[wuliwong]

I am going to push back without entirely disagreeing. Most of the people online are definitely caught in this social media as cable tv thing. But the number of people using the internet back in the early days is probably similar or even smaller than the number of people today that use niche areas of the internet, niches that still have that 'playground' experience and much less corporate overwatch control. Maybe?

[twodave]

There's a perspective by which you aren't wrong, and yet everything about how we interact with the Internet has changed in the last decade or so. Because (to quote School of Rock) the world is run by the man.