For people who only know the internet past 2010, the 2001 internet would be unrecognizable, so the question doesn’t really make sense. The world was an entirely different place before modern algorithmic media. There were trolls, and there were decent people, but the whole context of the world changed after the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Arguably for the orders of magnitude worse. It’s not really fair to compare then to now.
There just wasn’t really user-submitted content back then. If you wanted to post something on the internet, you had to create a website.
There were tools that made a website a bit easier to create (most notably Geocities), but it was still a fairly technical task to simply get text that you typed show up on a website accessible to all.
Simply being able to reply to someone else? That wasn’t really on the web, although by 2001 there were a few attempts to bring that kind of forum functionality to the broader web on actual http/www webpages (when it was previously on Usenet and BBSes and mailing lists and the technologies known as the internet before and separate from the world wide web). vBulletin was the popular one, and I think phpBB was fairly popular, too, but those projects started in 2000 and weren’t that popular in the first years. Web hosts actually offering a full blown LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for hosting, and the technical skills to administer that kind of service, even on free software, was a pretty big hurdle to adoption before 2003 or so.
In 2001, almost all of the web was static content, with no method of interacting with the content other than simply viewing it. You’d click on links to retrieve another piece of content. By 2005 the web 2.0 revolution was underway, and websites had become interactive, with dynamic content drawing from relational databases under the hood. But in 2001? No, the web was pretty static.
Your description of the rise of the social algorithms is part of the story since 2010, but even that leaves out the period of time in between.
laughs in IRC
Correct. There was no reddit or Lemmy like things. The closest we had were BBS forums.
I was a mod on a pretty major one: IGN, and it was definitely dark after that happened. Not many posts at all. People all just unplugged from the internet for a bit to watch the news. Which was the style at the time.
Many of us warned about the knee jerk reactions of our government, especially usapatriot and the kickoff of the wars. Same shit. Different decade. But it laid much of the groundwork for the hole we are in today.
Social media didn’t exist for the most part in 2001. There was LiveJournal and Something Awful. Most online discussions happened using instant messaging between people you knew or on discussion forums that usually were focused around an interest or niche topic.
All of those platforms had trolls but they were much more benign than they are today. Islamophobia spiked and there were spirited debates, but nothing like the vitriol we see today on even the most banal posts. The communities were much smaller to the point that most regular posters knew each other and had interacted many times, civility was maintained by that familiarity like it would be in a real community. The anonymity that comes from massive userbases were you’ll never encounter the same person twice is really what created the naked hostility we have today. There was a forum called Storm Front, which I believe is still around, a literal nazi forum but you had to be deep into the Internet to even know it existed.
After 9/11 more conspiracy theories started popping up and making their way to more mainstream sites as sort of proto-memes and it was a bad time to hold an opinion that wasn’t pro-US nationalism, but again nothing like the horrific things we see today.
I believe the internet was much smaller then. It existed, but most social hadn’t really begun yet. I still only had dialup.
9/11 was 2001, Facebook was 2004. So definitely a different place.
Broadband was around. The signal to noise was much better. We had Usenet, IRC, and our own home pages.
Maybe around, but I don’t think it was ubiquitous? Even then, ADSL was pretty bad, and I wouldn’t call it broadband by today’s standards. But that could just be Australia lagging the world :)
We had a lot of fourms back then. Myspace wouldn’t happen until '03.
I don’t count forums the same as modern social media. The are social places of course, but much more tight-knit, much less algorithmically ratfucked. Even 2003 Myspace and 2004 FB were much better places than what they have metastasized into.
I found a popular thread from the day of 9/11 here if you want to look at it: https://m.slashdot.org/story/20235
Most of it isn’t all that different from what you would see today but I should warn you that there are some “edgy humor” trolls using slurs that you’ll run into early on.
Generally, people weren’t dicks or trolls online quite as much at the time. The internet wasn’t for everyone in 2001. Most people got their news from TV. I had a family member call me to turn on the TV.
The lack of decency part was how quickly the anti-Arab sentiment came out of the woodwork. With a lot of people still sort of attuned to it from the first Iraq war, it was easy for a lot of people to fall back into that. Tons of racist cartoons and photoshoped images sent around, mostly by email. Lots of email forwards. To be fair, people were extremely pissed, and since it was not a nation-state doing this, it was hard to have someone to blame in the traditional sense.
But, in general, people were more shocked and terrified. Especially as the anthrax stuff happened a few weeks later, rampant speculation and conspiracy theories ramped up. All of that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” started within days. A lot of “woah, I can’t believe it” stuff. It took a few days before things got back to normal.
The Internet was awesome before 9/11/01
Now any idiot can use it.
The death of the Internet started in 2004, when Facebook launched, and fucking died in 2007 when the iPhone launched.
Found this interesting Pew study about the internet from 1 year after 9/11:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2002/09/05/one-year-later-september-11-and-the-internet-2/
Take it with a grain of salt, I think it comes off as a little overly optimistic, especially given some of the dire things it talks about (massive support for giving away our freedoms, etc).
I did just see at the bottom that there’s literally 8 pages, and I was basing all that on just the first page so maybe I’ll read more or at least skim through the rest.
Edit: holy shit (from pg 2):
From what I remember, just from small niche forums, most people were just too stunned about it to really be hateful. That’s not a big sample size but I don’t recall many people trying to be edgelords about it, everyone just seemed to read the room and just see that it was fucked up
This isn’t true, there were racist fucks immediately targeting Sikhs.
People were literally killed in retaliatory attacks (that often targeted the wrong fucking religion).
The question asked “on the internet” and I responded with my personal experience. Take it down a notch.
I didn’t realize I was up any notches. Maybe it is you who needs to take your defensiveness down a notch.
Also, hate speech went way up online after 9/11. Just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
Edit:
I posted a top level comment with a pretty interesting Pew research article, this chart is on page 6.
Over half of the sites in the study had a tenor of “anger, fear and hate.” More than the “nonviolent response” cohort. I also wonder what % of the “religious expression” ones were Islamophobic
Source:
Edit: to be clear, these comments are about as dispassionate as I can get, I’m honestly not sure why anyone would interpret it otherwise.
You need a healthier outlet
Why are you taking all of this so personal?
While I was already reading through what I found to be an interesting study Pew did 1 year after 9/11 about the internet,
(Quite literally the exact topic that OP was asking about)
I took 30 sec to screenshot a relevant chart.
I dunno man, doesn’t seem unhealthy to me. Found an interesting article about the thing we were discussing here and thought that I’d share. That took me literally 30 sec to screenshot the chart from the article I was already reading.
The problem here seems to lie with you.
Nothing to do with the internet; I was in elementary at the time and we were joking about it within 2 weeks.
Yeah I’ll say “happy holidays” now but on the day of, I was just too aghast to be edgy or really even react cos it was so surreal
No idea, I only used the internet for messenger with people I knew irl
