Comment by SllX

> 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.