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Comment by rocky1138 | Hacker News Reader

One thing that hasn't been mentioned in this thread is chat rooms. It was quite common to enter a chat room with complete strangers and become actual friends with them. The Internet was truly the first "safe space" where no one felt they needed to hide the real part of themselves or self-censor. You might never learn their real name, but you learned the person behind the handle.

I've written about this before: https://johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimit...

There were quite a few instances where people from chat rooms on Yahoo and otherwise became real friends separated by distance only, talking on the telephone nightly.

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That does not ring true for me. I was always self-censoring and hiding parts of myself on internet, including or especially in chats.

I mean seriously, we are talking about time when people were hiding "rm -rf" into newbie advice and such or would try to hack you if they did not liked you.

"real part of themselves" except for their name, anonymity was easier when I first started using the internet circa 1995. Doxing wasn't a thing.

I agree with that. There were a number of anonymous remailers [0] where you could send emails to others, or make posts to Usenet[1]. The remainers would strip all the headers from your post and replace them with a specific number. Other users could then reply to you using that number without knowing your real email address or name. Likewise, you wouldn't know theirs. Coupled with PGP, anonymity was very high.

I spent many months making good friendships with people like that before being comfortable with coming out as trans.

It was good not being tracked and traced.

[0] The most famous being anon.penet.fi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penet_remailer

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet

Yep, takes a lot more effort these days. Effort I am just not willing to put forth. The most I do is periodically Google my name and remove old information I no longer want out there.

I was maybe 9 or younger in the early 90s and I was very computer savvy (am in software now, surprise?) I knew how to log into chat rooms. My parents had no idea and it wasn't as dangerous as it was now. It was just a lot of people really excited to talk to each other. I may have been lucky.

a/s/l?

yup haha

oh man. I've neer been into irc, but this reminds me of msn and chat days. You know, IMs with online status and not. I hate to be always present in the current ecosystem.

Can you explain a different between that and the millions of slack/discord etc "chat rooms" of today through which I've met people in real life?

The difference is the mentality of the people going into them. It was a different time; you'd join one looking for friends and the novelty of the experience meant that everyone at the same level, exploring this new place together.

discord comes close. however it doesn't have that "dangerous" feeling where nothing stops you from exploring dark corners.

I ended up becoming roommates with three pals I met on IRC. This was in the mid-/late- 00's

My cousin met her future husband in a Los Angeles Lakers chat room and are happily married to this day.

It's nice of her to look at the individual and be able to see past his awful disability of being a Lakers fan :P

Getting back on topic, this brings up a weird thing to me: While not raised with the internet, it has been around for a good portion of my life, chat rooms and message boards, channels and newsgroups were my daily fodder. I've met numerous friends I've gamed with in person, had meetups with others, and traveled with some.

But having tried it across a few sites, and even tried some of the paid experiences, online dating-even as a guy-absolutely REPULSES me.

Being in the generation that birthed it, you'd think the exact opposite. It's a weird phenomenon to me.

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