It's fascinating that so many of these "old guard" care about such fundamental principles like privacy and archiving. Many people new to internet technologies today seem to not care, or have little interest in those subjects. "Old guard" is indeed an apt term for these pioneers of a technology/world/layer that seems to be heavily taken for granted today.
Wow I guess I'm old now. But people cared about Internet privacy well into the 2000s. To the unreasonable extreme in fact, but it was still better than the lousy Internet we have now.
Putting your personal information online was unthinkable for most until Myspace gained popularity. Then once Facebook took hold, no one seemed to care about online privacy anymore.
The change in this perception was drastic and precipitous. Though it was younger folks who started it, and the older generations followed out of ignorance.
The change you describe is still a little bit mystifying to me. People went from caring about privacy and freedom to being totally fine with listening devices in their homes owned by advertising companies in only about ten years.
I personally blame gasified social media that linked (over)sharing little dopamine hits. We basically used a Skinner box to retrain people to like having their privacy invaded and willingly participate.
I don't rule out the possibility that this was intentional and designed, but it seems more likely that we just hit upon it in the great search for a workable business model for the Internet after the dot.com crash. People forget that until surveillance capitalism nobody knew how to make the net into a sustainable business. Unfortunately the answer ended up being a more dystopian retread of the ad-driven business model of the old media we were trying to get away from.
I remember meeting some "Internet famous" people in the mid-2000s of whom I didn't know their names IRL and how much respect I had for them conversing in person. Now everyone seems focused more on name recognition than credibility within anonymous groups. Your point is spot on. I feel like the Internet has transformed much like the game of golf. Growing up there was an etiquette and a barrier to entry. You played with people who knew the rules and you didn't need to ever talk about the rules because you didn't want to be that person. I felt a lot of respect for my fellow players who were skilled and the group was tight knit. Then Tiger Woods happened and everyone was interested in golf overnight. Did it boost the sport overall? Sure. Do I find the game less enjoyable today because the barrier has been lowered and there are many more who don't seem to have come up with the same appreciation and respect for the game? Yes. Some probably think that sounds arrogant, but it seems there are more wannabe influencers than creators in today's landscape of the Internet. And there are many great creators out there still. But it's often hard to find them.
I can definitely see where you're coming from. I help out running fandom events -- actually for furries. So it's a very different demographic to golfers but bear with me.
I've noticed the exact same pattern. Fame (or infamy in some cases) at all costs, everyone wants to be Internet- or Fandom-famous. "Popufur" is the pejorative term for it.
For some it's a vehicle for their "fame". They don't give a rat's ass about the rules -- they want their ten thousand retweets, everyone knows their name -- and they'll step on, burn out and push aside anyone to get there. The rules are for everyone else.
The internet was our vehicle to find each other, but now unfortunately it's become the petard by which we are hoist.
To combine yours and GP's comments, furry fandom has had several popularity boosts over the past ~5 years akin to the Tiger Woods thing for golf. I go to one of the larger conventions yearly, and the general feel has changed significantly because of it.
Hah... I meant to say gamified but I'm glad people understood the autoincorrected version. Mobile is the foot rub. (Autoincorrect of mobile is the future I saw once.)
Not even famous - they just want to use all the cool free stuff (Gmail, YouTube, FB etc.) that happens to sustain the businesses that profit from hoarding info about users.
Oh yeah, you're totally correct. I can easily think of people who were aghast that I was _chatting on the internet_ in those days... These same people now post troves of very personal stuff on Facebook with great frequency... Most (all?) of those people are older than me! :)
In myspace’s defense, myspace didn’t require you to use your real name. You could be skyrider23 and post pics and videos of your fun endeavours and no one would bat an eye. In fact, lots of people had accounts for their pets that others could subscribe to.
Facebook (and later Google) insisted to use real names only. Something that, obviously, can be much better used and exploited than some anonymous persona.
People care about privacy up to a point. The majority of people (myself included) are apparently willing to give up their privacy if it means not having to pay for email service, or other information (search results, news).
Note that this happened at DWebCamp, an Internet-privacy focused event. Everyone present had self-selected for these attributes, and they aren’t necessarily representative of the wider population.
The average user used a ton of very very un-private things, including all manner of unsandboxed browser plugins.
It was mostly about trust back then. Windows explorer could not keep you safe from exploits, so an average user saw the internet as a somewhat dangerous public place.
Archiving was easy, because we didn't have any of this evil bad awful endless scrolling that I strongly suspects creates low grade anxiety regardless of content.
We had real pages with a URL that you could download. even forums(Which were so much better than social media) were paginated, not scrolled.
Now archiving, decentralization, cryptocurrency, and anonymity are often baked into the same layer.
I'm not going to bother with anything that uses Blockchains and five times the bandwidth, and most privacy centric projects aren't high performance or easy to use.
They often expect you to make some real sacrifices for privacy, without any "compromise modes".
Everyone is really focused on the tech, but most of it's already there. There's tons of anonymity networks out there.
What we really should ask, is why the sites used by the majority of people including tech pros are designed seemingly to encourage anxiety, comparing self to others,and throwaway content?
