this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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The early Internet had a few simple rules:
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.
I'm 40, and I'm not even sure if I learned these rules in school. I definitely didn't learn from my parents. But somehow, I managed to not get scammed, radicalized (I think), or diddled by predators.
I dunno how millennials did it, but many of us managed to stay tech/media literate. The Canadian house hippo probably played an important role.
more importantly, if you do know the real identity of another participant, don't reveal it
I always hated that, when bringing friends into whatever online space and they're using my real name. Especially if they're used to online etiquette
I'm an elder Gen Z furry. These rules are ingrained in me so hard it took genuine effort to stop defaulting to assuming everyone online is a "he" to avoid accidental misgendering ("they" works just as well).
I wasn't here for the very earliest parts of the web, but I was just in time to watch it die and remember that it used to be a better place. Still, I often reference the Rules of the Internet today and it sucks seeing how many people just don't get it.
But I think it's harder to for normies because they mostly cling to the corporate internet, believing it to be their safe haven, when it is, in fact, poison that actively promotes breaking the original rules (especially "don't feed the trolls") that kept people safe for the sake of engagement.
If it exists there's porn of it.
Nowadays people are too afraid to write "fuck" even on lemmy.
We made a movie out of that. Remember?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movie_43
NGL, I saw the gore and shock as well - stileproject, rotten, marsonline, ogrish, bestgore... and even WPD on Reddit in the early days and it really did give me an appreciation for safety first! in almost everything I have done since.
The biggest rule was proof/cites linking to legitimate sources, (not conspiracy sites or your friend "Sally" on facebook) or it didn't happen.
I learned a few important lessons. Cars, trains, knives, guns, angry people, power lines, and falling are dangerous. Treat them with respect.
+100 for the power lines. Saw some scary things happen to people that were not paying attention.
Nothing makes you properly understand a daily or work hazard like watching some one get ripped in half by one.
Yeah I think it's actually pretty healthy and good to see and read and watch horrible horrible things. For most of human history, people were exposed to such things from a young age. It strips away a harmful naivete. I know so many people who, when they see the ICE shootings, say stuff like "I can't believe a human could do that to another human", and I'm like...seriously? People think that atrocities are in the past just because they don't see them. People think that humans have changed or grown up or lost a capacity for viciousness, but it's absolutely still there. Actually watching ISIS slit someone's throat and seeing how the people around them react, or seeing someone kicked to death in the slums, I'm not saying this stuff was pleasant by any means - but it gave me a much more realistic and accurate understanding of humanity and our world. It's one thing to hear about it, it's another thing to see it, imo. The point sticks with you better.
Indeed it does.
"There are no girls online" also means that does not matter if is a girl or not. just treat all people equal, like a human being.
but when it is a girl, we make her our queen
The eternal September brought new people without end who never acclimated.
Broadband reached rural communities.
Not broadband, it was when dial-up internet access became broadly available.
That's what Eternal September means.
Translator note: keikaku means plan
The people who came after me didn't know that one and started putting their birth year, hometown, etc. into their usernames.
One time I was chatting with a woman who told me she was single. I'm still not quite sure if she was, but she had a kid with the claimed ex. However, the ex - or whatever he was - found out I was talking to her and left a voicemail threatening me.
I don't remember what he said exactly, but I do remember one detail. She and I had only talked online and over the phone. I never gave any really location specific information to her, just my first and last name and phone number. In his voicemail, he said "I will find you. I will Google your ass!"
Even now, if you Google my first and last name, you get results about some CEO, not me. I've never tried googling my phone number.
Yeah, there are people who search for themselves and want an ego boost. I search for myself and hope to find nothing.
Indeed. I know roughly what's going on because back before I cared about privacy I set up a "Google Alert" for my name. Since my tastes developed, I'm glad he's there to distract from anything notable about me.
Send me your phone number and I'll Google it for you.
Even better - you give me yours and I'll call you so you don't have to type it.
How thoughtful, (202) 456-1414
The white house? Probably shouldn't talk to this guy online, might not be safe.
Ah, I was expecting the rejection hotline. It never occurred to me that the White House has a general contact number, but it makes sense.
No girls online was pure misogyny though. And if your username was girl sounding, you got harassed ... ASL, pics or GTFO, etc etc etc... this hasn't changed either... but now girls know to use male or non gender names.
Prior to Gore asking to open up the Internet to the general public, most users were either academics, government employees, or students mostly on newsgroups. That most were on 56k dialup modems, and therefore their time online was limited. Fringers were then really on the fringes, instead of the other way around today. Yes, indeed, there was then etiquette, and in some places was strictly enforced by mods, either in BBS, newsgroups or IRC.
Once access became normalized and widespread as ADSL, which pretty much lowered the bar, most people just went straight online with complete disregard of what dark side they could run into later on, some even only starting the first time getting their web-only email addresses made such as Yahoo Mail or Google, before making their accounts for MMORPGs, online forums, Napster, Myspace, and later Facebook. That in some places, inept people have total disregard for their own online privacy, so bad they ended up being hacked or their personal identity stolen for fraud and other crimes.
I just got my 20 year cape on RS.
That's the only reason I logged in, mind you, but man it brought back some memories.
Dude I just looked that up. That is a sweet cape!
"Pics or it didn't happen" doesn't really work anymore.
This is like asking people to put on formal attire when traveling by air. Ain't happening, unfortunately. Society has stopped caring.
If someone sends you a link check it VERY carefully and don't click if it isn't exactly what it seems to be. I remember there was one shock site called nimp.org or something, and you could structure the link as [anything].on.nimp.org and it would send them to a shock site of (I think violent? But can't really remember) gay sex video, change the size of your browser window, have it move around the screen so you couldn't close it easily, and play at max volume "hey everyone I'm looking at gay porn". It quickly became a game trying to structure the sneakiest links that would trick eachother, like wikipedia.on.nimp.org , hiding links, tricking eachother into clicking on shady stuff. I learnt to be very careful clicking on things long before rickrolls existed.
This is great advice and why I find URL shortening services really annoying. I really do want to see what I'm clicking.
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.
Unable to log off, praying for an end
"You rage, you lose." was one of the rules people tried to adhere to back in the IRC times, I recall.
Nah, I think some things should be left in the past
Just replace it with "on the internet everyone is lying about who they are and the person goading you on is either 15 or a fed"
Add I understand it, the real meaning of that line is not exactly what it sounds like. It meant something like "in this anonymous place, only your thoughts matter, not your identity." If an idea was good, it was good, and it didn't matter who had the idea. Very egalitarian.
Of course, we have since realized that isn't really true. Sometimes it's important to know if a thought is coming from a woman, who has had different experience from a man.
Still an idea that need to be left behind, but not the one you probably think.
As someone who was around at the time, I think people meant it exactly as said. Partially it was an observation that most online spaces were really male-dominated. Partially it was a "no girlz allowd" sign. A lot of places were extremely hostile to women. The best that someone who admitted to being a girl or woman could hope for is a flood of messages from horny boys. That also made it a self-fulfilling prophecy. Girls would either stay away, or they'd pretend to be male just to avoid the drama.
I was around at the time, too, but young and still liked to think the best of people.