>>Another aspect is lack of social skills. Society has been falling apart for several decades, and that means people today have fewer opportunities to learn positive ways of interaction. They also feel free to do a lot of obnoxious things that used to be curbed by social expectations.<<
This is the origin of "the September that never ended". Before AOL gave "everyone" Internet access, most users were connected either thru a college/university or a job.
In both cases, there were people whose *job* it was to deal with complaints about users from their site(s) who were making nuisances of themselves. So bad behavior had consequences. Rather serious ones.
And even those of us who got net access at several removes had an incentive to behave because our access still had top go thru the business/education sites at some point, and it usually wasn't that many hops between you and them.
Address used to be !tektronix!reed!qiclab!leonard so if the folks at reed or tekronix got a complaint they'd pass it on to qiclab and my friend who ran qiclab would tell me to shape up because he didn't want to lose his ability to connect via reed (Reed College).
But AOL and the others that followed didn't *care* they were paying for their links and didn't care about complaint from outside.
So consequences for those who didn't want to "play nice" evaporated.
So it was a race to the bottom.
This probably helped undermine social skills, as folks get less and less exposure to them online, and stuff like news coverage tends to focus on the bad actors anyway.
The various laws meant to "help" sites moderate things are backfiring badly. Attempting to control content actually *removes* your immunity from prosecution for content that someone posts on your site.
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dancing_serpent
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2024-03-24 04:55 am (UTC)This is the origin of "the September that never ended". Before AOL gave "everyone" Internet access, most users were connected either thru a college/university or a job.
In both cases, there were people whose *job* it was to deal with complaints about users from their site(s) who were making nuisances of themselves. So bad behavior had consequences. Rather serious ones.
And even those of us who got net access at several removes had an incentive to behave because our access still had top go thru the business/education sites at some point, and it usually wasn't that many hops between you and them.
Address used to be !tektronix!reed!qiclab!leonard so if the folks at reed or tekronix got a complaint they'd pass it on to qiclab and my friend who ran qiclab would tell me to shape up because he didn't want to lose his ability to connect via reed (Reed College).
But AOL and the others that followed didn't *care* they were paying for their links and didn't care about complaint from outside.
So consequences for those who didn't want to "play nice" evaporated.
So it was a race to the bottom.
This probably helped undermine social skills, as folks get less and less exposure to them online, and stuff like news coverage tends to focus on the bad actors anyway.
The various laws meant to "help" sites moderate things are backfiring badly. Attempting to control content actually *removes* your immunity from prosecution for content that someone posts on your site.