The massive irony here is that the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids than itself or going outside ever was. Particularly when it comes to mental health, parents don’t let their kids go out but the same parents put no parental controls or at the very least, screen time limits on their devices.

I'm happy to report that the internet is still safer than what "going outside" meant for me as a kid. Mostly we were blowing things up or seeing which roofs we could get on.

All that freedom was good for my head though, so I'll give you that one.

I'll argue that blowing things up and seeing which roofs you can get on are a lot healthier than Facebook.

> the internet itself has become a much more dangerous place for kids

There used to be a joke about the Internet:

Where men are men, women are men, and kids are FBI agents.

It seems that this is no longer true, and with the massive influx of kids, that itself has increased risk.

It wouldn't make much sense to be a child predator on the Internet in 1998. There just weren't that many kids.

Internet has become a crazier place now than it was during the 1990s. Also, the smart phone revolution (with the cameras) has led to a whole bunch of crazies taking over the internet via their mobile devices.

Signal to Noise Ratio seems apt.

We built these things so the important voices would no longer be isolated from us by distance.

But now to maintain those connections you either have to put in almost the same amount of work as going to your neighbors house and talking to them OR you have to go into a massively networked social media site and scream into the void and hope you get a response through all of the ads and noise of everyone else screaming at the same time.

It's crazy.

We need a filter to lower the noise floor again.

Oh helicopter parents existed back then too.

And these days, there are still plenty of parents that let their kids run wild.

I don’t think anything has changed.

Sleep in a gym hall? I don't remember sleeping much at lan partys. Besides, there were more kids than computers, if you fell asleep you lost your seat.

I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

> I usually slept under my table, but just for convenience ; I've never heard of occurences of seat being stolen (plus your computer is plugged in, how are they supposed to take your seat ? That would be stealing).

I guess what gp is saying is that not everyone that attends the LAN party is able to sling along their computer to the venue so there are more people than machines and of course limited seating for folks without a machine.

BTW, the gp said you might lose your seat and not that your seat gets stolen since there aren’t enough seats to go round, there will always be someone who has been standing for while ready to take you seat.

Correct. Everyone knew everyone, so stealing is the wrong way to look at this. A lot of people had no PC and were just hanging around, looking at other people playing mostly Doom or Duke Nukem 3D. We tended to e.g. switch the PC between players when they got fragged.

Some people played until total exhaustion, so around 3AM you started to see people fall asleep while playing. That's the moment the hopefull looker in the next seat would gently grab they keyboard and mouse and 'borrow' the sleeper's PC and finally join the game.

Good times. Don't ask about the smell of the room after a 2 day fragfest.