On 9/11 what was the internet like after it happened? Did people quit being dicks or trolls and showed some decency? Or was it like we have today and nothing changed?
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
It wasn’t anywhere near as big a shift as 2016 when we realised that a lot of the people doing ironic nazi jokes were not, in fact, joking about having awful nazi beliefs. I was mostly on UK forums and IRC in 2001 though - the Americans would never have tolerated anything less than a reverential tone. There was a lot of conspiracy talk and concerns about further attacks and conflicts breaking out.
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.
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.
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.
From what I remember, just from small niche forums, most people were just too stunned about it to really be hateful. That’s not a big sample size but I don’t recall many people trying to be edgelords about it, everyone just seemed to read the room and just see that it was fucked up
I didn't realize I was up any notches. Maybe it is you who needs to take your defensiveness down a notch.
Also, hate speech went way up online after 9/11. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Edit:
I posted a top level comment with a pretty interesting Pew research article, this chart is on page 6.
Over half of the sites in the study had a tenor of "anger, fear and hate." More than the "nonviolent response" cohort. I also wonder what % of the "religious expression" ones were Islamophobic
While I was already reading through what I found to be an interesting study Pew did 1 year after 9/11 about the internet,
(Quite literally the exact topic that OP was asking about)
I took 30 sec to screenshot a relevant chart.
I dunno man, doesn't seem unhealthy to me. Found an interesting article about the thing we were discussing here and thought that I'd share. That took me literally 30 sec to screenshot the chart from the article I was already reading.
2001, dint really have an internet per ce, forums dint really exist in large numbers yet. the biggest news aggregate dint exist for another half a decade. . reddit dint really take off til 2010-16ish. there was a news aggregate forum that existed in the late 2000s, got replaced by reddit, and Y/answers.
Reddit and other big social media didn't exist yet, but there were plenty of jokes in the chat for Counter-Strike and other multiplayer games at the time. It wasn't even talked about much on the forums I frequented at the time. But I never paid for Something Awful, which was the biggest one around. Maybe it was discussed there.
That's interesting. My first thought was that i was playing counterstrike that day. I talked to a friend and he was like: you do what? Playing counterstrike? I was like yeah. He asket me if i'm terroriat or counter terrorist. I said terrorist, and he said: sick.
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.
44 Comments
knobbysideup@sh.itjust.works · 24 pts · 22h
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.
beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 19 pts · 21h
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.
CameronDev@programming.dev · 14 pts · 22h
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.
Zen_Shinobi@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 21h
We had a lot of fourms back then. Myspace wouldn't happen until '03.
CameronDev@programming.dev · 9 pts · 21h
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.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 16h
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.
knobbysideup@sh.itjust.works · 9 pts · 21h
Broadband was around. The signal to noise was much better. We had Usenet, IRC, and our own home pages.
CameronDev@programming.dev · 5 pts · 21h
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 :)
Balinares@pawb.social · 13 pts · 15h
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.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca · 13 pts · 6h
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.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 49m
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.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br · 11 pts · 21h
I remember there were a lot of memes about it, most of them were incredible islamophobic or in bad taste with the victims.
zerofk@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 14h
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.
BlackAura@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
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.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 9h
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.
lemmylump@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 21h
The Internet was awesome before 9/11/01
Now any idiot can use it.
The death of the Internet started in 2004, when Facebook launched, and fucking died in 2007 when the iPhone launched.
GreyEyedGhost@piefed.ca · 8 pts · 18h
The Endless SummerEternal September began inthe late 80s and early 90s...1993.lemmylump@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 11h
I liked AI so much better when it was just the sound of a Scottish person agreeing with you twice.
postcapitalism@lemmy.today · 6 pts · 10h
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
FluidBeef@quokk.au · 5 pts · 21h
It wasn’t anywhere near as big a shift as 2016 when we realised that a lot of the people doing ironic nazi jokes were not, in fact, joking about having awful nazi beliefs. I was mostly on UK forums and IRC in 2001 though - the Americans would never have tolerated anything less than a reverential tone. There was a lot of conspiracy talk and concerns about further attacks and conflicts breaking out.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 5 pts · 9h
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):
EggZackLee@lemmy.today · 1 pts · 5h
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
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 4 pts · 9h
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.
BlackAura@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
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?"
zod000@lemmy.dbzer0.com · 1 pts · 1h
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.
Amuro_eat@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 4 pts · 15h
From what I remember, just from small niche forums, most people were just too stunned about it to really be hateful. That’s not a big sample size but I don’t recall many people trying to be edgelords about it, everyone just seemed to read the room and just see that it was fucked up
HerbalGamer@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 15h
Nothing to do with the internet; I was in elementary at the time and we were joking about it within 2 weeks.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 10h
This isn't true, there were racist fucks immediately targeting Sikhs.
People were literally killed in retaliatory attacks (that often targeted the wrong fucking religion).
Amuro_eat@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 2 pts · 9h
The question asked “on the internet” and I responded with my personal experience. Take it down a notch.
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 9h
I didn't realize I was up any notches. Maybe it is you who needs to take your defensiveness down a notch.
Also, hate speech went way up online after 9/11. Just because you didn't see it doesn't mean it wasn't there.
Edit:
I posted a top level comment with a pretty interesting Pew research article, this chart is on page 6.
Over half of the sites in the study had a tenor of "anger, fear and hate." More than the "nonviolent response" cohort. I also wonder what % of the "religious expression" ones were Islamophobic
Source:
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2002/09/05/part-6-personal-expression-on-the-post-september-11-web/
Edit: to be clear, these comments are about as dispassionate as I can get, I'm honestly not sure why anyone would interpret it otherwise.
Amuro_eat@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 8h
You need a healthier outlet
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone · 1 pts · 8h
Why are you taking all of this so personal?
While I was already reading through what I found to be an interesting study Pew did 1 year after 9/11 about the internet,
(Quite literally the exact topic that OP was asking about)
I took 30 sec to screenshot a relevant chart.
I dunno man, doesn't seem unhealthy to me. Found an interesting article about the thing we were discussing here and thought that I'd share. That took me literally 30 sec to screenshot the chart from the article I was already reading.
The problem here seems to lie with you.
remon@ani.social · 4 pts · 16h
Wasn't really on the internet back then, but we joked about it in school the very next day.
Tollana1234567@lemmy.today · 4 pts · 16h
2001, dint really have an internet per ce, forums dint really exist in large numbers yet. the biggest news aggregate dint exist for another half a decade. . reddit dint really take off til 2010-16ish. there was a news aggregate forum that existed in the late 2000s, got replaced by reddit, and Y/answers.
Almacca@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 14h
There was usenet.
IWW4@lemmy.zip · 2 pts · 12h
Dude there were way more online forums in 2000 than there are now.
I belonged to many movie message boards, gaming boards and etc. Its all consolidated and controlled now.
RecursiveParadox@piefed.social · 4 pts · 9h
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.
CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 17h
No idea, I only used the internet for messenger with people I knew irl
FatVegan@leminal.space · 3 pts · 9h
Americans were turbo racist is all i remember
Kolanaki@pawb.social · 3 pts · 11h
Reddit and other big social media didn't exist yet, but there were plenty of jokes in the chat for Counter-Strike and other multiplayer games at the time. It wasn't even talked about much on the forums I frequented at the time. But I never paid for Something Awful, which was the biggest one around. Maybe it was discussed there.
FatVegan@leminal.space · 1 pts · 9h
That's interesting. My first thought was that i was playing counterstrike that day. I talked to a friend and he was like: you do what? Playing counterstrike? I was like yeah. He asket me if i'm terroriat or counter terrorist. I said terrorist, and he said: sick.
I do not remember what the chat was like
Malica@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 5h
Performative patriotism
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club · 2 pts · 6h
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.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de · 2 pts · 15h
one satirical website summarized it like this: https://inadequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html
Medic8eme@piefed.ca · 1 pts · 8h