> People who long for the web of the 90s, I always feel like they must not be very interesting. Imagine complaining that we can't go back to libraries of the 1970s when the ones today have 3D printers, DVDs to rent, etc. because "there are too many teenagers"
The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst offenders in this regard, because it enabled borderline illiterate people to communicate on the Internet.
A quick read of any old usenet arguments should instantly disabuse you of this absurd notion. Or the old archives of stupid IRC conversations.
The old internet was a space for people who were incentivized to spend significant effort dealing with technical things to connect to strangers, which has nothing to do with IQ or "intelligence" or anything like that.
There has always been plenty of people who are extremely stupid, but have no problem following technical minutia as required for things like the early internet.
Remember that early access was extremely expensive. Usually it was billed hourly, at significant rates. This means that the primary filter for internet users back then was connection to resources, through an academic connection, a corporate connection, a government connection, or a lot of personal wealth.
The quality of internet users early on, if it even existed (which I dispute), was more driven by organizations like the government, academia, and defense contractors.
And as much as people cried about "Eternal September", the internet mostly survived as a distributed place with real communities until the late 2000s, where it started to be really profitable to build walled gardens for Advertising economies.
The walls didn't really come up until the 2010s: Facebook being a dominant platform, Google owning Youtube and leveraging that to try and force their own social network, Apple controlling most phones, old forums dying, and the rise of AWS to centralize internet software design.
Being able to deal with “technical minutiae” is highly linked to intelligence. What you’re referring to is lacking social graces, which is different than lacking intelligence. Having a hobby that involved reasoning about abstract things like IRQ assignments is a pretty good proxy for IQ.
Similarly, back when computers were expensive, people on the internet generally were higher income, which is also quite significantly correlated with intelligence.
I think we still have many high-IQ people on the web. Its just they are not making tiktoks. However, they are harder to find since the pool got bigger.
The ease of use introduced the average individuals to the web and online gaming. When I was younger and online gaming was gaining traction my "clan" hosted servers. This is how I started dipping my toes into programming and server configuration. Literally, everyone that was in the clan was quite intelligent. We had debates and discussions on IRC, forums and teamspeak.
Now, gaming and the web is just trash full of brain rotted individuals. Communities have been destroyed by lack of self hosted or self owned servers. Forums have been destroyed by discord. Games are being destroyed by microtransactions.
The Internet used to be a space for high-IQ people, and now it's filled with low attention span, low impulse control people. Tik Tok and Instagram are the worst offenders in this regard, because it enabled borderline illiterate people to communicate on the Internet.