this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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IRC and newsgroups, too. Self hosted websites and forums.
I hate to be the regressive, but yeah…this was better.
I am always a forward looking person but i agree with this. The '90s is probably the best time period for humanity. Other parts of the world had it bad of course, but the cold war was over and the economy was amazing. It was the second "Era of Good Feelings".
There's a reason Agent Smith said the 90s was the peak of humanity. He should know.
I was going to say, "only if your idea of humanity was very narrow".
For certain groups of people in the west it was great. But, for the vast majority of the world, it was much worse. We don't realize how close most of the world was to starvation as just a daily threat back then.
At the very least, the West in the 90s had been more welcoming of migrants and refugees fleeing chaos and economic decline, such was the case with Rwanda and Yugoslavia at the time. The more prosperous nations had been willing to share the safety and prosperity to people outside. But now though? I can't say the same about the richer countries being more welcoming than before.
Part of the reason for that is that the rest of the world was so incredibly poor that only a handful of refugees could make it to the US. There was simply a lot less migration and asylum-seeking back then. It wasn't because people were better off. It's really because they were worse off.
The rest of the world is now richer, and most of the world can afford access to a cell phone. That means they know about the US and how much better it is there, and can often find a way to try to slip through the border to get refugee status.
The word "was" is doing a lot of work here. Those things all still exist, and I currently use all of them :)
Newsgroups are just a good technology. Decentralized, moderated as much as the forum decides it needs. Not monetized in any way.
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