30+ legbutts, what was your experience on the old internet? I'm 37 myself and I wonder sometimes how "normal" my exposure was.
>skinny blonde twink in hs
>started using 4chan around 2005
>gave out my AIM messenger and ICQ handles to random people on /b/ frequently
>"it's anonymous so there's no danger, they can't find out who I am"
>tons of pseudosexual interactions with random people online
>several ciswomen who contacted me a couple times a month to fish for compliments and make mysterious, vaguely sexual comments about me, but would vanish or go ice cold if i made any awkward teenage flirtation
>one who talked me into masturbating on cam for her on a regular basis
>a couple of transwomen who contacted me via force fem threads who were clearly trying to suss out if I was a fetishist or legitimately a young person in need of guidance, playing along in either case
>gay men with zero respect for boundaries constantly trying to talk me into taking selfies for them
>one guy I met in a suicide thread when I was deeply depressed who tried to convince me to give him my mailing address so he could send me suicide pills, I saw him bitching in another thread weeks later that he had been scanning the obituaries from my town and was disappointed that nothing seemed to match my description
All of these people knew I was underaged and shared sexual images of themselves of course. "It was a different time" as they say, but it makes me wonder if all the discord grooming shit that people talk about these days is unique to this time period whatsoever or if there's just less of a paper trail for the previous era.