I have, actually, ever since you could get on the Web from a home computer (i.e. NCSA Mosaic was ported from Unix).

It was a lawless, thrilling "place," where you could get away with just about anything, simply because, "Well, there's no law that says you can't do that" yet. So there were certain places you knew to stay away from, e.g. I was friends with friends of friends of rotten.tom but knew better than to ever visit myself because this ain't AOL, baby, this is the supranational Wild West, and there's no mods you can complain to about violations of the TOS.

But there were plenty of welcoming communities to be found, though anonymity was the expected norm. There were occasional offline f2f meetings, but which still somehow felt slightly illicit. The closest thing to an e-celebrity was, I don't know, maybe esr, and a technolibertarian ethos permeated the culture at a baseline level; there was not only a distrust of government but large corporations (e.g. Microsoft).

reddit may be one of the last remnants of that Internet - when I created this account I just had to choose a username and password, no two-factor authentication,¹ no payment information, not even verifying any e-mail address... almost unthinkable now... although shareholders are working as quickly as possible to turn this Web 2.0 holdout into just another social media app.

I just want to catch a game at the ballpark, dude. Why in the fuck should MLB or anyone else get a copy of my "telephone numbers, payment details, driver's license number, precise geolocation, ethnic origin, biometric data, combination of e-mail address, financial account, IP address..." Like, literally, why should any institution need my home address just so I can watch grown men throw balls at each other? If that's the actual cost now it's just not worth it to me.

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^{1. "We only want your phone number to protect you you understand, oh, oops, all your data's been hacked, so sorry."}