Chatting with ‘ransoms’ on the internet

[Easycheesy99]

I realise that it is ironic writing this on what is a forum of strangers but I’m interested as to whether anyone else spoke to random people a lot on the internet as a teenager? Obviously I am speaking to a certain age bracket here!!

I grew up in the age of MSN and AIM for messaging, before there was even Facebook. There was MySpace for the cool people. I used to frequent a forum where there were lots of people my age (allegedly, I suppose you never really know!) and often chatted with them on MSN privately.

I used to go in chat rooms as a 13,14 year old and speak to random people and then add them to my contacts. I remember having a contacts group on MSN called ‘random people’. I used to pour my woes and angst about boys out to these random people.

At some point, I just stopped speaking to any of them. Some of them I wonder if they were even who they say they were. Others I’m sure were but there’s no way I’d be able to find them on social media or anything now and wouldn’t want to really as I feel a bit weird about that part of my life?

Don’t get me wrong, I had a lot of friends at school and would usually be talking on MSN with actual friends at the same time as these ‘fandoms’.

I just cannot imagine doing that anymore?!? Did anyone else have this experience? I feel like it was very ‘of the time’. Obviously nowadays people slide into DMs and chat via Instagram etc but nothing is as anonymous as those days.

Anyone else? I wonder if anyone I spoke to is now on here

MuggleNet was the one that JK Rowling herself visited once incognito and later talked about it in an interview. Apparently she was made fun of for having a Spongebob nickname

Yup, I had online 'boyfriends' of my age in nearby towns lol.

Dangerous but at least my experience was also 14/15yo boys.

@Easycheesy99 @Dollywilde yeah, I was a mod on there for years and met DH at a drunken meet in Oxford. I have been to a couple of other TSR weddings! Still lurk in the medicine section occasionally!

I met my DH on the Microsoft chat rooms

I did my first degree 1997-2000 and to access the internet we had to go to the computer room or the library where we were meant to be researching for assignments but really we were all just chatting in The Student Room. We also had an internal university chatroom. Nowadays it would be used to deal drugs but back then we just talked about indie bands, flirted and asked what you got in your A Levels.

Friends Reunited was the pre FB platform where you could rate your mates in order haha. Brutal. I always feel sorry for the makers of Friends Reunited, they are the true social media pioneers but nobody renembers them!

Oh wow, this has stirred up some memories. I was on msn and aol when I was about 13-15 and all my memories are of deeply inappropriate conversations with some real creeps.
I think some of my late night shame spirals center around the embarrassment and self loathing I have for my naive teenage self

Yeah I used to do this back in the yahoo chat/msn days. Did meet up with a few, crazy thinking back! I'm still in regular contact with a couple of them, one lives not far, we have mutual friends it turned out and one lives in America. 😀

Yes! I was a regular on Yahoo Chat in 1999-2001. Sometimes I wonder about all my friends on there and how they're doing, but I don't have access to my old email account and can't remember enough about them to track them down (plus it'd be pretty weird). I hope they all had happy lives.

It was such a simpler time.