One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is chat rooms. It was quite common to enter a chat room with complete strangers and become actual friends with them. The Internet was truly the first "safe space" where no one felt they needed to hide the real part of themselves or self-censor. You might never learn their real name, but you learned the person behind the handle.
There were quite a few instances where people from chat rooms on Yahoo and otherwise became real friends separated by distance only, talking on the telephone nightly.
That does not ring true for me. I was always self-censoring and hiding parts of myself on internet, including or especially in chats.
I mean seriously, we are talking about time when people were hiding "rm -rf" into newbie advice and such or would try to hack you if they did not liked you.
I agree with that. There were a number of anonymous remailers [0] where you could send emails to others, or make posts to Usenet[1]. The remainers would strip all the headers from your post and replace them with a specific number. Other users could then reply to you using that number without knowing your real email address or name. Likewise, you wouldn't know theirs. Coupled with PGP, anonymity was very high.
I spent many months making good friendships with people like that before being comfortable with coming out as trans.
Yep, takes a lot more effort these days. Effort I am just not willing to put forth. The most I do is periodically Google my name and remove old information I no longer want out there.
I was maybe 9 or younger in the early 90s and I was very computer savvy (am in software now, surprise?) I knew how to log into chat rooms. My parents had no idea and it wasn't as dangerous as it was now. It was just a lot of people really excited to talk to each other. I may have been lucky.
oh man. I've neer been into irc, but this reminds me of msn and chat days. You know, IMs with online status and not. I hate to be always present in the current ecosystem.
The difference is the mentality of the people going into them. It was a different time; you'd join one looking for friends and the novelty of the experience meant that everyone at the same level, exploring this new place together.
It's nice of her to look at the individual and be able to see past his awful disability of being a Lakers fan :P
Getting back on topic, this brings up a weird thing to me: While not raised with the internet, it has been around for a good portion of my life, chat rooms and message boards, channels and newsgroups were my daily fodder. I've met numerous friends I've gamed with in person, had meetups with others, and traveled with some.
But having tried it across a few sites, and even tried some of the paid experiences, online dating-even as a guy-absolutely REPULSES me.
Being in the generation that birthed it, you'd think the exact opposite. It's a weird phenomenon to me.
I've written about this before: https://johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimit...
There were quite a few instances where people from chat rooms on Yahoo and otherwise became real friends separated by distance only, talking on the telephone nightly.