From your "even post dotcom bust..." I wonder if you are too young to know the time before that? It wasn't always that way. In my college days before the dotco

From your "even post dotcom bust..." I wonder if you are too young to know the time before that? It wasn't always that way. In my college days before the dotcom boom really took off, people could meet in real life after first contact on USENET, which I'd say was the social media of the time. You are referencing a later period where regular folks were piling onto the internet and giving each other advice. And maybe that advice was geared towards novices and/or children, coming from other novices, and steeped in a lot of urban legend fears of the unknown. Even the academic types started to embrace these ideas, lending credence to the idea that their magical garden was now turning into hunting grounds. But, imagine yourself in the early 90s, mapping your way (on paper, of course) to a trailer home in Silicon Valley or a secluded dirt road in the Santa Cruz mountains. You've never been there before, and your goal is to meet people you've never only seen as text on a screen. You assume they are real people but, technically, it could be all sock puppets. I did those things! It wasn't a horror movie. Instead it lead to light socializing and drinking.