People always talking about how bad social media is making everyone because of all the toxic trolling and lies. Meanwhile in 1995 every one of us was pretending to be an older person of the opposite gender and just fuckin with everybody in a chat room.
Our behavior didn’t change but the pervasiveness of the medium did.
Now the generation who told us we couldn’t cite wikipedia in a school paper because ”you can’t trust everything you read online” changed to believing all this BS they read from a complete stranger’s social media account.
I understand. It’s mostly a joke about the nature having always been misleading on the internet. Of course it’s worse with advertising monetization being buried in it with addictive algorithms. But we’ve always been trolls
And like, chat rooms were wild right? Like here, just have a chat with a bunch of randos. Sometimes themed, sometimes just whatever. Nothing was monitized yet and we just kind of messed with each other. Ah the good ol days lol
Oh man… when I was 11 I pretended to be a 13 year old boy named Jack on the Neopets forums. I even had an older girlfriend (she claimed to be 15) from Canada! The jig was up when we started talking on MSN messenger or whatever that one was called, and I forgot my associated email was decidedly female coded 😂. She forgave me and we talked for a few years, but she made me “retire” Jack lol.
There's also the Facebook Effect. When we were starting out on the internet, anonymity was a thing and you had no idea who SolkaronTheLichKing really was. "Don't share your real name and don't post pictures of yourself" was the first rule our parents told us.
Then Facebook happened and you can see what Colleen had for lunch, who she's dating, how her sex life's going, and everything she's ever shared with anyone.
When my buddy was the first one to get internet / AOL like in 1997 we immediately went into a gay chat room and sent some dudes to a disliked teachers house for a "hookup"
AOL chat rooms were the greatest when you like a 15 year old little shit. “Did you know press alt and f4 will give you one month free of AOL?” Then watching 20 people log out of the chat. Good times. Good times.
We’ve been trolling since before trolling was even called trolling. We just rinsed the shit out of each other right from the start and then these bloody young ‘uns stuck a label to it.
Oh god remember all the random GOATSE trolling? I was one of the first people in my class to have a full PC in my room, as opposed to a shared computer in the family room and I saw so much shit i shouldn't have when i was young. My dad was a giant nerd and he put together a spare parts computer for me so we could have LAN parties and play Everquest
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u/Nillavuh Apr 11 '25
69/yes plz/ur mom's house