Hello fellow 30 year old! I just climbed over that hump a little less than a month ago and have similar feelings. My tech/internet journey started where lots o

Hello fellow 30 year old! I just climbed over that hump a little less than a month ago and have similar feelings. My tech/internet journey started where lots of others probably began, with games. I remember picking up the magazine Maximum PC and being awed at the stories and reviews of different computers, video cards and games. I couldn't have been more than 10 or 11 at the time and was just beginning to understand how computers functioned and could be built, piecemeal, so the magazine felt like a major discovery. And at about the same time I learned that a game called Diablo 2 was in development by the company whose games I already adored, Blizzard. I learned that there were websites that speculated on and followed the game's development, so I started to visit those sites (namely diabloii.net) to satisfy my curiosity. That ultimately led me to the forums and to creating my first website, which I put together well before the game ever came out, devoted to a guild I wanted to create. And then I started to follow Warcraft 3, which led me to more forums and IRC. IRC was the big one. It was like stepping into an entirely new universe. A universe of people from around the world that could talk in groups and communicate instantly about any topic. That was a real eye opener, which led me to just about everything else in nerddom. I co-created websites, setup servers, worked on a game mod, talked with programmers and artists, learned about linux, dabbled with scripting... The floodgates were open! There's no question that the internet played a major formative role in my life and has had a huge impact on what I believe, who I've become and how I understand the world. But when I look at today's internet I see a very different place. Since 2016 I've been giving a lot of thought to how its popularity has changed the way that it operates. The promises of commercialization and politicization have brought many elements to bear that simply didn't exist to the same extent when I was growing up. The ongoing war for users and messaging seems to encourage cloistered spaces and inner-facing pairings (ie: exclusive instead of inclusive). Then again, maybe I'm just joining the ranks of old dudes yelling at kids to get off their lawn and reminiscing about the good old days. I'd love to hear from the people that are growing up online today. I'd like to know what their experience has been like and if they've found their own fonts of wisdom and information that I have never seen.