Beyond Selidor

I think a lot of it was down to the time we had available. As I said in response to another comment, almost all the people I'm describing in the post were secondary school or university students, and in that stage of life, you just have so much more time (you're rarely responsible for the upkeep of an entire flat or house, nor for working to cover your entire cost of living, and most people in that period of life don't have caregiving responsibilities). The guy I mentioned who made the elaborate playlists was an outlier — in his late twenties at the time — but he worked night shifts in a hotel, and in general seemed to have endless time for the internet.

I do also think that it was because no one had figured out how to monetise social media at that point, and the spaces where we congregated were not seen as appropriate platforms for marketing ourselves or trying to make money from our creative endeavours (and indeed any such behaviour would have been frowned on and the person frozen out of the community). Certainly I don't remember any sense of competing for replies or likes or engagement (although I guess this happened a bit with fanworks) — it was much more like having a very weird, asynchronous, long-running conversation.