I feel like this kind of post is starting to become much more common as of late, wondering where everyone - including the internet of the past - has gone. There

I feel like this kind of post is starting to become much more common as of late, wondering where everyone - including the internet of the past - has gone. There's one currently up for maintaining a social life, there was one maybe a week or so ago about someone grappling with how to improve their social life, and I'm pretty sure there was a thread before that which was the exact same subject but just about how to make friends past 30. The irony that others have seen before me but that I will repeat is that social media isn't very social. This alone makes me wonder how people can just say "oh, it's not the internet that has changed, it's you" when people clearly remember a better and more social time which seems to have a cutoff point around the hyper-growth of Reddit. I remember my super-early teens being defined by phpbb forums via Invisionfree for video game clans, browsing Newgrounds, 4chan, and ytmnd, and just being a part of the given community. Not to mention just hanging out in Star Wars Battlefront/Team Fortress/Battlefield (194)2(142) public servers and just chatting & blasting, eventually settling down to either one or two servers where you feel most at home. "Where everybody knows your name." Now forums are Reddit and Facebook. "Niche" forums are huge ones like RPGCodex and what used to be Neogaf (awful place) and SomethingAwful. Sociability in video games means you have to constantly roll the dice in terms of 9 to 11 other humans because matchmaking and MMR is the new normal; who knows who you'll get and if they're not enjoyable to be around, maybe you'll be stuck listening to them whinge because you're both on the same MMR level. I could go on, but I can tell you for sure that while there were definitely awful things back then, they're nothing in the face of the current web. I don't miss IRC anywhere near as much as I thought I would, though. Going back recently made me realize that some things have changed for the better.