The world was a very different place in 1999.
Computers looked like this:
Cell phones, like this:
These were the leading video game systems:
I remember borrowing this model digital camera to photograph my first Air Jordan sales samples:
This was a Nike basketball shoe:
(Not everything has experienced dramatic technical advance.)
I was a teenager in 1999, and had absolutely no idea what I was getting myself into when I accepted Nelson C’s gracious invitation to help out on his newly created message board. I could never have anticipated how long it might last or the impact it might have. All I knew was that the moderation work, which would set NikeTalk apart from other sneaker websites we’d frequented, was work that needed to be done. Our budding community deserved better than the dystopian free-for-all where we’d met.
The early World Wide Web was often compared to the “Wild West,” both for its relative lawlessness and, through a characteristically Eurocentric framing, its frenzied territorial occupation.
Even though there was no theoretical limit to the number of sites that could be hosted through the Internet, any outpost dedicated to discussing topics like Air Jordan sneakers, NBA basketball, and hip hop culture would quickly become a contested space.
Seemingly every single day, people would show up to impress upon you through the crudest and most vulgar means possible that if you were not a straight White male, and your subject matter did not revolve around straight White males, you were in the wrong place.
The unmoderated or under-moderated gathering spaces of that era were filled with fraud, misinformation, insults, hate speech, and pornography. And yet, despite this assault, we would not be driven apart.
I think about those days often - because we’re still living in them.
For all the technological innovation of the past 25 years, for all the billions of dollars held by the corporations who control the biggest online community platforms, the digital world remains steeped in fraud, misinformation, and hate speech. And, so, too, has the world at large.
Hours after the results were declared in this year’s US Presidential Election, we received a message to our support email entitled “plantation.” You can probably guess its contents. We’ve received many such messages before, and more since, all of them echoes of those same initial attempts to treat us as unworthy, illegitimate trespassers in our own homes.
I’ve lost count of the number of times someone has wished violence, illness, or death on me or my family in connection with my role on NikeTalk. Content moderation, whether as a part-time volunteer or a full-time career, has become
notorious for its impact on mental health.
Moderators endure routine exposure to the worst humanity has to offer and attempt to insert themselves between it and the end users of a particular platform or service in attempt to maintain a safe environment.
I would by lying to you if I said that experiencing two and a half decades of this has not taken its toll.
The morning after the election, the atmosphere in the forums felt bleak. Two posts in particular broke my heart: a longtime member who’d recently lost his mother to cancer and offered to cover postage costs for anyone who’d join him in sending voter engagement postcards wrote to thank the community and apologize for letting us down. (If anything, he’d made us proud.) Another longtime member who’d been absent for a couple of months posted an update regarding the medical and family issues that had kept him away. Both anticipated that they’d been unable to post again for a while, but promised they’d return. It struck me that even during an especially painful or challenging moment in their lives, they both felt an obligation to check in with their fellow NikeTalk members.
We’re in this together.
We all cherish our shared memories and the unique culture we’ve established together over the years, but it’s this sense of mutual commitment that makes NikeTalk a true community. That’s why we’re still here, long after many of us stopped collecting sneakers.
I do this work now for the same reason I agreed to it in 1999: because it still needs to be done. Our community deserves better, and those of us who founded NikeTalk would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.
At heart, NikeTalk isn’t an Internet domain, or a software platform, or a database. NikeTalk is a group of people. Wherever we choose to gather, that is our community. NikeTalk will continue on so long as our connections and commitment to each other endure.
Daily attempts to target the community with fraud, misinformation, abuse, misogyny, and White Supremacist hate speech may have driven us out of an unmoderated message board twenty-five years ago - but it did not and
will not drive us apart.
NikeTalk has run on four different forum platforms. Our original platform changed hands five times before winding up with a sleazy penny stock company that tried to steal and rebrand NikeTalk. The site has been beset by all manner of technical issues, and faced competition from small-time hucksters to billion dollar corporations. We’ve endured legal and physical threats, server outages, power outages, hacking attempts, DDoS attacks, NBA lockouts, global pandemic, and two Gentry Humphrey tenures.
And yet…
We are still here
together.
