It isn’t inherently toxic, people are toxic. It is merely the “enough rope” to have enabled that.
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Goodbye AOL
- Thread starter MJ5150
- Start date
JazznFunk
Supporting Member
You are correct. The internet is the method of delivery. People have forgotten how to have decorum in general, both on and off the internet, but I distinctly remember when a lot of what is 'default behavior' now online was not present early on in the 90s. Platforms like AOL, with strict TOS enforcement, helped maintain order, and everyone seemed cool with it, versus the environment we have today. Even in the late 90s when ISPs started to become more commonplace, it was still a bit more civil, even though it was the 'wild west' in terms of content management and delivery.
Peoples' online behavior is often a reflection of their offline behavior. The amount of people accessing the internet, and the ways in which it is now used, have amplified what used to be small, niche 'blooms' of intolerance and poor decorum, among many other far more insidious things.
My gauge in most of my interactions online is as follows: Would I say the things I'm saying online to someone if we were face to face in real life? It's a check on my dialogue, and a lens thru which I see other peoples' dialogues at me online. People are more toxic now than they ever have been before, as a result of consequence-free online interactions, and have become more emboldened to be toxic offline too as a result. I do blame that directly on how the internet has changed communication in general over the past 30 years, but ESPECIALLY in the last 20-25 years.
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CDs ??? I used to get the floppies! Which was actually OK because you could reuse them for saving files.
I use a dial up internet connection from my cell phone. Doesn't everyone, or am I missing something?
It is interesting to see craigslist still looking like that. They clearly adhere to the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality.
I guess they haven 't hired enough marketeers. So the product is still reasonably functional.
Wanna earn 0.001% more revenue, while pissing off all your long term customers? Hire Marketeers R US! We'll screw up your user interface, selectively use fake statistics to claim how much improvement we've made, collect our big checks and ride off into the sunset! What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Not only that, but you'd get so many floppies in the mail you could just erase them for use them instead of buying floppies
Providing tech support to almost anyone now is a horrific job. I am not exaggerating when I use the word 'horrific'.
Decorum and civility disallow me from providing many (recent) illustrative examples.
Decorum and civility disallow me from providing many (recent) illustrative examples.
JazznFunk
Supporting Member
I'm actually glad Craiglist and a few other sites look that way. No excess cookies, trackers, hidden scripting, overuse of graphics, popups.... the way the internet used to be. The coffee roaster I order from in NYC has a website that hasn't changed in over 25 years.
It reminds me of newspaper classifieds.
But, you know, it cuts both ways. By the time anyone actually talks to a human in tech support, they've already navigated who knows how many umpty-million voice recognition menus and had another zillion people try to sell them upgrades before they'll let them talk to a human. And most of the time the first three humans you are allowed to talk to are reading a script and unable to answer even basic questions. Now this is no excuse for shouting or being vile to the poor sod that's on the phone, but the frustration with customer not-service is already very high by the time the poor tech support person is actually talking to the customer.
If you feel that your customers are being rude to your tech support people, you need to look, first of all, at the systems the guys on Mahogany Row have put in place to frustrate those same customers. That's where the problems come from.
"Oh, you know, these statistics show that if we can increase on-hold time by 15%, enough people will just hang up, that we can lay off another 10 % of help desk staff - shall we do it?"
JazznFunk
Supporting Member
Definitely don't chirp the guys who are trying to help you.... they didn't put the AI/voice prompt/labyrinth in place. Especially if it's domestic tech support.
Correct. There is no excuse for being rude to call center folks - but as I said, it's a two way street. **** rolls downhill, and in today's environment the customers and the front line staff are at the bottom of the valley.
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Indeed. My mom would always elect me, to make big PRINTSHOP banners for birthdays from a floppy. I would make them 10 feet long on that dot matrix paper ream
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Oh yeah! Dot matrix printers. I first started keeping household expense records on Quattro Pro. On a PC-XT clone. And a green monochrome CRT monitor and dot matrix printer. Ahh the bad old days!Indeed. My mom would always elect me, to make big PRINTSHOP banners for birthdays from a floppy. I would make them 10 feet long on that dot matrix paper ream
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I have a very good friend who's a remote help desk troubleshooter for a govt contractor. She tells tons of horror stories about "user abuse". And she's a sweetheart. I feel really bad for her.
I would be fired from her job very quickly. I would tell one of the first a-hole callers exactly where they could put their problem.
Funny thing, fellow Sooner, I had my first exposures to "computer technology" and "interconnected terminals" across 1977 to 1981…both due to my mom loading Fortran-based punch cards into the campus computer and one of her grad professors at Tulsa University. Not only did those damn punch cards work their way into our house, but when I was in his office one day, I asked him what this waldo with a pair of suction cups was for. Being a very good sport, he told me how it let his terminal talk to other computers, then gave me a demonstration. He picked up the phone receiver, dialed some number, let me hear the (presumably) 300 baud rate chirping for a couple of seconds, then popped it into the suction cups.
So, when the movie "WarGames" hit the theater in 1983, I might've been the only kid in the audience who knew what Matthew Broderick was talking about when he was showing off his rig to Ally Sheedy.
As for the green monochrome terminal, my mom had one for years when she was working for Bell Labs/AT&T, starting around 1984. I can't remember if this is the exact model, but it's pretty close. What I do remember was how tall it was, so it could display more lines of vertical code, and that it's CRT screen and metal chassis made it a terribly heavy beast!
What's really sad is the fact that there are still countless people in Middle America that can only access the internet from home by way of dial-up. I don't hear about it much anymore, but if the FCC were to ever declare The Internet a utility, it would establish a degree of "net neutrality" and force the Internet Service Providers to run high-speed cable and/or fiber-optic service to places they've long considered "not profitable". (The same thing happened to telephone service from the early-to-mid-20th Century. As time went on, having a telephone was deemed to be a basic, necessary function of a house, just like water, power and sanitation.)
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But, since the makeup of "The Powers That Be" have become so big-business-friendly over the past decades, the only way many of these states can
Furthermore, it is important to mention the ISP's that are the gatekeepers of online activity did not build the foundations they have profited off of for so long. They did not create ARPANET or packet-switching, they simply take money to allow access to something built by government contractors decades ago.
So, if anyone says the internet hasn't become a utility in this modern, information-driven age, they're either ignorant or lying. Don't believe me? Just ask how dependent kids are on computerization just to do their schoolwork, both in and out of the classroom. (And no, I'm not talking about A.I. advancements. That's a whole 'nother topic and not for this thread. I mean basic, computer-driven classwork and the necessity for some internet connectivity to perform basic school functions.)
[/RANT]
Okay…I got that out of my system.
Never had AOL specifically, though I did have dial-up for a while, even a 2400 bps modem in the pre-WWW BBS days, but I never used those much.
But the idea that the Internet became toxic is totally the opposite of my experience. I really got online after older student told me in the early 90s that you can use the university computer labs to argue with people, sometimes even people at other universities in Texas. To me the entire initial appeal of it was that it was what today we'd call toxic.
I'm sure people who were using the Internet for serious things like, say, Unix variant development, had a different experience from me. But before 1994-1995 or so, to me there was no real purpose to it, just flame wars, and even well after that I remember things like the FMP666 forum which very much had that "old Internet" feeling in the early 2000s. I did eventually grow up a little bit, so now I stick to non-malicious trolling, but what I remember from back in the day was not that different from the most malicious parts of the Internet today.
But the idea that the Internet became toxic is totally the opposite of my experience. I really got online after older student told me in the early 90s that you can use the university computer labs to argue with people, sometimes even people at other universities in Texas. To me the entire initial appeal of it was that it was what today we'd call toxic.
I'm sure people who were using the Internet for serious things like, say, Unix variant development, had a different experience from me. But before 1994-1995 or so, to me there was no real purpose to it, just flame wars, and even well after that I remember things like the FMP666 forum which very much had that "old Internet" feeling in the early 2000s. I did eventually grow up a little bit, so now I stick to non-malicious trolling, but what I remember from back in the day was not that different from the most malicious parts of the Internet today.
All I can really say about this is "You've Got Mail"!!! 
