Comment on GTA IV Is A Snapshot of the World Before It Changed
chunes@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I did enjoy the video but I died inside when he said “Even by 2008 we realized that the internet could be used for nefarious purposes.”
Some of us have been on the web since 1994. It’s not much older than that. The World-Wide Web, I mean. HTTP. Of course you had Usenet and such before the WWW.
2008 would be 14 years later. Sure, it was 17 years ago, but in 2008, people were on MySpace. Pretty sure 4chan was around then, wanna-be hackers and pedophiles posting anonymously. So yeah, I think people were aware the Internet could be a dark place by then.
4chan was definitely around in 2008 but it was a lot more crazy random eclectic message board and a lot less nazi bar.
I went on 4chan back in 2004. I was 14 and I remember thinking I found some super cool secret website full of badasses.
I got bored after a few weeks. I returned when I was 18 and realised it was full of socially mal-adjusted teens pretending to be super cool badasses, with a few pedophiles mixed in for good measure.
I don’t really even recall the “web” being one of the rougher places. It was Usenet and IRC, aka places where you could actually deal with other people directly, that were the livelier area. They were also more fun for that exact reason.
Riding netsplits, slapping people with trouts, those were the days...
Science Fiction authors from the 40s, 50s and 60s toyed with many scenarios and theories about where technology would wind up. Half of them were right, half of them were wrong. I think it'd be a dumb thing to say what you quoted.
Doing nefarious things on the Internet is probably not much older than the Internet. That take sounds like something someone who wasn't around in the 90s would say. I still remember the Ping of Death, people abusing netsplits on IRC, scams, identity theft, fraud, etc. - this is not exactly a new thing and even predates the web.
makyo@lemmy.world 2 days ago
When Facebook was just starting to be popular I was telling my uncle how people will get exposure to more of the world and be more open to it. He told me he was afraid the wrong people would find each other too. Fast forward 15 years he gets red pilled and dies of Covid.