What happened to the internet to make it so that you now have to say “I’m not a medical expert, a beauty expert, an underpaid Walmart cashier struggling just to make ends meet just to lose my job to a robot or a piercing expert so take my advice with a grain of salt, but yeah, I think it would be wonderful for you get your ears pierced”?

I’m probably aging myself here, but it’s mildly annoying to see so many words for something that should just be assumed until someone explicitly says “I’m an expert, make sure you clean them regularly or don’t get them at all”.

The earrings are just a random example I thought of just now.

(This is somewhat satire, somewhat curiosity and somewhat ranty lol)

EDIT: Thanks for the insightful history lesson guys! I actually learned a little bit about the internet (at the risk of really honing in on my age lmao). I feel I should clarify, though. The issue I want to address isn’t the use of disclaimers in general, but rather the need for exceptionally long ones like my example above where the disclaimer is like 5x longer than the actual comment, which, btw, thank you all for commenting at least 5x more information than disclaimers lol

  • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
    0·
    1 month ago

    they came up with the abbreviation “IANAL” back in the 80s or 90s, back when the World Wide Web was either not even a thing yet or brand-spanking-new and Usenet was king.

    Child of the 80s here and grew up with connecting through a university and 28k modems. I never encountered the term IANAL until the last ten years or so. I was mostly on gamer forums though so maybe that’s why? I never saw it on older websites or chat rooms either.