For most teenagers, day-to-day life includes a rollercoaster of emotions and a serious dependency on the Internet.
We've seen growing criticism of this web addiction, and even comedian Louis C.K. is disturbed by children's attachment to computers and phones. But for some of us, a life without the Internet wasn't too long ago.
Redditor Mocker-Nicholas reminisced about pre-Internet youth with the thread, "As an early 90's child, I'm really glad that a 6 to 15-year-old me couldn't post my thoughts all over the Internet."
He wasn't the only grateful early-90s kid, and thousands of Redditors joined the conversation to reflect on life before Wi-Fi.
Either the Internet didn't exist, or it was a very strange place
Most Redditors grew up in the '80s or '90s, but there are select users like monkeytrouser, who are able to recall a time before the Internet.
Late 70's here.so glad my naughtiness was just for me.although,dammit i spent so much energy/money/dignity on top shelf magazines,what a waste when its now free.
That punctuation game, though.
Redditor pill_crosby offered some insight into how strange the Internet was in its developing stages:
Oh yeah. I'm so glad I got the internet before it blew up like it did. In the 90s it was still a haven for geeks, weirdos, and the like, and everything you did disappeared into the aether, unless you made it to Bash.org.
I'd probably have a criminal record if it were like what it is now. Hoo boy.
The politics of over-sharing
RedditorKAFKAESQUE_BITCH recalls over-sharing online, but at a time when it was still possible to remove all evidence:
I did something called Xanga when I was in high school and couple years ago I went to that website to see if my account still existed and to my horror it did. I've gone through each of my posts and carefully deleted all of my emo/hormone induced posts and also contacted the admin to obliterate all trace of my account. It's a GOOD thing that I didn't have FB when I was in middle or high school. Jaden would have looked sane compared to the shit I posted."
Unfortunately, that doesn't seem true for contemporary bloggers. Ever heard the adage, "Nothing from the Internet is ever really deleted?"
Redditor vikingladywizard agreed that nothing from your youth should be documented, saying, "For real though. It should be a basic human right to be able to sweep all that adolescence under the rug forever. Sorry, kids."
User theworldbystorm proposed a solution and wrote, "There should be a facebook for high school kids that automatically deletes everything when you turn 18. Or better yet, for every year after it could delete the most distant year's statuses, etc."
Redditor msolb added, "Livejournal actually got me arrested once. I was not a smart child." Um, what?
But back in the '90s, over-sharing wasn't really an issue
Redditor TheRedPython had a very clear image of what the Internet was like in the '90s, and how horrible it was:
People bringing up being online in the 90s seem to have forgotten what the internet was like in the 90s. I started going online at 10, in '94, and it was primitive compared to the 2000s, much less now. Most people, at least as far as my peers went, did not have usernames that used their real names or identifying information. There were message boards, chat rooms, fan pages for celebrities, text-based RPGs, and not much else. People often went online to either learn something or kill time, not vent their personal woes, and the people who did didn't often have their first and last names and a picture attached a 'la status updates and twitter.
Livejournal isn't comparable to Facebook, anyway, most people still hid under aliases and were able to more reliably adjust their privacy features. The only thing in the 90s that compared at all to today's social media was Friendster, and that is kind of a stretch. People's profile pictures were other images lifted off of the internet or badly scanned photos that were outdated anyway, and parents, employers, teachers, grandparents, etc weren't using it.
Even once MySpace came out, those of us who were online in the 90s were (mostly) no longer teenagers, and you still didn't have the amount of relatives and employers/potential employers using it like everyone and their ma uses Facebook and Twitter now.
Most of all, what made it different was that not everyone had digital cameras yet, flip phones were cutting edge, and uploading video was not really a thing. Most people still had dial up, and simply attempting to watch a video online was as enjoyable as digging your eye out with your bare hands. So, while you still could make an ass of yourself online, covering your own tracks was obviously not difficult.
Some users had the best of both online and offline worlds
"As an '80s kid I'm pretty relieved that some of the worst thoughts I posted on the internet were before everything that happened on the internet stayed on the internet," SippantheSwede wrote. "But then I went and started blogging right after high school and all of that stupidity is still online so the feeling is brief."
LOL
Some Redditors found the idea of nostalgia annoying. A few had quite a bit to say in response to lindinator, who wrote, "As an 80's kid, I am extremely thankful that my high school years were not captured with digital photographs all over the internet."
CopyRasta cheekily responded, "As a 35.000 B.C. Paleolithic era kid, I am glad I got to grow up with real music during my teenage years. You just can't compare today's crap to the sweet melody of tree trunk drums and bone flutes back in the day."
Redditor oh_horsefeathers added, "I've gotta be honest: I'm so sick of hearing people complain that everything's been crap since the upper paleolithic. It's like, 'uhhhh... am I the only one that remembers the Natufian Goat Yodelers of the mesolithic?' Fucking ridiculous hipster bullshit."
The Internet's biggest contribution?
Porn. Duh.
Redditor LordofPancakes93 took it back and reminded Redditors that there was a time when PornHub didn't exist, posting, "Back in my day we had to jerk off to 2 rocks and pretend they were boobs, and we liked it."
ProgramTheWorld responded, "I jerked off to a piece of curvy drift wood."
What about first memories of the Internet?
Can you remember the birth of the Internet?
DecentPizza did and wrote, "I was in '81. When my friend got a Windows 3.1 computer and AOL around 1992-93, it took us less than 10 minutes to start trolling Star Trek forums. Also, reams and reams of printed guitar tabs, from OLGA I think."
Olga?!
Overwhelmingly, Redditors cautioned teenagers against sharing misguided angst on public platforms. Redditor Casul-Scrub summarized it perfectly with, "It's a pretty dangerous environment that kids grow up in these days"
