Internet Habits: Stuff You Do, Stuff You Used to Do, Stuff That's Passed You By

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’ve sometimes wondered about internet habits, and I’m curious to see how typical I am. This is brought on by the “Do You Keep a Blog?” thread…

Stuff I Do
-Message boards (no. 1 to the point I’ve had to let a few slide)
-Surfing (a little now)
-Email (my main way of keeping up with online friends now, at the expense of chat)
-Meeting folks, but restricted to one railway enthusiast messageboard, so it’s not totally internet-related, as we go on steam tours and such.
-Work-related stuff (I work from home part time now, and transfer files a lot)

STUFF I USED TO DO
-Chat rooms
-IM programs
-IRC (briefly - didn’t like it)
-Online radio
-Dopefests
-Usenet
-Maintaining a purely personal website
STUFF THAT’S PASSED ME BY
-Online gaming
-Blogs
-Email lists
-Telnet or any of that overly geeky stuff

2

Interesting thread!

Stuff I Do:

-Work (I write freelance articles on historic firearms, and the Internet is invaluable for this)

-E-mail (obviously)

-Messageboards/Forums (This one, and a couple of Military Firearms Collecting)

-Instant Messaging (mainly MSN or Yahoo, depending on how busy I am)

-Surfing (Not as much as I used to… the amount of quality stuff out there is getting diluted by the spam and crap, IMO)

-Porn (I’m upfront about it- I’m a man who likes his Internet Porn, thank you very much!)

-Online Games (Less so than I used to, because of work commitments and the fact that I’m sick of getting “pwned” by 13 year olds, no matter what I play)

Stuff I Used To Do:

-Chat rooms (I outgrew them, especially when the Bot:Real Person ration became somthing like 50:1, and the Real People were either Angry Unemployed People with too much spare time who’d formed their own little online social cliques, horny guys wanting cybersex, or, well, people who could best be described as a can short of a six-pack)

-Contributing to AD&D/Shadowrun websites (I didn’t want to upgrade to AD&D 3rd Edition, and Shadowrun just seems to have dropped off in popularity

-PBEM (Play By E-mail) RPGs- AD&D and Shadowrun. (Again, moved onto other things, groups drifted apart, etc)

-ICQ (Too buggy, and later surpassed by both MSN and Yahoo)

Stuff That Passed Me By:

-Usenet/Newsgroups (Too young to fully appreciate them when I first got the 'Net, now I think they’ve largely been bypassed by Forums and Messageboards)

-Blogs (I really couldn’t care what random strangers have to say about whatever random shit has happened to them lately)

-mIRC (Too complicated)

-MMORPGs (World of Warcraft, I’m looking at you!)

-Online Banking (Hey, that’s what ATMs and actual Branches are for!)

-EBay (Never been an Auction fan at the best of times)

-Online Shopping in General (Any savings made up by buying online are generally outweighed by the shipping costs, in my very limited experience)

-VOIP (That’s what phones/fax/E-mail is/are for)

-“Snakes On A Plane!” (Or most other “Internet Phenomena”, for that matter… I just don’t get a lot of them)

3

Stuff I do -

This messageboard. I don’t belong to any others.
One chat room, where I added “Does Not Cyber” to my nick, which greatly reduced unwanted private messages.
BBS games via telnet.
Email.
IM with friends.
IMDB - I do this so much that it warrants its own listing. I’m on IMDB at least once a day, probably more, looking up various movie info.
Banking - 99% of my banking takes place online
My website - I have an entertainment website that takes up a lot of my time these days

Stuff I used to -

Used to spend a lot of time in various chat rooms.
Spent a lot of time just randomly surfing the web, not so much anymore

Stuff that passed me by -

Personal blogging
Online gaming
And all kinds of other things.

By the way, I don’t see how Snakes on a Plane is an internet thing? Unless I’ve seriously misunderstood everything, I thought it was just a movie that happened to have a title that says exactly what it’s about.

4

Hmm. Yeah, interesting to think on this.

Stuff I do:

Emails - personal, and for work
Online banking, bill paying
Timetable lookups
Research/look-ups - for work, finding leads and sources of info for projects
Hang out at one main messageboard, visit four more regularly (including this one), and maybe three more on occasion.
Chat. These days, MSN, ‘cause that’s where my friends are.
Maintain websites for my interests. Sporadically. I’m running short of time, tho’.

Stuff I used to:

Surf. Just going from site to site, maybe even following one of those webring things that took me anywhere. I used to do that pre-2002. Got hooked (unfortunately) into another messageboard which took up too much of my time, and shackled me down until late last year. Now, these days, RL stops me surfin’ as I used to. sigh

Stuff that passed me by:

Blogs
Online gaming (gaming bores me silly, anyway)
Online auction sites
Probably tons more stuff I can’t think of …

5

Just to add to the stuff I do: I do still meet up with folk from messageboards. Love doing that. It’s been working out extremely well, considering we start out as strangers apart from what we know via th’ 'Net thing! :slight_smile:

6

Occupational hazard, that…

7

Yeah. Happens when you care too much. Still haven’t stopped doing that, though. I just try to even things out more.

8

Hmm.

9

Stuff I do:
Online banking
Checking on reward points
Erowid.org (it’s work-related :smiley: )
IMDB
A couple of chat rooms, if I have the time to kill
Lately, here :slight_smile:
And, occasionally subscription games (ala Gameblast)

Stuff I used to do:
mIRC (too buggy, too many bots and viruses flying)
General surfing
Webring surfing
eBay (got tired of robobidders and sniper bidders)

Stuff that passed me by:
Blogs (is that passing me by, then?)
Online gaming
Personal websites
VOIP (kinda scares me)

10

Stuff I do:

[ul]
[li]Email[/li][li]A few message boards (including this one)[/li][li]Light surfing (visiting a few choice sites from time to time)[/li][li]News, including local and national[/li][li]Reference (IMDB, Wikipedia, etc.)[/li][li]Usenet- I cut my teeth on Usenet and I still use it. Many newer-generation netizens probably don’t even know what Usenet is.[/li][li]FTP- Another one of those “old school” things that I still do from time to time.[/li][li]Download music[/li][li]Internet radio (don’t do this a lot, though)[/li][li]Banking- I hardly use paper checks anymore.[/li][/ul]

Stuff I used to do:

[ul]
[li]IM/chat- Just don’t have time for it anymore, and too many whackaloonies out there.[/li][li]Random surfing- My exploratory phase of randomly perusing the net has long since passed and I have learned where most of the good stuff I am looking for is.[/li][li]Saving every cool graphic or text file I come across. At the time I thought about how fun it would be to go back and re-read this stuff, but like a person who always records movies off of TV and amasses a big collection, I hardly have time to do this because I am always too busy getting new material.[/li][li]Internet phone- The system I used was buggy and the connection would often drop.[/li][/ul]

Stuff that’s passed me by:

[ul]
[li]Blogging- Really, why should I give a shit about someone else’s personal life if I don’t know them? I just don’t understand why blogs are so popular.[/li][li]Online gaming- I just don’t have time for this.[/li][li]eBay- If I had more money, maybe I’d check it out once in awhile, but I wouldn’t get caught up in auction fever like some people do.[/li][/ul]

Also, can someone please enlighten me on what “Snakes on a plane?” is? The only thing that comes to mind when I see this phrase is an SNL skit I saw with Will Farrell playing as a pilot talking to the passengers about a cobra that had escaped and was slithering about the cabin, trying to keep passengers calm about the threat.

11

Snakes on a Plane.

12

Stuff I do almost everyday:

Read the SDMB.
Read several left-wing political blogs with SharpReader.
Play poker.
Email.

Stuff I do once in a while:

Ebay.
Surf.
Wikipedia.
Play other games.
Download music.

Stuff I rarely do:

Usenet, telnet, etc.
Read personal blogs.

13

Stuff I Do
Email
Random Research: IMDB, Wikipedia, Straight Dope, Google any random topic that comes to me, often following a twisting trail of leads over dozens of subjects for hours at a time. I’m an information junkie -shrug-
Browse iTunes store
MMPOGs, inc. WoW.
Check the news
Visit Worth1000.com, CuteOverload.com and BoingBoing.net

Stuff I Used To Do
IM/Chat - ICQ, IRC and Yahoo mostly. I still sometimes use them
Visit forums - this is probably the only one I’m still visiting regularly.
Maintain a website/blog
Newsgroups - I only dropped them in Feb when I got a new computer and couldn’t be bothered setting them up, and then didn’t miss them.
eBay
Family history research

Stuff That Passed Me By
I’m not sure… I guess that, even though I have a MySpace profile, I don’t really get it. Nothing else springs to mind.

14

Stuff I do:

The Straight Dope

Usenet
research about technology I use or would like to use
gemm.com (record collecting)
other sites about records, biographies, discographies
Online banking and shopping
MSN Messenger. There are two people on my list.
e-mail

Stuff I used to do:

Surf for porn. Been there, done that, got the band-aid.
Collect mp3s. I hate mp3s and the people who don’t know how to make them properly.
Buy stuff off of eBay.
Random surfing.
rec.music.beatles before it got overrun by idiots.
ICQ (the last time I installed a new version, it started to format my HD!)

Stuff that passed me by:

DOS
BBS
IRC
Telnet
Chat rooms
Games
Role-playing games
having everybody and his brother able to Message you
Blogs
HTML and having a website
goatse
Jeezo-glurge. Lucky, I don’t know anybody who sends that stuff.

15

Stuff I do:
Email
The Dope
Banking
Bill-paying
Gossip and trend websites (JustJared, PopSugar, Superficial, etc.)
Music

eBay
News & weather
Photos

Stuff I used to do:
Chat - I was a regular in an AOL chatroom for years
Maintaining my modeling profile and keeping in contact with other models
IM
Search online for news on whatever hot celebrity I was in love with at the time (I still do that, but not as much!)

Stuff that passed me by:
Blogging
Online gaming
Internet phone

16

Stuff I Do
-Email, work and personal
-Listserv for book club
-SDMB
-LiveJournal
-Retail shopping
-Bill Paying
-News source
-General Reference

STUFF I USED TO DO
-ICQ
-Chat rooms (specifically, Virtual Places chat)
-Fan sites (actors, movies, music, etc)
-Tetrinet

STUFF THAT’S PASSED ME BY
-Multiplayer games
-Online gambling
-Ebay
-Music downloading, legal or otherwise
-Dating sites