I just watched a video on the “early internet”, I guess that means from the early 90s to the early 00s, and mentioned how wild chat rooms could be. It made me remember what a troll I was in 2001. I befriended a guy on Yahoo Messenger and he told me about a “cracking program” you could use to troll Yahoo chat rooms, among other things, so you bet your ass I downloaded it and we wrought havoc in certain rooms. There was a feature to use pre-made ascii art, most of which were pretty offensive, and spam them in the chat. We teamed up every night and did this 😂 I was very anti-religion back then and would troll the Christian chats with satanic skull ascii’s and stuff, which I kind of feel bad about 24 years later, but I was 16 and tired of being told I was “going to hell” for wearing a spiked collar 😅 I was generally annoyed with religious people of any background. So we trolled the hell out of their chats. Jerk move, but what’s done is done, ya know?
Really though, that program was cool, if I remember right, it had the ability to turn someone else’s computer off remotely. It did all manner of crazy stuff, wish I could remember the name of it so I could find some kind of info on it, for the sake of nostalgia. I lost contact with my friend eventually and that makes me sad. I lost contact with a LOT of people. We lived, laughed, loved, and trolled together😂 the internet was basically unregulated, no bullshit “my fee fees are hurty because this person disagreed with me” censorship, people had their own personal websites (that has made a big comeback with young people in the last five or so years) and people had freedom. I miss the decentralised internet so much. Sure, there was some f’d up stuff out there especially on those shock sites that were really popular at that time (that I checked for new gore pics every day after school 😭) but the f’d up stuff (with exceptions obviously) was worth having all the freedom. What I’m trying to say is that I really miss being a 16 yo bridge troll with nearly zero repercussions. 🥴