The early Internet had a few simple rules:

• Never feed a troll
• Never trust anything written online
• Never tell anyone your real name or address
• There are no girls online (i.e. people are not who they claim to be)
• Online is not IRL

And most people knew these rules. The proliferation of the Internet has brought a lot of people who don’t understand these rules in to the fold and it has made the Internet a worse place. “Normies” seemingly think the Internet world works like your normal social interactions - it does not. The anonymity of the Internet brings out the worst in people. We really need to bring back the rules of the early Internet for the safety of everyone.

Feel free to comment more rules if you remember any.

As much as I miss the early Internet though, I genuinely do wish I’d had more protection from the seedier sites. I am not better off for having seen the gore and shock sites.

Oh absolutely, I also believe that growing up with dialup was great, it meant that being online cost money, giving parents incentive to monitor the time spent online by children, and gradually getting used to being online.

I remember asking and being allowed 30 min online, every few weeks.

It worked well as we hadn’t transitioned to an online first society.

Then later in school there were a few shock sites being sent around, goatse was never huge at my time in school, for me the most prolific shock site around school was lemonparty.

Even later in school, I started realizing how much gore and weird crap you could find, and a morbid curiosity took over forna few days, I remember finding a picture of a guy who got beheaded after falling on a spiked fence, you could see the head on one of the spikes, and another time when I saw the aftermath of a guy being sucked into a jet engine, that one was quite mild as the result was too abstract and you only saw a red paste, so it never bothered me.

As it stands now, I think there is a value of mild supervision of kids and teens when online.

I mean mild in a way that full access is allowed but only on a desktop in a shared space.

And at 16 they can move their computer into their own room, and at 18 any admin account on their computer that the parents have should be removed.

I had dialup, but we had 2 phone lines and our phone company was the ISP so a local number with unlimited access. I’ve been terminally online for way too long.