To ask what the strangest thing you did online as a teenager was?

[Username73638]

I’ll go first… when I was about 12 or 13 (mid-00s) I signed up to a UK mum/baby forum - I can’t remember what it was called but it was a bit like Mumsnet but way, way smaller, everyone knew everyone - and created a whole fake life and made a load of ‘friends’ on there who were presumably women in their 20s-40s. This was when the internet was a very different place and everyone had their kids’ names and DOBs on ‘tickers’ I think they were called in their signatures. There was minimal anonymity. I had a fake husband and a couple of fake kids with names and back stories and then ‘got pregnant’ and tracked a whole pregnancy and birth. All of my online ‘friends’ were really excited to hear the birth announcement and helped me pick the baby’s name. I made up a fake birth story. There was actually an in-person meet up with all the kids that I was invited along to but obviously I couldn’t go, I pretended that one of my kids was sick.

I still remember some of the names of the women and their kids and think about how old the kids would be now (in their 20s!)

Anyway after 1-2 years, can’t remember exactly how long, a group of them realised I was fake and ‘confronted’ me online. I didn’t confess but deleted my account and never went back.

I had a difficult home life and I think I wanted to imagine the happy family I might have when I grew up. It was a bit of an obsession though and I spent so many hours on there, basically every afternoon and evening after school. I’ve never done anything similar since, my catfishing days were over after that!

Did anyone else do anything similar online as a teenager, pretending to be anyone else or something?

😂😂😂😂😂

Online didn't exist in the 1970s, nor did mobile phones

No such thing when I was a teen BUT I did get up to all sorts on my CB radio and me and my friends used to make up outrageous stories to send into newspaper Agony Aunts (which we used to physically post)

Baby greenhouse? I wonder if I was catfished by you if so.

Like a previous poster I'm too old to answer your actual question but it's interesting to read why people do stuff like that.

Hopefully your life is a bit happier now

Or the 80s thank god

When I started university in the mid 90s, chat rooms on the Internet had just started. I remember randomly chatting to an American person at 3am online.

It was so novel I couldn't quite believe it.

Only worked if there was space on the computers, there were only ten in the halls of residence!

No, not me! But good to know other people were doing something similar haha. Yes I now have the family that I wanted ☺️ Very different baby names though…

I am very glad that dial up internet meant I did not use it much when I was a teenager. I plan to keep my kids off it as long and as much as possible.

Baby centre? I caught a troll out there who faked a premature birth.

I turned 13 in 1971. The most radical thing we did involving 'technology' was to go to a phone box, put 2p in and listened to that day's 'Dial a disc' choice. None of us had a phone at home so we had to go to call boxes.

This - and you'll laugh - was a record out of the top 30 that you could listen to down the phone.

Wild, eh?!

Nope, didn't exist in the 70s/80s. Was spared that anxiety.

This reminds me of when circa 2000 aged 12/13 I secretly used to listen to Graham Torrington's 'Late night love' on the radio with my headphones 😂 I was an only child with older religious parents so they would have been mortified if they knew, but it taught me all the juicy bits about romance and relationships that they would never have done and was probably more useful than the PHSE lessons at school for setting me up in such areas! 🤭😂

This is hilarious 😂 no harm, no foul.
I didn’t do it on the internet but I had a late night taxi home from work once (worked in a nightclub) and the driver asked if my husband was looking after the kids… I was 18 and childless (I’m early 30s now).
So I went with it, I explained how we’ve got 4 kids and DH puts them to bed and I’m home in time to have a quick sleep and do the school run in the morning 😂

Oh yes! I remember that! Spotify in it's infancy 🤣🤣

I was reading More magazine, no Internet then.

I'm lucky enough to remember life before the Internet and my "first time" in 1997, still am in total awe of it and how much life has changed.

I’m pretty sure I was on dial up when this started! It was certainly on our family computer, not a laptop or anything.

I attempted a chat room in the mid 90s, no idea which one or how I found it. I was completely bamboozled. Just a rapid fire conversation, or maybe many conversations all happening at once, and the page refreshed with each comment posted so no chance to read back or follow what the hell was going on. I don’t think I even plucked up the courage to post anything, or if I did it got instantly lost and no one replied to me anyway.

I found this place in 2007 and have been stuck here ever since 😂

I regularly pretended to be a 30-something woman getting divorced in various Yahoo chat rooms, I've NO idea why lmao

I used to listen to my radio under the bedclothes, Radio Caroline or Radio Luxembourg.

No Internet in my day, but my friends and I used to phone random numbers and pretend we wanted to speak to a name we made up. Don't ask me why, but it seemed hilarious at age 12/13!

So much! Chatted with grown adults (allegedly) from across the world at 13, met up with one at 15 and dozens of them from 16, travelling hours by train having lied to my parents about where I was.

Moved hundreds of miles away at 16.

I had very negligent parents. I remember being pushed for photos and nudes from 13 from random AOL chatrooms.

This was 2003-6

From the sounds of it baby and bump.

Used to sit in chatrooms taking the piss out of the grumpy mod. She would ban me, I’d log out change ip and be back in winding her up something Cronic. We did actually become threads but boy did I kick her ass in those chat rooms.

I think we have disappointed the OP who is very young compared to the rest of us

I remember dial a disc and the speaking clock.

Phone calls used to be a lot cheaper after 6pm and at weekends as long as they were kept under an hour, and my friends and I used to spend hours on the phone to each other. I would ring a friend and after 59 minutes she would ring me back.

Online didn't exist when I was a teenager!

Oh op, this is an interesting thread. Good to hear that things feel better for you now. I don't actually think creating a fantasy world is so unusual and the Internet certainly facilitates it.

As a student in the dawn of the Internet forums I met some fantastic people online on a music forum. Some had very interesting backgrounds. I met many of them in real life too and it was a nice thing. Thankfully none were nutters..
Reflecting now through I'd be wary if my teenager did the same.