I was also online from a really young age and had a lot of very risky behavior. In my experience, pedophiles are relatively rare, but extremely bad at hiding it. There is pretty much no way that OP wouldn’t realize it. Like, they struggle to talk about anything except inappropriate subjects with kids. Everything you say they try to turn it into something weird. It’s pretty much impossible to be friends with them and somehow not know.
Most people I communicated with at the time were also minors, maybe a few young adults, and it happened almost entirely in public forums, not private conversations.
That’s different than what i did as a kid. I was talking to people on AOL messenger and chat rooms all the time. Didn’t occur to me until much later that theses 40 year olds were trying to groom me.
I remember once meeting someone (a woman) on IRC who was over 40 or even 50, I don’t remember the exact age. I remember just being surprised that someone that age would be on the same part of the Internet I was hanging out on. But I don’t think that person was there for any bad purposes.
You just didn’t realize you were talking to pedophiles…
If you told me your age online and you were ten years old, i’d nope out of there pretty quick.
People who want to continue talking to little kids on the internet when they’re in their 40s aren’t doing it bcz 10 year olds are interesting.
I was also online from a really young age and had a lot of very risky behavior. In my experience, pedophiles are relatively rare, but extremely bad at hiding it. There is pretty much no way that OP wouldn’t realize it. Like, they struggle to talk about anything except inappropriate subjects with kids. Everything you say they try to turn it into something weird. It’s pretty much impossible to be friends with them and somehow not know.
Most people I communicated with at the time were also minors, maybe a few young adults, and it happened almost entirely in public forums, not private conversations.
That’s different than what i did as a kid. I was talking to people on AOL messenger and chat rooms all the time. Didn’t occur to me until much later that theses 40 year olds were trying to groom me.
Didn’t work, but, it happened nonetheless.
I remember once meeting someone (a woman) on IRC who was over 40 or even 50, I don’t remember the exact age. I remember just being surprised that someone that age would be on the same part of the Internet I was hanging out on. But I don’t think that person was there for any bad purposes.