For me, it was that the Internet never forgets and that you should never enter your real name. In my opinion, both of these rules are now completely ignored.
Don’t pick up the phone if someone is online… I’m old
I’m a millennial, I learned this, and now I just don’t pick up the phone.
It’s weird when someone calls me and it’s actually a live one.
I’m a gen z and I can’t put down the phone
Now try and call someone with it. I’ll wait
Feel free to call me whenever, it only costs you $69 a minute.
Don’t call them, it’s just them screaming " NOT THE BEES!" Over and over again for a minute, weirdest wank ever.
Hot damn! Where’s my wallet!?
I can’t remember. Did it make pterodactyl noises or is that just faxes?
The modem made noises when connecting, but if someone picked up the phone, your internet would just stop working and they’d get their dial tone.
Now dot matrix printers, those were real pterodactyl sounds.
Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.
- Squeee
- Whale song
- Chunkachunks
- Teeth grinder
- Buckbuckbuck
- They’re here
Ah, another Poltergeist fan, I see. :p
Decades ago, I saw a (one of many) "you might be a geek / nerd if … " list (referencing “you might be a redneck”). As of this moment, the only one I remember is “you leave the modem speaker on after connecting because you think it sounds like the ocean - the perfect sound for surfing the web!”
Modems can still make noise. As recently as five years ago I still had to work with modems. A lot of them now have silent mode though
oh yes it made the noise.
You come from a nice family. My family disconnected each other all the time
I used to get hella annoyed that my mom would be online all afternoon so I would pick up the phone and blow into it for a few seconds until I heard AOL man say “Goodbye.”
That, together with: I’m online, watch out for the ca… “No carrier”
I’m not that old but was dealing with that in the mid-2000s before my parents finally switched.
Dont believe anyone on the internet.
I don’t believe you
I don’t believe you
I don’t believe that you don’t believe me
That’s my favorite Charlemagne quote
Don’t feed the trolls.
Of course nowadays its nearly impossible to tell whos spouting racial slurs to get folks mad and whos doing it because they’re just an asshole.
Don’t feed the AI
Just assume almost everybody is an asshole online and you can’t be wrong. Because anonymity has granted them that capability.
The fact that people being assholes with their real names on Facebook tells me, anonymity has nothing to do with it.
Facebook has no anonymity though. So it’s different. You are sole responsible for who you allow yourself to add that now may know your real name.
I think people being assholes on FB with their real names makes filtering a hell of a lot easier.
More recently, this behaviour is known as “driving engagement”
I remember when it was just funny edgy humor that was clearly satirical for the most part because a lot of us were just dumb kids. It was abrasive and stupid but you had this feeling everyone was in on the joke.
But bizarre satire has turned to deeply held conviction.
I’m not just sad that the mean spirited trolling persists, but that it’s gotten more sincere and often must be taken seriously. :(
When you share something cool, link back to the original creator or where you found it from.
I’d argue this is the opposite of what was asked.
In the early days, no one would post sources or attribute “stuff” to anyone. We’d all just share what we thought were cool pictures.
Now, everyone gets mad when you dont post the name of the artist and their socials.
What people are really mad about us the fact that artists are (and always have been) starving. We throw so much food away, let the artists cook for fucks sake.
This might be more of a blogosphere-era thing I guess. Even when most people blogging did it for pleasure rather than work, it was always considered polite to “hat tip” (h/t) the source of a given link, if you happened to find it on someone else’s site.
I would posit a big part of this is because early-net days were primarily for just socializing and sharing cool stuff (heck yeah, I miss it.) Artists probably didn’t make a majority of their living through the 'net. If something was shared it was likely just “I think this is cool, folks!”
Nowadays, to say the Internet is heavily commercialized would be a massive understatement. Every little interaction is monetized. Many people make their entire living through e-commerce. It’s just how things went.
Meanwhile you have a billion faceless sandfleas with repost-botfarms trying to hustle cash with the stupidest methods possible.
You’ll see entire channels where animations or paintings or whatever are circulated on socials like youtube, twitter, or tiktok with the artist tag conveniently cropped out (if there was one).
Some are outright stealing the work for profit (selling tshirts or something), while others are just using it to farm clicks, which is also a route to profit.
The artist who made the work is cheated, perhaps unaware, as some click-grifter gets all the attention. And that sucks. :( As an artist myself, I try to make sure I share the sources for stuff now, because recognition is a form of thanks, at the very least.
I miss the sharing internet…the attention economy has basically turned the internet into a sociological illustration of “The paperclip apocalypse”. :(
Social media killed online aliases and I have a hard time deciding if we’re all worse for it.
Instinctively I still stick by that, though, as you can tell by my anonymous profile with no bio, but when I volunteer any amount of personal info these days people are often confused that I’m not sharing openly who I am or where I’m from. Every time someone does that it weirds me out because in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
in the 90s telling (and asking) people those things would have been such a suspicious, sketchy move.
a/s/l?
Aight, I put on my robe and wizard’s hat.
RIP bloodninja.
