The internet of my childhood was pretty awesome. All the TV channels I liked to watch had a bunch of amazing games that were absolutely free, sometimes you could join a kid-friendly chatroom with a big celebrity like Vitamin C. You could download whatever song or movie you wanted and half the time it was even labeled correctly. You didn’t have to search for anything, just type what you want and add a “.com” to the end and nine times out of ten it’s exactly what you are looking for. If you couldn’t find it Jeeves or Lycos could help. You could chat with your friends and ‘meet’ their friends, or just show off how cool the lyrics to the music you listen to are. The internet wasn’t free of idiots or trolls, but most of the riff-raff of humanity had not yet discovered it, or it was too "nerdy’ for them. When Myspace first came on the scene there were only three pages of people ‘near me’ and I knew half of them irl, and this was in massively overpopulated South Florida. Later I would come to know almost all of them IRL because the Internet used to bring people together. Now I don’t even want to use any social media that’s used by people I know IRL. There is nothing free without heavy microtransactions and/or data collection. It was never a great place for kids, but now I wouldn’t let a kid near it unsupervised. The only thing that’s really improved much is the piracy. I almost never accidentally download Shrek anymore.