Near 26 year old Zillenialoomer who was on the Internet very early on (since 2002-2003). I'll give my thoughts.
1) 2007 was when "social media" really began taking off. Facebook opened up to the general public, twitter started blowing up in popularity and Tumblr was created this year. Yes, social media was around in 2006, like myspace and friendster (and facebook existed then but it was only for college students) 2007 was the year social media really blew up.
Honestly understandable, though I would argue at that point it was still in its infancy and therefore a lot of guys who were LTN-MTN were still able to get foids and the real brainrot didn't happen until a bit after smartphones were made. Foids weren't able to play Pick-A-Chad like they do now for sure.
2) 2007 was also the year 4chan slowly started to decline in quality. 4chan started getting media coverage like the Fox News piece about it being an "internet hate machine" and 2007 was the year "project chanology" started. Both of these things brought in newfags that slowly changed the vibe. 4chan was still fun in 2007, but it wasn't the same as 2006.
Lol, that's how I found it when I first started lurking the 'chan in 2007. Some high school kid close-ish to me posted a bomb threat and got doxxed through 4chan and my local station did an entire news piece on it. I honestly have no clue how different it was before then, but around the Trump election, holy shit, the zeitgeist became gigaraped and 4chan started to became troon-op central. That's when it was starting to become unbearable to use. I literally just post on /vr/ every now and then and that's it.
3) The iphone came out in 2007. This planted the seeds for 24/7 connectivity and ultimately lead to the internet being designed around smartphones as opposed to desktop users.
100% agreed, though everyone I knew was still using flip phones until 2010-2011. Very rarely saw people with smartphones before 2010.
4) Digg started blowing up in popularity in 2007 which created the updoot/downdoot "hivemind" culture that Reddit (it's spiritual successor) would weaponize.
Barely remember Digg and honestly never got the point of it, but agreed with this.
5) The "2008 recession" technically started in late 2007. Several companies did hiring freezes that year, getting a job became more difficult, and the economic optimism of the mid 2000s evaporated.
Honestly too young for this as well to really remember what the job market was like but agreed. My parents sold their house for pennies on the dollar back then and never bought a house again after that, the recession turned them into lifelong rentoids.
Then there was forum culture. Back in 2006, small, independently hosted forums (like this one) were where most discussion took place. Every forum had it's own culture and you were expected to assimilate to that culture. Outsiders who came in and tried to change the culture (or just refused to assimilate) were considered the bad guys, but now it's reversed and "gatekeeping" is now a word that has an almost universal negative connotation.
Tbh I'm hit or miss on this one. I definitely understand reasons to gatekeep, but I remember being too intimidated to make forum accounts on sites like Resetera and IGN when I was younger because I would lurk and see some of the "power users" back then acting like dickwads and having metaphorical dick measuring contests, and cause drama with other users over menial bullshit.
Though honestly that's probably most gaming and tech related forums today, still. I don't go on those that much.
I would definitely say forums like this one are the perfect combination of gatekeeping and being friendly towards the main userbase. The majority of spaces that stopped gatekeeping completely (pre-Aaron Swartz death Reddit, pre-2016 4chan, probably more I could think of) turned into unrecognizable shitholes.
And that brings me to my next point. Back in 2006, people posted on the internet because they wanted to express themselves, wanted to discuss something they genuinely cared about, or wanted to connect with others. The rise of social media changed all that. Now most people just want to craft a reputation for themselves, farm engagement, virtue signal, or push an agenda of some sort.
Trvth. Fucking. Nvke.
Not only that, but these days apparently sending someone you don't know a DM is considered "weird" and "creepy". If you DM someone these days you need to have a good reason to. But back on the old internet these barriers didn't exist. A lot of the online friends I made back in the day were from either me randomly messaging them, or them randomly messaging me because I posted my MSN/YiM/AIM on a forum or in a guestbook.
Yeah I agree, I never understood this either. A lot of niggers online, especially late Zoomers and foids, act like you are forcibly shoving your penis into their orifices when you DM them. I've made quite a few friends through just randomly DMing people as well, though these days I'm pretty asocial tbh.
And it's not just the internet that was better, it was real life too. People were generally more friendly and extroverted. "Third places" were still common. 2006 was sort of the tail end of mall and arcade culture. Arcades had technically been dying for a long time, but there was still an active arcade scene if you were into fighting games or DDR/PIU. By the late 2000s, arcades were becoming ghost towns, and so were malls. Online shopping and online gaming made these things "obsolete", but the rise of these things and the deaths of the third places like malls and arcades are a large reason why people are so unsocial, terminally online, hyper-introverted, isolated, and atomized today.
I remember when my local mall had a small arcade with Tekken 3 and DDR cabs along with one of my favorites which was Arctic Thunder. Believe they also got in a F&F Tokyo Drift cab one day as well (my local movie theatre also had this one), but I remember it always being out of service. They tore the entire section of that mall down in 2014 and got rid of all of the arcade cabs in 2011 or 2012. It was highkey heartbreaking.
Almost all of the malls in my current area are dying. There is one active popular mall in my area, but it has spots of high crime, especially after 6 PM. It's filled with hoodlums and wiggers roaming. I'm new-ish to the area I am in but it only became like this after COVID. The last time I went (2024) there were wiggers in the parking lot beefing over a foid and they were about to fight each other.
I honestly wish I could time travel back to this time and be back in Texas. Even with my current stats as a LLTN-MLTN I would have probably been able to easily bag a cute alt chick at the mall instead of being a near 26 year old incel. I was born at least a decade too late.