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The internet used to be way crazier back in 2000's or smth.
It was less popular, so now there's just way more stuff, but a larger % used to be crazy shit.
Crazier as in, less controlled. Less moderated from corporations. A lot more flew back in the day both in terms of content sharing and what you could say and do, but it was very difficult to access.
The closest thing we had to algorithmic short-form content was YTMND.
The Golden Age was before Web 2.0
Before just anybody could easily post content, there was a barrier to entry - you had to learn how to put HTML together. Sure, it wasn't too hard, but it kept people like mad relatives from posting their racist nonsense for the world to see.
Yeah the crazies back then were a bit better than the ones today. At least they had to be able to cobble up an html site, but to be fair, that was pretty common.
My point being that the craziest bullshit back then was at least a bit more sophisticated than the facebook crazies you speak of.
Also most content wasn't mediated by large sites like social media platforms, which moderate their content. Actually writing an URL was way more common than now as it's all just clicking links and icons.
Also, it was a lot less insidious - the crazy stuff was a lot easier to detect.
Granted, stuff like Time Cube Theory usually ended up incorporating antisemitic and anti-islamic tropes, but you'd have to wade through literally pages of red flags before you got there.
Now this kind of stuff is more sneaky - it presents as more reasonable, which makes it much more dangerous.
hey man grandma can be fun too
It was way less uniform for sure.
Yeah the internet used to be the most insane drug fueled place, it's almost impossible to explain to people that weren't there