I think I started around 2009 and before that in slashdot, mostly lurking around. Then, using alt accounts, the internet back in the day taught you to never post real info about yourself, so it was lurking through RSS feeds.
I hosted an official 10th anniversary slashdot party in 2006 where they shipped me tshirts to give attendees. I got so many extra shirts over the number of attendees it became a staple of my wardrobe for years to rock one of those shirts… I miss old slashdot…
I still think it's wild that we went from having a dozen alt accounts and pseudonyms and never sharing anything private or identifiable publicly on the internet to just putting our entire lives on the internet tied to our name (and by extension our friends, family, where we live and work), complete with exhaustive image and video documentation.
I still live like I did in the late 90s and early 00s when I started using the internet though. I guess old habits do die hard.
