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.
Comment on GTA IV Is A Snapshot of the World Before It Changed
cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days agoSome 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.
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io 2 days ago
Riding netsplits, slapping people with trouts, those were the days...
FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io 3 days ago
4chan was definitely around in 2008 but it was a lot more crazy random eclectic message board and a lot less nazi bar.
WALLACE@feddit.uk 2 days ago
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.