Microblog Memes

Not just me then

Public chatrooms were everywhere too. It was just the default, anywhere you went. AOL, yahoo games, random websites for no reason.

Even as late as Starcraft 2 (so 2010-), you'd open the game and immediately be dropped into a giant public chatroom on the home screen with everyone else currently playing.

"15/f/Cali"

Says 99% of the dudes in the aol chat room.

I mean aol stared in 1989 it’s been here pretty much from the start.

That's amazing. It doesn't seem crazy these days to meet your spouse online, but I know y'all must have gotten some funny reactions telling people back then.

Eh, you get used to it.

I have a handful of colleagues in Iran so I probably emphasise with it more than the usual horrors but stuff like this has been going on non stop around the world my entire life so idk why you’d be uniquely horrified by it

I don't know the context for this microblog, but I don't think whats happening in Iran is what he was thinking of when he said "digital horrors".

I remember seeing footage of bombings from the Bosnian war in the 90's. Well before digital video on the internet was popular, it was just on cable TV.

I don't know Lauderdale personally, but he has a funny YouTube channel and seems cool enough that I'm gonna hold off on judging this without context.

• Use a nick (handle, username) that doesn't give anything away

The people who came after me didn't know that one and started putting their birth year, hometown, etc. into their usernames.

"Pics or it didn't happen" doesn't really work anymore.

NGL, I saw the gore and shock as well - stileproject, rotten, marsonline, ogrish, bestgore... and even WPD on Reddit in the early days and it really did give me an appreciation for safety first! in almost everything I have done since.

The biggest rule was proof/cites linking to legitimate sources, (not conspiracy sites or your friend "Sally" on facebook) or it didn't happen.

Never tell anyone your real name or address

more importantly, if you do know the real identity of another participant, don't reveal it

Oh absolutely, I also believe that growing up with dialup was great, it meant that being online cost money, giving parents incentive to monitor the time spent online by children, and gradually getting used to being online.

I remember asking and being allowed 30 min online, every few weeks.

It worked well as we hadn't transitioned to an online first society.

Then later in school there were a few shock sites being sent around, goatse was never huge at my time in school, for me the most prolific shock site around school was lemonparty.

Even later in school, I started realizing how much gore and weird crap you could find, and a morbid curiosity took over forna few days, I remember finding a picture of a guy who got beheaded after falling on a spiked fence, you could see the head on one of the spikes, and another time when I saw the aftermath of a guy being sucked into a jet engine, that one was quite mild as the result was too abstract and you only saw a red paste, so it never bothered me.

As it stands now, I think there is a value of mild supervision of kids and teens when online.

I mean mild in a way that full access is allowed but only on a desktop in a shared space.

And at 16 they can move their computer into their own room, and at 18 any admin account on their computer that the parents have should be removed.

The eternal September brought new people without end who never acclimated.

Please tell me that people aren't clicking ads...

I'm 61 and feel like an absolute fossil out here most days.

The kids are just babes..

i watched the video of them cutting that guy's head off too, and i'm the opposite now. in fact i'm trying to figure out how to not faint and piss myself when i get a blood draw. i fucking hate it, it's so stupid, i get tattoos and i'm fine, but if i even think about anything going past a certain depth to my insides (blood lab, surgery, injection), it triggers vasovagal syncope