A one-person oral history of Geocities HTML Chat (2022)
I feel very fortunate to have been around for this part of internet culture. Chat was so different at the time; this part especially stuck out to me:<p>&gt;Our MC Skat Kat posted from the persona of this fictional MC Skat Kat, regularly referring to Paula Abdul as his girlfriend. Everyone simply accepted this.<p>You would see the same essentially-anonymous users every day, and there were users with known-unlikely stories - this is before catfishing as a concept was part of the lexicon - but they were just accepted. Did I think that I was talking, at 13, to Demi Moore about Bruce Willis&#x27;s latest movie? No, I did not. But someone got online every night to just shoot the shit and pretend to be Demi Moore, and they were just one of the gang. No one believed them but no one tried to prove them wrong, either, because they were otherwise a good citizen. It was surreal, but at the time human interaction in real-time over the internet with strangers WAS surreal, in itself. No one could prove or disprove anything without a lot of work, so people just tended to shrug at wild claims.<p>I know that newer generations are all experiencing their own forms of social-media-ingrouping that they will feel just as nostalgic for, but it truly was a unique time.