[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.