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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2025
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in the 80s 'online' was often very local . you learned not to say things you wouldnt say to that persons face because there was every chance you would run into them at some local gathering of users.
Indeed and this very thing happened to me as I was a teenager talking shit to a user on our local MajorBBS system, which was a popular multi line BBS system that had chat, games, forums, fidonet, etc. and he showed up to the next meetup at the park (he did warn me he was going to be there, to kick my ass). Everything turned out fine but lesson learned.
Sounds quite similar to CB radio.
on the internet? it's an on-going process, there is no "everything"
Bingo. Whether or here, or formerly, reddit, I can adjust my style and words to get the upvotes, without compromising my beliefs. But holy shit, people are easy to manipulate.
I'm pretty sure that I still don't know everything I need to know about online discourse.
I am a monkey with a typewriter
By being a part of online discourse as early as 1993 and watching it grow pretty much from inception.
NO TOP POSTING
lol
I still automatically think "YOUR .SIG IS TOO HUGE!" when reading modern work emails with rows upon rows of name, job title, company, contact info, disclaimers, embedded graphics, etc. at the bottom.
If you count the telegraph as online communication, it'd go back to the mid-1800s.
FUCK YOU.
STRONGLY WORDED LETTER TO FOLLOW.
"Back in my day, we weren't online, we did lines! And there were fuckin' ninjas on the lawn tryna kill us, too!"
Kids and their chats today have it easy, man.
https://home.nps.gov/people/hettie-ogle.htm
Hettie moved to Johnstown on 1869 to manage the Western Union telegraph office where she was employed on the day of the flood. Her residence was 110 Washington Street, next to the Cambria County Library. This also served as the Western Union office. Unlike many other telegraph operators associated with messaging on the day of the flood, Hettie was not employed by the Pennsylvania Railroad. She was a commercial operator. Three women were employed by Hettie; Grace Garman, Mary Jane Waktins and her daughter Minnie. They all died in the flood including Hettie.
A timeline of Hettie's activity on May 31, 1889:
7:44 a.m. -She sent a river reading. The water level was 14 feet.
10:44 a.m. -The river level was 20 feet.
11:00 a.m. -She wired the following message to Pittsburgh. "Rain gauge carried away."
12:30 p.m. -She wired "Water higher than ever known. Can't give exact measurement" to Pittsburgh.
1:00 p.m. -Hettie moved to the second floor of her home due to the rising water.
3:00 p.m. -Hettie alerted Pittsburgh about the dam after receiving a warning from South Fork that the dam "may possibly go." She wired "this is my last message." The water was grounding her wires. A piece of sheet music titled "My Last Message" was published after the flood.Hettie's house on Washington Street was struck by the flood wave shortly after 4:00 p.m.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Explosion
The death toll could have been worse had it not been for the self-sacrifice of an Intercolonial Railway dispatcher, Patrick Vincent (Vince) Coleman, operating at the railyard about 230 metres (750 ft) from Pier 6, where the explosion occurred. He and his co-worker, William Lovett, learned of the dangerous cargo aboard the burning Mont-Blanc from a sailor and began to flee. Coleman remembered that an incoming passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, was due to arrive at the railyard within minutes. He returned to his post alone and continued to send out urgent telegraph messages to stop the train. Several variations of the message have been reported, among them this from the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic: "Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys." Coleman's message was responsible for bringing all incoming trains around Halifax to a halt. It was heard by other stations all along the Intercolonial Railway, helping railway officials to respond immediately.[71][72] Passenger Train No. 10, the overnight train from Saint John, is believed to have heeded the warning and stopped a safe distance from the blast at Rockingham, saving the lives of about 300 railway passengers. Coleman was killed at his post.[71]
I started in a/s/l? chat rooms, but as social media has evolved, so has the discourse. I think I had to relearn every time I changed platforms.
The NME (popular British music paper) had a website with a chat room/board that I was active on in the late 90s. I was about 17.
They also gave you free webmail with a @nme.com address, so you felt like a music journalist. Unfortunately, they shut it all down out of the blue in the 00s, with little warning, so I lost my primary email address. Would love to recover all those messages, but they are gone forever.
Started with online BBS's in the 1980s where you could get kicked off for being a dick (and your phone number banned) but Larry Wall's "rn" for Usenet used to say before every post:
This program posts news to thousands of machines throughout the entire civilized world. Your message will cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
Over thirty years ago, on TALK.
By being terminally online since the previous century.
AOL LOLOL1
ASL?
I'm pretty sure American sign language looks different than that.
CS 1.6
tumblr
Runescape
&totse and IRC mostly
Usenet and IRC, back in the late 90s. Damn I'm getting old.
MMOs and forums.
Chomsky
I'm still learning, despite being around it for over 2 decades at this point.
This year marks three for me. Also still learning.
I'd quote Abe Simpson about being "with it" until they change what "it" is, but that doesn't quite apply online. You're always going to be a couple of steps behind with something as niche things crawl out of the darkness, ever mutating as they turn mainstream.
And to think, when I started on the Internet, I was already technically an adult, but I didn't act like one, that's for sure. Some lessons were hard learned.
Some of it is immortalised if you know where to look. I've changed my pseudonym a handful of times as a result.
I was in my mid-twenties and my second marriage by the time I really got into internet forums, and they were mostly bicycle related ones. God only know how I'd have turned out if I'd been a teenager or Reddit or the like had been around. I think the closest thing at the time was slashdot, which I looked at briefly and noped the fuck outa there. Bikeforums.net is still alive and kicking, apparently.
I think the most important lesson I learned early on is that you're not going to change anyone's mind.
It wasn't just one place. It wasn't even all online.
The starwars.com forum long before the Disney purchase killed it, then Digg until the v4 update, then Reddit until the APIpocalypse.
So many communities I've seen wrecked by corporate greed. The Fediverse gives me hope for people being able to interact online without having to worry about the enshittification.
Alt.flame. iykyk
On MMOs, trying not to sound like a kid, even though I was a kid, so I could join groups of cool people and guilds. Learned a lot of American lingo on Reddit.
Hmmm, I think my gateway drug to interacting with actual Internet strangers vs talking online with people I knew IRL, was probably via StarCraft over dial-up in 1998. RuneScape shortly after for developing actual relationships with people, then WoW owned my soul from its vanilla release through the cata expansion.
Several WoW guilds had their own websites/forums, which eventually got me into forums for other topics, then Reddit, then here.
Oh man, I am not the primary demographic of lemmy am I?
I was going to say AIM (AOL), but really it was Yahoo! Games. Specifically Towers with a little bit of Pool mixed in.
As many others have said IRC and usenet in the 90's
Thank god I was able to learn on the early days of the internet
Discussing online.
Nexopia and NinjaVideo forums.
Yes, I am Unc and chopped.
4chan taught me that, in a highly uncivilised world, the best thing to do is be kind and keep your dignity. It'll either calm people's spirits or infuriate others, and I enjoy both, lol. Also, words don't have to hurt, especially those from online strangers!
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