The Picard ManeuverMany were desensitized by the early, totally unmoderated internet.
gedaliyahme at 11, hanging out in public chat rooms with Neonazis, pedos, and scientologists debating the Hubble deep field without knowing what any of those things are but just happy to be included.
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.
JadenSmithI got an invite for Gmail from a Yahoo Messenger chatroom, about two months or so after the service opened up as an invite only email service.
I remember it very well. Some kid comes in, and says that his mother traded 12 lbs of peanut brittle on a website called Gmail Swap (where people were trading random things for Gmail invites, instead of money) for a bunch of invites, however because she grounded him he thought of enacting childish revenge by just freely giving 12 invites to anyone who asked.
The Internet was wild.