[muglug]

Maybe it's just me, but I remember a time where online defaulted to private and anonymous.

facebook.com shifted that paradigm. Making people's conversations with friends as public as possible (via the news feed) turned out to be a fantastic way to incentivise more of that behaviour.

From there it was a short leap to apps like Venmo, where your monetary transactions are public by default. If PayPal had defaulted to public transactions upon launch a decade earlier people would have spurned it.

[tredre3]

I remember when online defaulted to anonymous, but I don't remember it ever being very private? Most forums or chat systems that predate facebook were public by default, with the users full history in plain view.

I suppose posting photos of yourself or your kids publicly wasn't that common prior to facebook, though.