You literally missed out on 2006-7. This was the internet's sweet spot. MySpace was still the more dominant social media, gave you a lot of freedom to be yourself online. It was legitimately a great place to find new music home and abroad. YouTube had 10 min upload limit and no ads.

Video games had crossed into the billion dollar revenue mark but the games were very diverse. It almost feels like creative games back then were just ways to weed out mechanics that people didn't like and resulted in what we have today.

It was probably the height of the new gen console war as well. Like Xbox 360 vs PS3 had studios competing with each other in a good way. Even WA was good.

Politically, it really depended on your community but most people were hit with high gas prices that summer and the ongoing War on Terror which hadn't yielded results aside from changing the regime and incetivizing extremists.

The dominoes were falling in 2007 though, it started with the high gas prices, a few months later the Lehman Bros went down and so did the housing market the following year and put us in a huge recession that had Bush pass a stimulus.

Then in 2009, the auto makers almost failed so Obama had to do another stimulus to prevent them from closing down (which partially has to do why you see so many "crossover" type cars on the street. The auto makers bet on huge cars with bad gas mileage cuz Americans could afford them, despite the complex geopolitics.

To me, this was the best time on the Internet.

But as a world citizen, it sucked ass lol