Since the advent of “cheap” computers?
I frequent an adult chatroom. Within the last year or so flamers seem to have taken it over. Is it just coincidence?
Have flames picked up here in the last year or so?
I guess my question is…
Is internet access for everyone regardless of manners, decorum and just plain old common decency a good thing?
I happen to believe we have to take the bad with the good.
The most Invisible poster in the history of the boards. Posting invisibly since sept 1999.
Well I can tell you that AOL users and especially WebTV users have a pretty bad reputation on usenet - and to an extent it seems justified. Still, I rememember flame wars on diversi-dial systems - and that was what, 15 years ago? All the evidence is going to be pretty subjective, but the premise seems reasonable.
[Grumpy Old Man Mode: ON]
In my day…!
[Grumpy Old Man Mode: OFF]
Seriously, waaaaaaaaaaaaaay back when I started contacting others the electronic way, it was on <gasp> local BBS’s. The decorum was outstanding - polite, intelligent, verbose, interesting… yadda yadda yadda. Granted, a few low-lifes would make their way onto the mostly private boards from time to time, but they would be so quickly quashed and tamed it was like sport to us long-time users.
Then came the internet.
But still, a sense of decorum reigned virtually unabated, basically because it remained in the realm of academia. Again, some newbies breached protocol, but they were alternately mocked into shameful disappearnance, or patted on the head in a chuckling, “ain’t the newbies cute n’ naive?” kinda way.
Then all hell broke loose.
Must have been when PC’s and Macs first dropped below a thousand bucks, or somebody on Wall Street (or was it Al Gore?) decided that the Internet would be a Good Thing ™ if everyone had access to it, not those liberal media/literary/academic types. I don’t know. All I know is all my friends and BBS’s and favorite parts of the web disappeared or got usurped by LAMERZZZZZZZZZ or were awash in the undertow of it all.
I miss those days.
However, the bright spot are hard-to-reach but worth-the-effort places, like, for example, here at SD - decorum has its place, IQ’s are a tad higher, intelligent discourse is the norm, and people who can’t spell (u no who u R) are nowhere to be found.
<sigh>
How I love a breath of fresh air.
Has the net’s IQ dropped? Dramatically, but (a) long before this past year, and (b) gotta take the good with the bad. I’d rather have an internet that everyone can have than just an elite few. I don’t mind wading through the sludge to find the few places worth going to.
Esprix
“Must be the UU in me. <grin>”
Next time I want your opinion I’ll beat it out of you.
Back in MY day, we used to use smoke signals to communicate across the open steppes. This worked very well when you needed a cured mammoth hide to control the smoke. It all went downhill after vegetable fibre cloth was invented. Some Newbies would start signalling over their fire with cloth, getting themselves all worked up over their messages so they didn’t watch the heat buildup, and then POOF!
Thus we started calling them Flamers.
“Flame Wars” involved torching the yurt of an opponent…
I started posting to Usenet back in 1983, after having used dial-up BBSs for about 2 years previously to that. I can still remember having to compose an e-mail address out of a “bang path”, e.g. stb!remsit!ucla!uunet!uueast!cambridge!batcomputer!bob instead of bob@batcomputer.cambridge.edu, where each name between the !'s was a specific computer the e-mail had to go through on its way to its final destination. I can remember having to use IP addresses for FTP because our system wasn’t one of those big elite expensive jobs with a domain map. I can remember walking 40 miles uphill both ways to school in a blizzard.
I also remember the furor that was made in the mid-1980s when all these “losers” from cup.portal.com started posting to various Usenet newsgroups. “Portal.com will give accounts to anybody, no matter how lame they are!” the old timers lamented. “Even people who have never hacked the Unix kernel!”
So, the apparent “dumbing down” of the 'net is not a new phenomenon.
The truth, as always, is more complicated than that.
Felice
“There’s always a bigger fish.”
A similar thing happened each autumn; an entirely new class of college freshman would discover the net, repeating the same old stupid mistakes. This always generated much lamenting throughout most of the 80’s, up until it began to pale in insignificance compared to noise from AOL and other such sources.
I tend to think that there are many more smart and interesting people on the net now than back then (as exemplified by the many well spoken SDMB posters), but percentage wise, morons make up a larger fraction of the net now than in the past. Anything that gets popular enough will attract idiots, but thankfully there’s a huge supply of worthwhile people as well.
peas on earth
Last year about this time, on the old AOL SDMB board, I ran a contest called 100-hour wonders, in “honor” of all the folks with a brand new 'puter & AOL coaster.
There were some real beauts.
Here were the rules:
These were the 3 finalists:
As you can imagine, it was a fierce competition. Ultimately #1 was declared the “winner”.
Sue from El Paso
Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Maybe we should require a test for SDMB membership. All the questions would be pulled from the works of the Great One himself - the articles that are in the online archives. We would select them ourselves in a special board that was not public readable, and have a new test once a week or so. We’d need some way to prevent you taking the same test more than once - maybe just a cookie or recording the IP address would be enough. This way, pretty much anyone could become a member, but probably only after they had read everything Cecil had posted on the net (like I did!).
Where is Rousseau when you need him?
Oh, I’m gonna keep using these #%@&* codes 'til I get 'em right.
::shudder:: Sue, I just had an AWFUL thought! You don’t suppose “mikey” and “mikeylikesit” . . . ?
-Melin
Melin, if you’re worried that maybe Mike was on AOL, you probably shouldn’t be, none of them were in capslock.
I sold my soul to Satan for a dollar. I got it in the mail.
I dunno about the net, but from what I have seen in the chat rooms – which I avoid now, I would say that the general IQ has dropped considerably or else the asshole quotient has risen sharply.
The FBI has a computer program which they give out to their agents. (I know, I saw one in use with a friend.) It is not available anywhere that I know of but if you are an asshole in a chat room or while on-line, the owner of the program pops it in, uploads it and types in your screen name and provider. Within a moment, the program pops out your real registration name along with all of the information you had to put in when you signed up for billing. Stuff ISPs try to keep so secret that a search warrant is probably needed to get it out of them. The guy I saw use it, IM’d the pain in the ass and threatened to post his real name and actual physical address on the site along with his real phone number if he did not beat it. To prove it, he sent the bugger a copy of the information and the jerk popped off line.)
Now, if we had more copies of that program, we could locate these ‘anonymous’ flamers and put a stop to their shit.
There used to be programs out called ‘punters’, which I never got, though I saw them used in chat rooms. When someone got to pissy, another member would fire up the program keyed to the screen name of the offender and force him off line for a time. It was supposed to temporarily screw up his system so that it would take him a bit to get back and if he did not behave, he got ‘punted’ again.
‘I like me but I sure as shit aint so positive about you.’
Maybe the internet is just becoming more representative of the general population. As much as one might wish it so, the world at large is not peopled by only the smart and gifted. As was suggested, computers and internet access are more available now than they once were, and now just any old joe can get on line and join up.
I don’t think it’s entirely a bad thing, though. Especially with a site like the Straight Dope, someone may enter “stoopit”, but leave with a much broader view of life and the world around them, as well as the concept of “nettiquette” (sp?) they had been sadly lacking. (Then again, I know, many don’t learn a thing.)
Will I be damned,
or be forgiven?
Chrome Toaster
NightGirl: Someone was yanking you. There is no ‘standard’ way that a person’s real name and billing information is handled by a website. The information isn’t even necessarily in the computer any more - they may offload it somewhere else.
I develop high-end web sites with large database backends. Each one I’ve built has been different. So there’s no cool little program that you can just run and extract that information.
I was going to say something very similar to what dhanson just said: I could see some special circumstances where such an ability might exist, but to say it can be done in general is quite hard to believe. The environment is just too hetergeneous for there to be a one-size-fits-all approach.
Also, as to the “punter” program described above: such things have existed, but almost always depend on bugs in the Windows TCP stack. A very popular one a while back took advantage of the lack of buffer bounds checking to crash the entire Windows TCP stack, booting the poor victim offline.
There are several ways you can protect yourself against things like that. The best (IMHO) is to use an OS with a more robust TCP/IP implementation than the one in Windows. But failing that, Microsoft usually releases patches for such security holes after they are discovered, and installing the patches will protect you against such malicious attacks.
–
peas on earth
Ever since Al Gore invented the flame, people are just downright nasty…
Has IQ gone down? I don’t really think it has. Manners? Yes! Drastically - there are too many people thinking “Me first! I don’t care about anyone else!” When you have that mentality, coupled with the fact that most young people these days don’t have manners - IF they were ever taught them - and they bring them on the net. You can see evidence of this on the net, on the roads, in the schools, and everywhere - they are concerned with “me - me” and not respecting other people.
Hey you hunk - where ya been hiding? I keep missing ya! 
::glancing behind himself::
You talking to me, darlin’?