I know I have a wall of text earlier, but I was dealing with a couple nasty aspects of social media and I kind of reminded me of another reason why I likely get into this stuff, and it's a big part of why I try to get all these old machines to do modern tasks.
See, I kind of hate the modern internet. I hate that for certain services and social media - usually the most popular ones - I need to give an e-mail address (Reddit), or my full name (Google, Facebook), or even more personal details I"m not that comfortable with having on these idiots servers that can be hacked, mismanaged, or just outright abused. Add to it that now almost every big page has a 90 page long list of rules, EULAs, and whatnot that everyone clicks "I Agree" to but never actually reads and in a way, I'm kind of fed up with the modern web.
I've been online in some capacity since the early 1990's and it seems that the biggest problem is people are trying to fix things that will never go away and could have been prevented in the first place if people did not just freely throw their personal information around like it's nothing. It used to be we made up ridiculous screen names to keep from being found out who we were and to make ourselves less of a target.
I also miss that there was a certain "bar of entry" of sorts. Not so much the financial one, but the technical one. It used to be you had to really want it, and you earned it - learning how to connect a modem, setup COM ports, setup IRQs, setup memory addresses, tuning and tweaking plaintext files for network subsystems like you're tuning your drag racer for the track. It kept a lot of idiots away and kept you a bit more in touch with what your system was actually doing in some respects.
There are days I go online and think "If I can't get this page to come up on a 486 DX4 with RetroZilla at least, then maybe it's not worth my time". That's a common sentiment I tend to hold as of late. Sometimes I wonder if it's just old-fogeyism settling in - or if I'm really legitimate in my concerns about the modern world. I just get something out of a simple webforum, BBS, or IRC that I don't get out of more modern channels.