[Joeri]

ICQ used to have this in the late 90's. You could find random people on the network based on what they filled out in their profile and start chatting with them. I live in Europe and made a friend in South Africa that way, who I ended up visiting a few years later.

Of course, you couldn't do this nowadays because abusive people would show up and ruin it for everyone. I don't know why they didn't back then.

[shobith]

> Of course, you couldn't do this nowadays because abusive people would show up and ruin it for everyone. I don't know why they didn't back then.

People who had early access to Internet (or any tech) were more likely to be nerds.

[TallGuyShort]

I don't think you can explain this by simply categorizing people. You can find more than a few stories of nerds being abusive to other people.

I think initially the Internet brought people closer together. It was like ham radio - you could connect with people in a relatively small but very distributed community of hobbyists and experts. Once everyone joined and it became ubiquitous, it's had the opposite effect - it's replaced most of our social interactions but there's an increased anonymity and social separation.

[shobith]

> I don't think you can explain this by simply categorizing people

I was not trying to categorize people, but I was trying to abstractly point out how this might happen, but I used a "category" to explain it simply.

> I think initially the Internet brought people closer together. It was like ham radio - you could connect with people in a relatively small but very distributed community of hobbyists and experts. Once everyone joined and it became ubiquitous, it's had the opposite effect - it's replaced most of our social interactions but there's an increased anonymity and social separation.

Exactly!

"nerds" is just a type of social circle, who're also the initial adopters of a tech, you don't want to be an outcast by doing something that is not "nerdy" in the early stages, because it is easily noticeable by other nerds of that tech. When the social circle expands to potentially bring in other types of social circles (by going mainstream) and becomes (pseudo)anonymous, you'll obviously find a large variation of (acceptable) behaviors among the different social circles, which may or may not overlap with each other.

[pawelk]

> You could find random people on the network based on what they filled out in their profile and start chatting with them.

In my case not ICQ, but a local messaging app had this feature as well. When I have moved to a new city a girl who has also recently moved there has found me by age and location. We've been married for 13 years now :)

[jfroma]

Another I remember from that era was Microsoft Netmeeting.. there was an screen with a list of all users and their status online/offline and you could call a random stranger.

Another thing I remember about this is that I could make unlimited calls to land lines in the United States from my country. Pretty interesting for a 12 years old kid.