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Comment by pnathan | Hacker News Reader

Uggggh. No. No.

Yahoo!, AIM, IRC, whatever came before phpBB, Delphi Forums, ICQ, even Livejournal.

These things were pretty common, not just among geeks. I chatted with a 60+ year old grandma I worked with at a department store on ICQ in '98 & '99. All my buddies had AIM, yes, the non-geek buddies.

I know a carpenter active on a carpentry forum in the 1998-2002 era.

And we were in rural Idaho.

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All of my friends had AIM as well. But that was not true of people even five years older. All of those things that you pointed out existed, but they were not the kind of assumption that Facebook is now. Web-based social sites starting with Friendster, then MySpace, and now with Facebook opened up online interactions to most people in the Western world, as opposed to the geeks, or family members of geeks, or the young, or people with special interests.

The point is not that people were not social on the web before. The point is that many, many more people are social on the web now, and that it's becoming an assumption of society. And from what I have witnessed, this is clearly a result of social networking sites.

You're basically making a non-refutable argument since anyone who responds to you here is going to be an HN commenter whose experience is disqualified by your premises.

At least provide some data to back up your claims.

> that it's becoming an assumption of society.

It was an assumption of general online society in the 90s, as near as I can remember.

What exactly is the argument here? Were people (non-techies) using the web/internet before Facebook/MySpace? Of course. Are considerably more people (non-techies) using it now after Facebook/MySpace? Of course.

That's a function of mobile and broadband, not facebook et al (arguably)

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