Well, there was Ender's Game, it came in '85. Usenet did exist at that point, though. Don't know if the author had encountered it.

The Shockwave Rider was also remarkable prescient.

I've been using Firefox since it was called Phoenix. Going against the users like that would make me drop it like a hot potato.

The interconnects already exists.

> and it's not too difficult to make an opinionated and challenging chatbot

Funnily enough, I've saved instructions for ChatGPT to always challenge my opinions with at least 2 opposing views; and never to agree with me if it seems that I'm wrong. I've also saved instructions for it to cut down on pleasantries and compliments.

Works quite well. I still have to slap it around for being too supportive / agreeing from time to time - but in general it's good at digging up opposing views and telling me when I'm wrong.

Grew up with Duralex Provence as the 'regular milk / water glass' here in Norway. Never broke one by accident. Excellent glasses.

I don't know how folks did it elsewhere, or what the rules was.

Here, a friend and I created ourselves a "bubble". My family and his family hanged out with each other. My kid was playing with his kid. We went on long forest walks, with the kids, and they could roam and play.

We didn't have contacts with lots of others, and if we did, we stayed away from each other for ~4 days or so, until we shared the same social bubble again.

Worked wonderfully well.

Scary statistics from the US. Here's some anecdotal data from Norway (my daughter being the data, she's 11):

- Walked in a different aisle at a store. My daughter started going to the store alone from she was about 7.

- Talked with neighbours without parent. Uhm. That's just weird. I'm assume she was around 4? That's when we moved here..

- Made plans with friends, yeah, from she was around 5/6 or thereabouts.

- Walked/biked w/o parent: From 6/7, to/from school, and to friends.

- Built a structure outside: She's been part of building various structures in scouts.

- Sharp knife: Since she was about 6 or 7.

And now I realize I need to wag my hands a bit back and forth with all the 6-7 stuff.

Anyhow; one of the best things we did was ensuring she joined the scouts. Creates incredibly independent kids. I've seen threads on reddit where people are wondering if it's OK to leave the 9 year old at home alone for 30 minutes, and I'm wondering what kind of lunacy that is. My daughter has been capable of walking / biking home from school since she was 6 or 7, and proceed to make her own afternoon snack before we arrive home from work. She's been baking since she was 8. Making toasts, omelets and whatnot since the same age. Scouts taught her how to use a gas burner outside when she was about 8 or 9.

I mean; come on.

I'll note that phrack magazine predates the worm by 3 years. Wargames, the movie, predates it by 5 years. 2600 by by 4 years. Mitnick started having fun around 9 years earlier.

I'm not so sure the Morris worm was the turning point.

We had the right technologies in the past, but we mismanaged them.

Email, Usenet and IRC was great.

Email, however, went dogshit due to spam. From simply having the office mail-server, everyone went to Gmail and Office, who didn't always want to accept legitimate email. Thus, encouraging more folks to move to it.

Now we're in a situation where everyone is "forced" to use crappy interfaces, email is htmlified shit, and more and more companies require you to use the official client. Which in the case of Office365 means a very, very crappy web solution if you're on for example Linux. IMAP is often simply turned off due to whomever decides security has decided that's a bad idea.

Mailing lists used to be great. But got broken in a variety of ways due to spam filtering among other things.

Usenet was great once upon a time, with internal newsgroups etc. That died too.

IRC was, and is, an excellent way of having instant messaging. Unfortunately it wasn't business friendly enough so only the geeks used it. It was a great way to coordinate, though.

Each had a unique set of pitfalls. Out of the 3 Usenet seems to be functionally dead for it's original purpose. Perhaps there was no possible outcome where usenet would scale along with the internet.

The email spam issue is trivially solvable with a contact whitelist, which is a UI issue. Email as it is right now is definitely very usable, but keep me the hell away from anything from Microsoft.

IRC is alive and small. On the optimistic side it outlived Skype. Maybe 25 years from now IRC will still be working and Discord will be dead. There has been a lot of buy in on Matrix, but I'm unconvinced the protocol is going to thrive long term due to design choices made.

Reddit is doing what Usenet did. In my ideal world, reddit would be part of the fediverse along with Usenet & Twitter and the UI would close to hn.

I’m obviously biased (as proj lead for Matrix) but I genuinely think Matrix is in a good place going forwards. There’s a lot of legitimate complaints about the transition to Matrix 2.0, and trust & safety still needs a tonne of work - but the core protocol and featureset feels pretty good. Critically, we just showed we can successfully land pretty major changes to the core federation protocol to improve it (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/08/project-hydra-improving-stat...), which feels pretty liberating in terms of having carte blanche to fix the other remaining warts.

What design choices are you worried about? (To confirm that they are on the radar).

Sadly lacking a nice big table to lay out the metadata on.