The other day, a stranger followed me on Mastodon. He seemed to be a nice young man from Gambia who had followed me completely at random, and I was thinking Please don't be a scammer, please don't be a scammer.
Anyway, it turns out he was a scammer.
He made small talk for a little while, talked about his home country, asked me about my hobbies and interests, and then after a few days told me he needed some money to feed his family.
I'm not naive. I'd known all along that was probably where this was going. But wouldn't it have been nice if it wasn't? If somebody halfway across the world had just decided to talk to me for no reason other than curiosity and wanting to make friends?
I feel like if this had happened 25 years ago, there's a better-than-even chance that's what it would have been. That kind of thing really used to happen in the early days of the Internet, just people from all over the world excited at the opportunity to connect with strangers.
I don't mean to romanticize the Old Internet too much. People sucked back then too. I was trolled, brigaded, and gaslit. I got e-mails from strangers cursing me out. One guy called me the N-word, because back then it was text-only and nobody could tell what race anybody was and I suppose the racists just had to guess. One angry Sonic fan sent me an e-mail saying that I, quote, "hump Robotnik's ugly butt."
So the old days had their share of assholes too. But there wasn't such a commercial motive, you know? Back then assholes were assholes for the sheer love of the game.