Comment by ratg13

> The type of people are different.

That’s what happens when you have more of them. It’s not that the type of people is any different, there’s more total types of people. If we’re talking the early 90s, we’re talking academics, programmers and some of the more forward thinking, and some of the patrons at early Internet cafe’s. Most of them in Anglophone and European countries.

By 1999 which is when I was first online as a kid, the web had 150M people. In 2005 we had 1 billion users on the web. In 2024, it’s still not 100%, but there’s 5.5B people on the web.

> Back in the 90s, you could do random chat on ICQ and 95% of the people were friendly.

Back in the aughts this was true too on AIM, on Google Talk, on Skype (who remembers SkypeMe?) and eventually we had Omegle, Tumblr and Snapchat. Friendly people abound in community-spaces. You can still find friendly people on the web, I just find them in different—notably not dead—places now, and exercise the same caution I did in 2005.

> Microsoft Netmeeting had a global directory of everyone using the software.. like a big phone book where you could call anyone in the world.

Facebook’s and Discord’s phone book is bigger, and I’m not saying that just to be facetious. You have to go through the step of mutually adding someone, but that’s less of an ask than setting up Netmeeting and there’s more total people to add than there were people on the web in 1999, and if not there, any of the billion and a half social networks people also use.

>The type of people are different.

>Back in the 90s, you needed to have a decent amount money to afford a computer.. this essentially built a wall between people that came from affluent backgrounds vs. those that did not.

I remember the sub-$1000 PC came about in the late 90s, you didn't have to be that affluent; lower-middle class was enough. I remember people in the BBS days that were barely middle class that had computers. Wealth wasn't really that much of an issue. It was more of an interest thing. Lots of people back then really didn't know how to use computers and they were pretty foreign to most people.

I remember pre-Windows 95, you had to know someone who had WinSock and install it, and you had to manually enter your IP address and gateway and all that. It wasn't an easy task. Once things like Internet in a box came out, it became easier. That's what AOL offered, easy access to the internet back when it wasn't that easy.

I think the biggest difference is how commercialized it has become and how the big companies have essentially taken it over. In all fairness, they did have a lot to offer; most websites were static documents.