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This 30 Year Old Document Helped Establish Internet Culture

This 30 Year Old Document Helped Establish Internet Culture

Ray Doraisamy
March 10, 2025

Do you remember flame wars?

Precursors to the culture wars, these were the forum and mailing list fights that colored corners of the internet.

I associated these with the early 00s, but they happened enough to end up in a 1995 Request for Comments. You might be more familiar with these requests as a reference to an IP addressing practice or something like that (RFC 1918).

Consider these gems:

Wait overnight to send emotional responses to messages.

Remember that the recipient is a human being whose culture, language, and humor have different points of reference from your own

Or the suggestion to bracket messages with ‘FLAME ON’.

FLAME ON: This type of argument is not worth the bandwidth it takes to send it. It's illogical and poorly reasoned. The rest of the world agrees with me.
FLAME OFF

Check it out! See if you find anything that would be relevant today.