I can't believe thanks to the internet undergoing enshittification I'm actually nostalgic for a time when it was casually racist, because that's somehow better then this "Watching the words that we say, big brother corponet is listening." bullshit
Somehow the bigotry of the old not-for-profit internet felt less harmful than the current model where corporatations fund bots to fuck everyone in the mental health for a grab at our empty wallets.
The Internet didn't so much get less racist as it simply got sanitized because they realized that they weren't extracting maximum dollar from non-white users. The hate simply got pushed further down into the dank miserable depths to fester while the rest of us get to pretend that racism isn't still a massive problem because black people are a marketing demographic now...
Fun thing is that because of that, you could theoretically live you entire Internet life without ever encountering racism. Only theoretically though, because racism still happens everywhere casually.
I've always said the best type of media on the internet is almost no moderation because that means anyone can post anything.
People who post stupid or nonsensical things would just get ignored anyway, there's no need for a mod tram to dictate what can and cannot be posted online. They should only exist to remove spam or brigading.
The wild west internet was great at this, we got some of the coolest communities and memes from all over the world.
Right around MySpace falling off, Facebook started agregiously taking over the majority of social media. Lots of forum sites are now dead or empty.