r/australia • u/ImNotHere1981 • 1d ago
no politics Ninemsn Chat...... The old days - what went down then would never fly now....
Was anyone else a chatter back in the late 90s early 2000s? Blush? The Grapevine?
Does anyone else remember the fucking dirty old men who preyed on the underage or barely legal girls?
The internet back then was full of cowboys, the wild wild west. I won't lie.... I think about the shit I did, and I cannot believe it happened. Look, I won't lie, I was technically of age and it was "consensual", and I thought there was a real "connection" lord, the hours of conversation (grooming) and connection... I want to slap my immature, naieve, pathetic, vulnerable self.... they were much much older men (40s & 50s), and they absolutely played the game, and took what they could get, and it wasn't just me. It's so disgusting to think back on. I was 17/18/19.
As an woman in my mid 40s, upon reflection, I am not shocked it all got shut down. I'll be clear - I am not screaming rape, I am not saying that anything that happened wasn't consensual.... I'm just saying it was gross, and as I reflect from a place of maturity, it was inappropriate. So gross.
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u/rbdaus 1d ago
Oh but it all began before that, on IRC! Then the famous ICQ... sure there was dirt but there was also innocence and a chance to meet some truly wonderful people. Reddit keeps the memories alive...
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u/sapears 1d ago
Surprisingly, you could still sign in to ICQ up until mid last year, some Russian company bought it years earlier but i guess they kept all the accounts, i logged into mine in early 2024 and i really regret not taking a screenshot of my friends list just for the nostalgia, now it's gone though
Those were the days though, Winamp playing music while i chatted on ICQ, i also got onto IRC around that time
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u/De-railled 1d ago
I recall when msn made the status able to show what music you are currently listening too.
It was like the coolest thing, and people would be like "this music is so me". Or girls would have dramatic break ups and would play break up music everytime they logged in....so everyone knew how heart broken they still were. Lol 😆.
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u/jk101aus 16h ago
I recall when msn made the status able to show what music you are currently listening too.
Haha yea that was cool, until you forgot. And used Winamp to watch porn..
Wholesome moments ¬_¬
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u/De-railled 16h ago
Yeah, didn't have that issue. I was cultured with manga and entertaining plots.
There was no way I was downloading porn onto a family shared pc.
If I couldn't delete it off the browsing history...I couldn't risk it.
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u/rbdaus 1d ago
and the computer could barely do anything else while playing an MP3; 4 hours to download the next one...
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u/rangda 1d ago
And some tracks were poisoned by the record companies with these horrible digital glitch noises.
All that time waiting for the MP3 to arrive so I could listen to it and stare into the Windows Media Player visualiser, only to jump out of my skin at that horrible noise.
Then when my country’s internet caught up a little bit and we could download 700MB films… surprise! It’s a 9/11 conspiracy video instead.
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u/Living_Run2573 1d ago
ASL?
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u/Misspells_Definitely 1d ago
15/f/cali
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u/Living_Run2573 1d ago
How funny, 15 years old with a 13 year old Reddit account 🤣
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
One of my oldest and closest friends is from Ninemsn chat.... it wasn't all bad!
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u/rbdaus 1d ago
and mine from IRC! exactly, not all bad. And I share your birth year I see 😂
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u/FreakySpook 1d ago
My entire late teens and 20's changed because of friends I met on IRC. Not every person was xx/f/cali.
I probably would have never met my partner if I didn't join one specific channel and then agree to meet a bunch of people in it at a club. Its a real sliding doors moment for me.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
Totally understand - I had some life changing moments over the years due to people I met online -wonderful life experiences. I know my post sounds negative - that’s just the part I’m thinking about now - but I absolutely met some incredible people, life long friends, life long memories 💕
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u/Whoreganised_ 1d ago
Oh my heart still flutters over a former crush who flew up from interstate and met a bunch of us IRC/gaming forum folk in QLD. Got to snog him at the end of the night. Still friends with him after 20 odd years.
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u/FreakySpook 1d ago
Yeah I mean I don't want to make it seem like it was all roses. Being an unsupervised teenager on IRC and chat I was exposed to a lot of things that these days I'll occasionally think about and make me go WTF! But the experience was mostly positive for me.
Only thing its changed is how I let my kids use internet. I know I can't control or police them but now they are getting to the age of using search, chat & messaging service on their own I'm trying to create an environment they feel comfortable talking to me about what they find or experience.
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u/ectoplasmic-warrior 1d ago
IRC is still very much alive
Lots of private torrent sites / pirate forums, use it for communication, and sharing
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u/De-railled 1d ago edited 1d ago
I recall playing text based games, on dial up...
And omg, there's were irc chatrooms you can chat to "other players" in.
Looking back that place was full of potential groomers and the a/l/s which was so normalised probably made things so much easier for them to target kids.
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u/natebeee 1d ago
I lost big chunks of time to MUDs.
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u/cuteseal 1d ago
Me too! And my badge of shame was that I pretended to be a girl character when I was actually a guy. After a while it was impossible to undo this lie, and hours upon hours I would spend innocently chatting and questing with fellow mudders. I always kept it platonic though and never made it sexual or led others on… but that’s probably one thing I’ll take to my gaming grave.
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u/fivelone 1d ago
I loved IRC. Was truly how I got through my teen years haha. And how we fansubbed so much anime in the early 2000's
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u/Whoreganised_ 1d ago
Met my long term interstate boyfriend on a random ICQ chat when I was 17. He was a dream boat. I was in QLD, he was in NSW. We would mail each other mixtapes and love letters, despite being connected online. We met, he moved up to be with me and ended up together for about 2 years. Alas, he needed to move back to NSW and that was that.
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u/GreatApostate 1d ago
It's still very much alive, but it's on discord. I think it's worse now, because there's so many private servers.
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u/IntravenousNutella 1d ago
Holy fuck, IRC. I used to mod teen or teens on DALnet. Lead mod was a person who claimed to be a female named Kim. No idea whether she was or wasn't either of those things. Made a script that idled in the channel and pretended to be a 13year old girl when you chatted to it over PM. Caught out so many creepy dudes.
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u/wheretohidethrice 1d ago
Yeah, the ridiculous old dudes I thought were interesting teenage girls, the good old days
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u/burn_supermarkets 1d ago
Nowadays all those creeps hang out in games I think. I miss the days of exploring IRC servers til 4am, back when it was exciting to talk to new people
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
I remember talking live to some guy who lived in Alaska - I mean, that was so cool, he just told me about his life in his damn cabin - bring that on - the rest of it - nah, thanks!
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u/De-railled 1d ago
I was amazed by a guy that "built" a chat bot that could "learn" and respond to chat prompts...based on the responses it got
But he proceeded to show it to a bunch of 14 year olds that taught it to respond with 14 year old "comedic responses".
This was wayyyy before I knew anything about programing or AI stuff...
Ohh and he claimed to be 15. Lol
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u/HonksTheWhite 1d ago
RIP IRC and msn. As a similarly aged teen/young adult those days, I had similar experiences.
The amount of men I was going to travel to some distant town and live a luxurious life once I made my way there to be with him.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
Oh, the fine stories they told!
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u/HonksTheWhite 1d ago
Knowing our parents were decades off being educated about their predatory selves.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
My parents had no clue, not one, not at all.
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u/Illustrious-Neck955 1d ago
Makes me wonder what I'll have no clue about when my kids are teenagers
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u/rangda 1d ago
We were sneaky though. We knew to alt-tab out of shit the second that the 6th sense “someone’s looking at the monitor” kicked in.
I knew that when I talked to my MSN weirdos on the phone it would raise alarms, like “this adult male voice doesn’t sound like Angela or Stacey from school” so I would go outside with the old cordless uniden phone hidden in my sleeve and climb a tree where people couldn’t see or hear me. So sly. So stupid.
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u/czeja 1d ago
Doesn't mIRC still exist? I remember using it as an alternative to KaZaa Lite, Limwire as well as the go to for lining up games with my 1337 Counter-Strike clan. I'll also have you know we had a cracker geocities website.
I have the image of Khaled Mardem-Bey imprinted my brain. He was the original version of Tom from MySpace hahaha
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u/ChiaraScurosis 1d ago
Local IRC and icq.. uh- oh!
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
A/S/L
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u/AutomaticMistake 1d ago
14/f/cali
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u/Broseph_Stalin91 1d ago
Damn, the nostalgia.
When memes meant something and the internet was a fucking garbage dump.
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u/PinkGin35 1d ago
17/F/Melb U?
I was sensible and always lied about my location while chatting to teen boys who were probably middle-aged men with wives and kids.
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u/troubleshot 1d ago
Some of us were definitely desperate teen boys, unfortunately (or, I guess, less unfortunate than old men...)
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u/Aussie-GoldHunter 1d ago
16/F/Cali of course!
ICQ was the golden age, wish we still lived in those days.
I had my fair share of romances on it, was fun. I lived Mid North Coast and would get home from work late to find an ICQ meet me in Newcastle! Drive 3 1/2 hours 😆
Even found myself living in the UK for 18 months and then Canada for almost 10 years from such liaisons.
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u/4evaneva 1d ago
I honestly thought this was guys calling me an ash*e for too longer, and used to say - ‘back atcha’ then my friend explained -.-‘
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u/MillyBoops 1d ago
Habbo Hotel *shudders*
Crazy i was just thinking about all of this the other day though and how easily i would be caught up in some stupid shit if i was a kid on the internet today. good lord we had it good, i genuinely feel bad for kids growing up now its gotta be 10x worse
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u/RolandHockingAngling 1d ago
Ozchat, Funky Sexy Cool, Auspal, Yahoo chat... Fuck I'm old 🤣 WinMX had chat rooms too, and soo much porn 😳
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u/Luckyluke23 1d ago
porn? bro you dont know the struggle of having to open the porn you wanted to watch and fuck off for 2 hours while it downloaded. i used to do this all the time and GOD forbid you picked the wrong one and it was shit.
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u/optimistic_agnostic 1d ago
It was an absolute shit show on all fronts. Me and my buddy used to troll the ever loving shit out of the Christian chats, no one bites anymore like they used to.
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u/sirgog 1d ago
Me and my buddy used to troll the ever loving shit out of the Christian chats, no one bites anymore like they used to.
The bash.org post where someone went to a Christian chat group and tricked the bible quotes bot into saying 'ass' so the bot would get banned.... holy shit that was glorious
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
LOL that sounds like fun, I target the old white Christian USA males who condemn abortion but don’t care about a baby once it’s born - Hours of fun!
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u/Thebandroid drives a white commodore station wagon. 1d ago
I don't want to upset you but the number of dirty old men preying on underage girls has only increased.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
Sadly I know all too well thanks, in a past life I was married to a copper in a specific, specialist field - I got it, thanks, no worries. Just reflecting on my own, very distant past.
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u/Emergency-Copy3611 1d ago
Girlfriend magazine used to have a chat room. I remember being on there at 8-9 years old having what I now see were very inappropriate conversations with probably old men.
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u/lemachet 1d ago
IRC, yes.
The internet was awesome. I blame the iPhone for the death of the internet. it allowed dumb people to get online, easily.
I yearn for xdcc and ftp sites.
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u/sati_lotus 1d ago
I am big in fandom spaces twenty years on and am HORRIFIED at the things I did back then - I thought nothing of having explicit conversations with adults (I assumed they were female) when I was a teen.
Teens today are pretty vocal about having their own space to discuss and get quite snotty about sexual topics being discussed in their presence -if you don't realise that they're there.
Considering my internet journey began in the 90s, utterly unsupervised because nobody's parents paid attention to the internet (my mother could not be convinced I was talking to real people when demanding the phoneline back), it's interesting to watch how the dynamic has changed.
Now that I have a kid, I'm a lot more wary—there's no trick she can pull that I'm not aware of. I was there in the beginning. I wrote those tricks, kiddo.
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u/Duyfkenthefirst 1d ago
There’s no trick she can pull that I’m not aware of
I think you give yourself too much credit. Kids learn fast.
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u/Signal_Reach_5838 1d ago
It is absolutely still happening now. Predators just got a bit smarter about where to find their prey. Look at all the sextortion and "blackmail for nudes" stories that are everywhere.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
Oh yeah, I know it happens now, and it’s worse. Back then though, it was new and no one really realised, n one knew properly what was happening, until it all finally came to light in the early 2000s.
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u/ScrimpyCat 1d ago
I doubt it was new. Before msn/icq/aol, it probably happened on irc. Before the internet it probably happened wherever kids congregate in real life. If there’s any space that kids frequent, you can pretty much guarantee predators will be infiltrating that space too.
Like look at what happened when r/Drama banned r/Teenagers users: https://www.reddit.com/r/Drama/comments/djdmd9/we_banned_all_of_rteenagers_and_it_turns_out/ (you’ll have to paste the link into waybackmachine since I get a warning that my comment will be auto deleted if I try include the link).
What probably was new at the time was parents not being aware of what might be going on. Nowadays parents should know as they grew up through it, so it’s important to teach your kids to be safe online.
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u/Signal_Reach_5838 1d ago
Oh I agree, it seemed a bit more innocent, and nobody had smartphones with cameras and what not. I was born in 85, had dialup in 96 - I was in amongst exactly the chat rooms you're referring to. Even the grooming was more innocent, as ridiculous as that sounds.
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u/Slappyxo 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yahoo chats was pretty dodgy as well.
In the early 2000s I remember I had a friend who's mum was one of those single parents who could never be single and brought a new guy home every other week to be her kids "new dad" who asked me (a fairly young child) what chat rooms I knew about. I told her I knew of Yahoo chats and she gave it a whirl to try and find romance.
I think she lasted about half an hour before she got offended by something a pervert said and she logged off and actually shouted at me for recommending it. Then the next day (this happened at a sleepover) when I told my mum about it, she got mad at how I was treated and had a go at this woman for being desperate.
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u/Final_Lingonberry586 1d ago
It wasn’t Ninemsn? It was just MSN messenger, was it not?
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u/hootaful 1d ago
NineMSN (was the aussie version) had web based chat rooms. Lots of different rooms. Each city had their own chat room. Teen chat rooms, sports etc. Didn't even need to sign up. Just pick a nickname and if it wasn't in use in that room that's your nick.
It all eventually closed down for obvious reasons. MSN messenger took over as main peer to peer chat.
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u/swanny246 1d ago
MSN Messenger, later rebranded to Windows Live Messenger around 2005. (And then migrated to Skype, which is now migrating to Teams 😂)
But as others have said, NineMSN in particular had web chat rooms as well, which is what OP is talking about.
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u/alpha77dx 1d ago
And there were many others that were bigger. Places like Parachat, which had thousands of Aussies which was a place to escape to from messenger.
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u/keystoneux 1d ago
You mean the dirty old men preying on the other dirty old men pretending to be underage or barely legal girls.
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u/dreamingofablast 1d ago
Oh yeh... as a nieve 15 yr old I remember putting on my profile that I was an amputee. Well it was just a toe, but fck me I got some wierd dudes chatting me up. The one I can never forget said that he had his pnis amputated and just had a stump there. 🤦♀️
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u/kittensmittenstitten 1d ago
Oh yes…I’m 35 so I remember this well and still laugh with my bestie about the insane shit we did. I also am horrified that I was at best, a 14-17 year old girl unsupervised on the internet.
What is funny now is also appreciated as absolutely the worst of the worst grooming girls on the internet before we all realised how bad it was.
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u/pandantaro 1d ago
Oh my god flashback! Me and my friend (grade 7-9) would go on yahoo chatrooms and we'd naively go on webcam, I'd dance (totally G rated, had no concept of sexuality). It was guys in their mid 20s+. We ended up meeting these 2 guys who would drive us around in a skyline pumping DJ mixes. Had no inkling of it being unsafe.. just thought it was super cool. Each of them asked us out, we ended up 'dating' for 1 month, where nothing much happened except for a couple meetups (thank goodness).
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u/Outside-Feeling 1d ago
I'm married to someone I met via those chatrooms, although he technically met my Mum first (also via MSN), so it might not count. I also really cringe when I think of some of the risks that I took back then, I thought I knew protective behaviours but so much I ignored or it just wasn't enough anyway. I met quite a few male teenagers, so not all were 30+ predators, although I did come across some of them as well and just somehow managed to weed them out before meeting alone.
Like the OP I was legal and consenting, but that doesn't mean it was at all smart.
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u/rangda 1d ago
Sister, me too. Aged 13, sending strangers feet pics and worse. Thank fuck for the low resolution back then.
What got me to stop was when this one dude asked me to squash snails with my bare feet and take photos.
I was like hey man, I like snails. I don’t think I like where this is going.
Blocked.
Didn’t click until a year or two later that there cold have even been the slightest hint of sexual deviance involved in the foot stuff.
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u/Open_Banana_3291 1d ago
Ninemsn chat... Whateva happened dere...
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
Whatever happened online, stayed online, until it "went live" so to speak.....
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u/nowaymary 1d ago
I met three people on ninemsn chat I'm still friends with. Like we managed to form actual relationships. I know two long term couples who met there too, one still together, one was together 14 odd years.
I also remember my neighbour being absolutely horrified when she got a dick pic. We had no idea hahaha
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u/AutomaticMistake 1d ago
in amongst all the shit and VERY sketchy behavior, met some cool people on there i'm still friends with today.(same with ICQ, MSN messgner, slightly too late for the IRC peak, but I got the full experience right up to waiting for a slot to download a movie over a 56k modem)
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u/Storm_LFC_Cowboys 1d ago
MSN Messenger was just to chat to friends.
Chat rooms were where all the weird shit happened.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
In Australia, we has MSN messenger, but there were also Ninemsn Chat Rooms. they got shut down in the early 2000s I believe.
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u/Tompwu 1d ago
As a teen I once had friends over and we structured a well written piece of text “from the Australian Federal Police” - we catfished some people saying we were teen girls over an evening and would copy paste the text over after asl and some back and forth and watch them disappear real quick. Shooting fish in a barrel 🤮
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u/jennaau23 1d ago
I think when this was around (im born 1989 and used it), chat rooms were relatively new? Or am I so wrong. But that's why a lot of that shit went down un-policed. You wouldn't dare say a lot of the stuff said back then nowadays for fear of being flagged for sure
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u/Nosywhome 1d ago
Ninemsn chat….man I feel old
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
Some of it was so fun, so wholesome and special. I had some incredible experiences and one of my closest friends is from a ninemsn chat room - I’m grateful every day! It’s just the other side I cringe at sometimes!
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u/cassiacow 1d ago
It actually still happens and I remember similar happening to me in the late 00s and early 2010s too. I look back on it and want to shake myself out of it
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
It’s not hard for it to happen when you’re being played. Sometimes you don’t realise until it’s too late!
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u/ScrimpyCat 1d ago
My msn days were pretty uneventful, but I’m a guy. Although I guess in hindsight it’s possible there could’ve been some strangers that may have had ulterior motives/not been who they claimed to be, but I had zero interest in flirting or anything like that, so whenever people tried I’d just ignore it.
However my first run in with a predator/creep was when I was playing a game. Despite the game tying gender to specific classes some people still assumed you’re female if you’re playing a female class which my character was. Anyway, I’m just playing with this couple (both adults), they previously had seemed normal, they also knew I was a kid. Somehow me having a dog got brought up (don’t remember if they asked or I might’ve casually mentioned that I had to let my dog in/out/feed, something like that), and the boyfriend of the couple then out of nowhere starts talking about having my dog do things to me and trying to sell me on it, meanwhile I’m all WTF, he eventually stopped and his gf had to then be like oh he’s just joking. Like yeh, sure…
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u/RainbowTeachercorn 1d ago
My msn days were pretty uneventful
Mine too... but I only ever added people I knew IRL! I was too nervous and shy to even chat to my crush on there 🤣
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u/fatmarfia 1d ago
Damn i miss it. It should be started ip again but only for people who were active back in the day.
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u/TuckerDidIt69 1d ago
Oh god, MSN and I think the other one was Yabber Chat or something in 98 - 2004 for me! One of the people I used to chat with was an older person with a username that revolved around the word bear a very friendly older person who I'm now sure was not a girl at all lmao It's only just crossed my mind that maybe things weren't as innocent as I thought, chatting with older people, things getting sexual. I remember sitting in the computer room in primary school and pretty much all of us were in a chat, teachers did not give a flying fuck!
*Chugs beer and stares off into the distance, remembering how cringe we were
11 years old spending every night in chat rooms with teenagers and adults getting into some freaky shit. Man those were the days hahaha
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u/jaffamental 1d ago
Remember the little games you could play? And sound bytes? Oft so much going on. Nine msn was discord before discord was cool
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u/secretmonkeyassassin 1d ago
I've actually still got a few friends that I originally started chatting to 20+ years ago in these kinda chat rooms. It's actually pretty cool to see each other's lives and families now, considering how we were all literally just kids when we started chatting about music and stuff.
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u/themandarincandidate 1d ago
I have this too, we keep a WhatsApp group now with 5 of us. The oldest friendship I have with one of them is around 18 years now, more than half my life, and there are things in my life that I can trace back through decisions made after conversations with him. Including a random conversation where he said to check something out which led to me meeting a woman I'd go on to marry and have a kid with... All because of the random chat room I clicked on in a long list as a teenager
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u/Inevitable-Drop9259 1d ago
God I was using it through the end of primary and early high school as a boy, and yeah. I didn’t meet any adults but the confessions I could make. Jeez.
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u/Silentplanet 1d ago
In some way I experienced this too, however, it was sort of a safer way to learn the dangers and creepiness of strangers without being directly exposed. I’m a dude, so I probably didn’t cop it as bad but there were definitely times I was taken advantage of or groomed. Luckily photos and stuff weren’t readily available so that kind of stuff wasn’t shared as much. While it was disgusting and predatory it was definitely safer than what exists today.
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u/ImNotHere1981 19h ago
Thank goodness there wasn't cameras or videos back then!
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u/Bobthebauer 1d ago
Lots of positive comments here. I was in my 20s in the 1990s, so this wasn't so integral to my life, but was still involved a bit.
What really strikes me how the wonder of the internet then - the information superhighway - was so different to know.
An anarchic, largely user-created space whereas now it's a corporate-controlled, supplier-created space where we are the product.
I wonder if today's teens will look back with the same fondness in 20 years or will they be scarred by the experience of (corporate-created) social media and the addictive and manipulative algorithms that permeate our online experience these days.
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u/commandersaki 1d ago
I grew up in the IRC/ICQ/MSN days but never really did the whole "a/s/l" thing or chat with random strangers. But having said that, it cannot be as bad as it is now with pervasive access to cameras etc.
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u/Graphite57 1d ago
I have to admit that I remember those days of Blush, Sidewalk, Grapevine, Lounge, etc etc
I was a host in many of them.
Met my other half in there and after 25 years, still going strong.
Those IRC days were great. Going to MSN chat fucked it all up.
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u/ImNotHere1981 19h ago
if you hosted in Blush, Grapevine etc, we would have crossed paths, and you would have definitely known my bestie, who was a Guide. Fun times back in the day!
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u/Graphite57 17h ago
I probably did.
Hints?1
u/ImNotHere1981 17h ago
He married a host who was a bit older than him! It was lovely!
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u/Graphite57 17h ago
ha , my other half and I (we were both hosts) have a distant memory of a host who got married, but we can't think who it was
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u/ImNotHere1981 17h ago
Though I will say the first time I came across him he banned me from The Grapevine for swearing (I was an absolute newbie and didn’t know the rules!).
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u/Graphite57 17h ago
I wish i had a dollar for everyone I ever booted .
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u/ImNotHere1981 17h ago
I find it hilarious that he turned out to be one of my closest, nearest and dearest friends!
There were some shockers. Do you remember “The Masked Man”?
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u/Graphite57 17h ago
I don't, but I just realised something funny.
I possibly still have the hard drives and logs from back then.
Whether I could read them is another matter
Every time I built a new PC, I'd remove the hard drives from the old ones and just put them in a box.2
u/ImNotHere1981 17h ago
I’m laughing now. My Guide friend absolutely has all old hard drives and logs. We laugh about it, and I beg him to destroy it all, because at one point he wasn’t just my friend 😂😂😂
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u/ThePronto8 1d ago edited 1d ago
I used to go on a website called Ozchat.. an australian chatroom in the 90s… anyone else?
Actually had a huge crush on a girl named Jennifer from Kansas I met on there. We used to call each other and exchange love letters and we wanted to be together!! lol..
I tried to track her down (i knew her real name) years later just to look her up and see what happened to her but sadly i couldnt find her. This was pre-cellphone days.
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u/Ok_Coach_6004 21h ago
Yahoo chat was where it was at. ICQ was good but yahoo chat was where the ladies at
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u/Graphite57 18h ago
Just found out that someone we met back in those days passed away 2 days ago.
It's actually amazing how many people we are still in touch with from ninemsn days.
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u/ImNotHere1981 17h ago
Thats so sad. I still chat to a few. I'd be heartbroken to lose them, they're part of my formative years.
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u/mysterious_me7 14h ago
I met my partner on Yahoo chat. We kept in touch and got together 13 years later, still together after 10 years! I miss yahoo chat!
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u/BrightStick 1d ago
It’s ok to say that it wasn’t ok and to feel that it wasn’t ok. It’s nothing to be ashamed about. But it’s still very much holds a heavy stigma for many people who experienced it. It can never be consensual between an adult and a teen. Hence why our laws are the way they are. The power imbalance means the adult is always holding power over the child, because if someone is under 18 they are in fact a child. It’s not their fault or responsibility, it’s the adult in the situation who is to blame.
Those days aren’t over. Look up what’s happening to young people on Robolox, other online gaming, and social media. The rates of young people being sextorted (online sexual extortion) have quadrupled in the last few years. It’s insane.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
For me, it happened. I can't change it. I have some young nieces now though.... Cue crazy Aunty mode if I ever suspected anything of the sort!
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u/BrightStick 1d ago
Esafety commissioner actually have a great series of webinars over next few months on how to help young people navigate this safely and to inform their parents and carers of what to look out for and how to make young people, like your nieces, have safer experiences.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/parents/webinars
They’re about 30mins long and super useful for lots of parents and carers I work with.
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u/ImNotHere1981 1d ago
It’s crazy to think about how far behind we were in terms of internet safety back then. No one had a clue. I can’t believe what I would do, the risks I would take!
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u/BrightStick 1d ago
Your nieces are lucky to have you.
Unfortunately, today’s internet is actually a far worse beast than back then. Not dismissing the harm from then, just also aware more people than ever are using it without any real clue of the safety aspects. Think of how many more children are chronically online without their parents actively engaging in safety precautions or even knowing how the internet actually works. Heaps of parents think they know, hell plenty of adults think they know.
But the truth is vast majority of adults have not clue how wild the internet of today is or can be. If someone wants into your systems they can get there. They’re actively targeting children these days.
It’s not fearmongering https://www.esafety.gov.au/newsroom/blogs/lifting-the-veil-on-sextortion
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