asl pls

32-year-old Adnan was elated for the first time in months. Stuck in a loveless marriage, he had sought companionship in anonymous internet chatrooms. This was 2007, and text based chatrooms had been around for almost a decade.

While orkut was peaking in popularity at this time, it wasn’t anonymous. Chatrooms were perfect for what Adnan sought. There were many options: ICQ, AOL’s own chatrooms. And then there was mIRC, which was the one I used in the early 00’s. It was built on the IRC protocol. If that sounds like gibberish, think of it like reddit, but with an ancient user interface. You had chatrooms organized by interest (like subreddits). And naturally, a lot of the chatrooms were just smut, violence and 14-year-olds being edgy (like reddit).

In fact, if you’ve ever heard the “a/s/l?” question, this is where it originated. In an anonymous chatroom, the first thing you want to confirm is your counterparts’ age, sex and location. So that became the traditional opening question. Not that there was any way to verify the answer.

You wouldn’t believe how many 16F from California were always online during daytime in India in the early 00’s.

“IRC started as one summer trainee’s programming exercise. A hack grew into a software development project that hundreds of people participated in and became a worldwide environment where tens of thousands of people now spend time with one another.”

— Jarkko Oikarinen, creator of IRC

As facebook’s popularity increased, IRC’s declined. There was only so much time people spent online, and more and more of it was on facebook.

By the late 00’s IRC had become unusable. It was just bots talking to other bots. The users had long gone. Some of them went to omegle, which was a simpler implementation of the same idea. No themes, no chatrooms. You were just randomly matched with another user and could have a conversation. Early omegle was awesome.

Of course, omegle quickly became a hub of sexual content. That’s usually how it goes when you combine online anonymity and lack of monitoring. It became worse when omegle’s video chat became mainstream. Paedophiles and predators prowled, and the site had to shut down in 2023 after losing a $22m lawsuit over its failure to protect underage users from abuse.

But back to 2007 and Adnan. He had been chatting with “Sweetie” for two months. He had found his soulmate- and “Sweetie” (real name Hana) felt the same:

"I was suddenly in love again. It was beautiful, I thought I finally found someone who understands me, and who is in a similar situation - in a bad marriage, like I am,"

They became closer and opened up their souls to each other, discussing their daily and marriage problems as well as their newly discovered secret love and understanding.

They were both eager to take the next step, and decided to meet up in real life. There is a song that perfectly describes what the date was like, so I’ll just leave it to Rupert Holmes to fill you in:

They filed for divorce soon after.