For people who only know the internet past 2010, the 2001 internet would be unrecognizable, so the question doesn’t really make sense. The world was an entirely different place before modern algorithmic media. There were trolls, and there were decent people, but the whole context of the world changed after the emergence of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Arguably for the orders of magnitude worse. It’s not really fair to compare then to now.
Correct. There was no reddit or Lemmy like things. The closest we had were BBS forums.
I was a mod on a pretty major one: IGN, and it was definitely dark after that happened. Not many posts at all. People all just unplugged from the internet for a bit to watch the news. Which was the style at the time.
There just wasn’t really user-submitted content back then. If you wanted to post something on the internet, you had to create a website.
There were tools that made a website a bit easier to create (most notably Geocities), but it was still a fairly technical task to simply get text that you typed show up on a website accessible to all.
Simply being able to reply to someone else? That wasn’t really on the web, although by 2001 there were a few attempts to bring that kind of forum functionality to the broader web on actual http/www webpages (when it was previously on Usenet and BBSes and mailing lists and the technologies known as the internet before and separate from the world wide web). vBulletin was the popular one, and I think phpBB was fairly popular, too, but those projects started in 2000 and weren’t that popular in the first years. Web hosts actually offering a full blown LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) for hosting, and the technical skills to administer that kind of service, even on free software, was a pretty big hurdle to adoption before 2003 or so.
In 2001, almost all of the web was static content, with no method of interacting with the content other than simply viewing it. You’d click on links to retrieve another piece of content. By 2005 the web 2.0 revolution was underway, and websites had become interactive, with dynamic content drawing from relational databases under the hood. But in 2001? No, the web was pretty static.
Your description of the rise of the social algorithms is part of the story since 2010, but even that leaves out the period of time in between.
laughs in IRC
Fark.com was around. People were definitely less trolly right after, for a bit.
I found a popular thread from the day of 9/11 here if you want to look at it: https://m.slashdot.org/story/20235
Most of it isn’t all that different from what you would see today but I should warn you that there are some “edgy humor” trolls using slurs that you’ll run into early on.
Joke about Linux use being the reason was funny though morbid.
Many of us warned about the knee jerk reactions of our government, especially usapatriot and the kickoff of the wars. Same shit. Different decade. But it laid much of the groundwork for the hole we are in today.
It destroyed my friend group. One person was angry at basically all Arabic people, and her racism started lots of fights. I couldn’t get through to her, and didn’t know how to handle it. Everyone had a different reaction. We all just stopped talking.
Social media didn’t exist for the most part in 2001. There was LiveJournal and Something Awful. Most online discussions happened using instant messaging between people you knew or on discussion forums that usually were focused around an interest or niche topic.
All of those platforms had trolls but they were much more benign than they are today. Islamophobia spiked and there were spirited debates, but nothing like the vitriol we see today on even the most banal posts. The communities were much smaller to the point that most regular posters knew each other and had interacted many times, civility was maintained by that familiarity like it would be in a real community. The anonymity that comes from massive userbases were you’ll never encounter the same person twice is really what created the naked hostility we have today. There was a forum called Storm Front, which I believe is still around, a literal nazi forum but you had to be deep into the Internet to even know it existed.
After 9/11 more conspiracy theories started popping up and making their way to more mainstream sites as sort of proto-memes and it was a bad time to hold an opinion that wasn’t pro-US nationalism, but again nothing like the horrific things we see today.
Generally, people weren’t dicks or trolls online quite as much at the time. The internet wasn’t for everyone in 2001. Most people got their news from TV. I had a family member call me to turn on the TV.
The lack of decency part was how quickly the anti-Arab sentiment came out of the woodwork. With a lot of people still sort of attuned to it from the first Iraq war, it was easy for a lot of people to fall back into that. Tons of racist cartoons and photoshoped images sent around, mostly by email. Lots of email forwards. To be fair, people were extremely pissed, and since it was not a nation-state doing this, it was hard to have someone to blame in the traditional sense.
But, in general, people were more shocked and terrified. Especially as the anthrax stuff happened a few weeks later, rampant speculation and conspiracy theories ramped up. All of that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” started within days. A lot of “woah, I can’t believe it” stuff. It took a few days before things got back to normal.
More than a few days, more like months. One could argue that things haven’t returned to “normal” ever since.
The Internet was already a very different place back then. These days, most people are on a few very large platforms. Back then it was a lot of smaller sites and forums, whose individual vibes depended a lot on its own moderation policies.
I spent much of that day with other players of the MUD-style game I played at the time, figuratively huddling together, sharing updates about our people in NYC as we heard from them.
For a time, I think, people were kind of stunned. The US had thought itself invulnerable, you understand.
But it wasn’t very long before the raging islamophobia began, and a hard turn toward the direction of fascism. But also the reaction to that. The split was stark.
And is still going on to this day, I suppose.
So no, people didn’t quite stop being dicks. If anything they only started dicking harder.
Someone made a Flash animation with the Counterstrike HUD playing the win audio “Terrorists Win” to a photo of the World Trade Center right after both planes hit.
There just wasn’t a Facebook to post it to.
It was truly impressive how niche forums and start-up websites coalesced to support an anti-war movement that brought 300-400k people to New York (and similar numbers in cities globally) to protest the invasion of Iraq.
Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) was one such focal group.
Interestingly it still largely felt organic and spread by word of mouth. With no real social media to amplify or mute.
The discourse today feels much more controlled. And the powers globally continue to manipulate internet discourse increasingly.
Despite millions collectively protesting globally- a coalition of the willing invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 using the tragedy to support the globalist ambitions of the father and his cadre
I believe the internet was much smaller then. It existed, but most social hadn’t really begun yet. I still only had dialup.
9/11 was 2001, Facebook was 2004. So definitely a different place.
We had a lot of fourms back then. Myspace wouldn’t happen until '03.
I don’t count forums the same as modern social media. The are social places of course, but much more tight-knit, much less algorithmically ratfucked. Even 2003 Myspace and 2004 FB were much better places than what they have metastasized into.
forums dont really count, they are pretty niche, i think the closet one would be e-world, and the Y/a. I happened upon a location specific forum, and they go back to late 2000s.
Broadband was around. The signal to noise was much better. We had Usenet, IRC, and our own home pages.
Maybe around, but I don’t think it was ubiquitous? Even then, ADSL was pretty bad, and I wouldn’t call it broadband by today’s standards. But that could just be Australia lagging the world :)
I was a moderator (we didn’t call it that) at an online chess server, with live chat. When the attacks happened, people started to talk about it. At first I tried to moderate them, sending them to appropriate chat rooms, but soon the admins told me these were special circumstances and to just let people talk.
What was especially strange for me was that I might’ve been among the first people in my neck of the woods to hear about it. People were not chronically online at the time - I just happened to be online, and in a live chat environment with Americans, so I heard about it that way. When I turned on the TV, there was nothing yet. I kept switching between channels, and finally CNN was the first to interrupt their programming for a special bulletin, followed quickly by BBC. Other channels followed a bit later.
As for the conversations online, I mostly remember shock, and later fear of what this might start. Jokes and memes came later.
Oh wow, you just reminded me that this was the beginning of “all day all night all the time news”.
Pre 9/11 I don’t think it existed (I wasn’t really watching the news), but day of, as more and more information came in, they just kept updating when they had new news and reiterating what they had when there wasn’t anything new.
People stopped being dicks and trolls for about 24-48 hours. The came a flood of really dark 9/11 jokes. Essentially any 9/11 joke was already though of within the first week.
I remember seeing a video (from a digital camera, not a phone), probably turned into a gif, of three or four friends on Halloween.
Two were dressed as towers. One (or maybe two) were of planes.
The ones dressed as planes were running into the ones dressed as towers.
So only like a month and a half after 9/11, and anyone posting it to forums usually titled it “too soon?”
Yeah, that was about right. Some of my younger, more moronic friends were making these same kinds of jokes pretty much right away. You know the type, trying to show how cool they were with being edgy. I was already working two full time jobs at the time when this happened so I was kind of in a daze at the actual moment of 9/11. I was more mad that I knew it would be used as an excuse to pass a bunch of bad laws that would screw over everyone and that was right on the money.
I remember there were a lot of memes about it, most of them were incredible islamophobic or in bad taste with the victims.
Found this interesting Pew study about the internet from 1 year after 9/11:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2002/09/05/one-year-later-september-11-and-the-internet-2/
Take it with a grain of salt, I think it comes off as a little overly optimistic, especially given some of the dire things it talks about (massive support for giving away our freedoms, etc).
I did just see at the bottom that there’s literally 8 pages, and I was basing all that on just the first page so maybe I’ll read more or at least skim through the rest.
Edit: holy shit (from pg 2):
Aside from the outcome, it’s crazy that in 2001 there were still enough “Internet non-users” to make gathering data on them statistically significant
I don’t know about the day of, because I was downtown in NYC. I didn’t get home to the Bronx until about ten at night.
But I was on Metafilter and a couple of other fora. But these were already mostly asshole free places, so few dicks or tolls as per OP.
The whole day - hell the next two weeks - updates of news and speculation about the ratfuckery this would cause dominated the chat/posts.
