I, your mad admin was there, in the beginning.

No, not that beginning (whichever one you might be thinking of), I mean the internet. Back before it was widely available, and most access was only between college campuses. Certainly before the invention of the “world wide web”. Most people used to think the web was the internet. Now probably most think that social media is the internet. Those are both incorrect.

The internet was there, at colleges and universities, and it was text-based. Most of what was available was via USENET. That’s where I got my start interacting with people on the net. That time period is when, I think, the first version of internet culture was being created. Which is part of what I want to complain about. Also, part of the reason I’m quite mad, now.

You see, everything was text based because almost all computers themselves were all still text based. When I was in college, the Apple Mac had just come out, which was the first desktop computer with a primarily graphical user interface. (I got an Amiga 1000, which came out the year after the Mac, and was better than the Mac in all ways. Oh, that I get the timeline where the PC won instead of the glory that was the Amiga. Weep, mythical readers, weep for what was lost.) Ahem… anyway, all the college systems were still text interfaces. So the net was built around text communication.

As well, at the beginning of the net, bandwidth was slow and expensive. Most of the communication, again, was between colleges. As bandwidth was expensive, it became part of the culture to be as concise as possible, to keep the message lengths down. This meant that responses to whatever had been sent previously should only include what was necessary.

College communications over the net at first were mostly limited to the computer and science folks. Science progresses, in part, by critiquing other scientists’ work, theories, experiments, whatever. There was not an expectation of spending a lot of time agreeing with each other. This led to most reply messages sent over the internet to be negative, not positive. “Attacking” another’s idea is part of science; giving someone the textual equivalent of a hardy handshake for a job well done was seen as wasting money and time, because remember, net communication was slow and expensive.

So the internet culture fostered a tradition of bitching about everything, and never thanking anyone for anything they said or did.

That tradition, I think, continues today. Communication now is not only no longer limited to text, text is losing out to emojis in most communications. Fewer and fewer folks write things; instead they share videos. If you want to respond to any of that with an indication of positivity or agreement, you click a “like” button. There used to be “dislike” buttons on most things, but they did away with those because someone might feel bad, so they bitch at each other in the comments or response videos.

And this is what I’m complaining about: positive feedback for anything is barely existent. Sure, the number of likes on something can go up… but it’s still just one number. Look at any page of the web, or something on social media, or whatever you choose. Look how much screen real estate shows positive feedback — that little “like” number — versus the amount of the screen the negative feedback takes up — usually the entire comment section.

Isn’t it just human to want some positive feedback on things you do or make available, at anywhere, not just on the internet? But the positive feedback is nigh non-existent, while the negative feedback is vast and at times overwhelming. The more you put out there, the more you’re attacked. The people who agree with you, or like what you did or produced, almost never bother to tell you that they liked it beyond clicking a button that makes little number go up.

It’s like the original internet culture of only bothering to give negative feedback, due to arising on campuses and relatively expensive communication costs, has progressed into today where if you put any part of yourself or anything you create onto the net you’re only going to get bitched at, attacked, demeaned, and denigrated. One person might bother to say “hey, I liked that”… but they usually don’t even do that.

So why bother to put anything on the net at all? Apparently these days people only create things for putting up on the net in the hope of making money on it. If it’s just a personal project you do for your own self-satisfaction, why would anyone bother putting it up for others to share? You’re just going to get your face ripped off if enough people dislike it, but if people do like it, they’re not going to do anything that makes the creator glad they put something up to share.

You can also now perhaps understand why your mad admin does not permit comments here. Or even bother to write anything very often. No good to me will ever come of it.