first handle nor is it my only active handle, (though it is the only one I use here). To the degree that anyone here knows or has an opinion of me it is through this handle. And to the degree that this handle holds any value as the voice of an actual human being it is through its years of established history. I could delete this account and start a new one tomorrow but while it might be me (the individual in meat-space) it would not be @HlynkaCG. This is one of the core disagreements I always had with @ZorbaTHut, he would say that you can't just assume that in the absence of an established history that a user is a bot troll or sock-puppet where I would counter that in the absence of an established history you can't assume that they aren't. What value an internet handle has as a human being is in it's history, and a Handle with no history has no rights.
So TheMotte is the Singapore of internet forums?
There are good forums that are primarily anonymous, such as 4chan. (Yes, 4chan can be good, depending on the topic.) What matters is the website's culture.
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That's a part of it, but it doesn't explain everything. Even post-Eternal September forums' level was way above the social media of nowadays. My money is on centralization. Getting a whole bunch of people together originally provides loads of benefits like one-stop-shopping or crowd-curating, but it also seems to be a huge temptation to whoever is running the services. Sooner or later they're no longer satisfied with merely providing a service, and want to start shaping their audience, and their sheer size protects them from user rebellions.
Don't forget smartphones! They helped to completely ruin the internet by lowering the barrier to entry to zero (everybody has a smartphone and a data plan now). Turns out, democratizing internet access by letting billions of poor, technologically illiterate people online was not a good thing.
How much would you pay (in money or time) to access the patrician internet where only intelligent nerds can post?
IIRC there are a few places out there (Gemini, and maybe Urbit?) where you need to invest some time upfront to get hooked into the network and to navigate it. Anyone know of any others?
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Anonymity, as opposed to the pseudonymity we enjoy here, also has the ability to turn people into esoteric erudite dicks who find common ground in the faceless teasible enjoyment of whatever it is they enjoy.
Back in 2010, I became a “ponyfag,” a /co/mics&cartoons poster who was surprised to find himself a My Little Pony fan. (“Brony” was our epithet toward those guys who enjoyed it because of the pastel colors and happy songs, instead of in spite of them.) I watched something great (and profitable) arise because of the protection of anonymity.
We advised each other to “hide your power levels” because of the potential for instant status reduction we saw people earning daily through public declarations of love of the show.
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