Honestly pre-2008 spending time online was pretty niche. I spent maybe a couple hours a day max on MySpace and LiveJournal and maybe a couple of forums once or twice a week. This was between pirating music and burning CDs for friends in high school which gave me a pretty high score on the nerd-index.

I was listening to a podcast on Flat Earthers and the host basically traced the explosion of True Believers to the advent of the smartphone circa 2008 onwards; suddenly hundreds of millions more people were spending hours a day online.