In 1995 been on the net at all made you an outlier which is why I said by percentage though perhaps that wasn't clearly put.

None of my friends had a computer at home and didn't understand anything about them beyond those things we use in school for an hour once a week I was literally the only kid in my year who programmed them as a hobby.

We were not rich or anything but my father (for his faults) was fascinated with them and so I had access years before they became a thing.

They just were not embedded into the fabric of a working class northern town in England the way that they are now.

It's strange been under 40 and remembering three distinct phases in my life, pre-computers in homes, 1 computer in a home (maybe) and now everyone is wandering around with the kind of hardware 15 year old me would have dreamed of in their pocket.

I've been on the leading edge of computer adoption since a child and I still get future shock when I walk through a bus station and literally everyone is starting at a little glass rectangle streaming video wirelessly.

The other thing that still makes me smile is that my mum has three computers in her house, all of them running a linux kernel (Kindle Fire, Chromebook and a desktop running Mint) meaning as a percentage of devices owned she out 'Linuxs' me (I have an Xbox and dual boot for gaming), in 1998 when I was faffing about with RH and getting in trouble for breaking the family PC I wouldn't have seen that coming either.

You're entirely correct that most people just aren't all that fun or weird. Over the last 20 years the internet has become an increasingly commercial and democratised place. In the earlier years the level of technical aptitude necessary to be a content producer online would have filtered out the contributions of all but the more tech-savvy amongst us, who I'd wager tend to be among the more 'fun or weird' people out there. For commercial reasons alone, it's advantageous to all parties involved from those on the infrastructure side, all the way to media companies and manufacturers of consumer goods to make the internet a more accessible place. This has contributed to the internet becoming ever more homogenised, commercial and bland to match the taste of the vast consumer public. 2019 internet is built for the same status quo that the television stations and tabloids of old were made for. Also refer to the 'Eternal September' phenomena on Usenet, that's pretty much what's happened here at a large scale.

> Most people aren't all that fun or weird, [..]

It took me way too many runs around the sun to finally get that :(.

Maybe they are now self-censoring and therefore are even less fun or weird?