Wanna turn yourself off of using social media entirely? Uninstall all of it from your phone and use it in browser instead. Is so fucking awful that after two (2) days you'll never want to see a reel again.

We got far to comfy/cozy clicking on a brightly colored square on our brightly colored rectangles. There are kids that have no idea Facebook is a fucking website you can just go to. Same with YouTube. And it made us soft.

Skype, various Jabber services, sometimes OTR (not OMEMO yet), raw dogging 127.0.0.1:9150 as a SOCKS5, and prayer. Cool kids did fun things with 4G modems/tethering but that's out of the scope of this skeet.

I guess it was a bit different over on 8chan with the ability for board creators to divvy out mod privileges. For /baph/ specifically I basically broke up fights and deleted messages that "we" didn't (at the time) agree with. If I could I would have never gotten involved in the first place...

That doesn't shock me at all nor does the poor treatment during/after being a janitor. That shit was rough all around...

To the best of my knowledge/understanding that was not the case.

And why were we doing all of this? Generally it was:

1.) Minecraft griefing/harassment
2.) We wanted an OG username (yeah we came before OGUsers)
3.) "Wouldn't it be funny if..." or "I wonder if I can..."
4.) We were trans, had shit families, and wanted to take it out on someone else

Sim swapping isn't some new thing that popped up in the later 2010s/early 2020s. We were doing it back in 2011. I had a friend who had someone who worked at a T-Mobile retail location that would help for free McDonald's when we needed something with that carrier done/looked up. TEENAGERS.

WE WERE 13. 13 YEAR OLDS DID THIS. 13 YEAR OLDS DID THE LEGWORK TO GET THE TOOLS/LINGO/EMPLOYEE INFO/EVERYTHING. TEENAGERS.

TWC had a tool called "Einstein" if memory serves. It was as easy as giving a phished employee name/ID to the tech support person and asking for a DNS (IP address) lookup for "account verification." The tech would then give us name/DOB/addy/SSN/etc on whoever was behind the IP we gave them.

Back in the day we had Skype resolvers. Put in a Skype username, get an IP address back. A few enterprising young individuals then went to a bunch of ISPs/carriers and brute forced their way through the terms of the trade.

This process is no secret and has been done for a long time. But Minecraft griefers got malicious. Team killing in CS:S for rage videos was one thing. But people would get MAD when you clicked a few times and deleted a castle they worked on for months. So it escalated... and we got good at doxing.

The natural evolution of that was commercialization. Figure out how to obfuscate the code to avoid cracking/leaking, put in a way to sell access to it, list the client for sale on MPGH/Hack Forums, rake in money to a PayPal account, buy as much as you can before it gets limited.

Team Avolition videos created an insatiable want for cheats in Minecraft but nobody except turbo-nerds knew how to make such things. It started with one dude making fly/xray mods for their friends/teams of friends. Then those private clients got leaked.

First of all it really doesn't get talked about enough that WE WERE ALL BETWEEN THE AGES OF 12 AND 16. For me it started with Minecraft griefing and making hacked clients. Teens were making money hand over fist selling access to these clients, well into five (5) digits.

The best people IN THE WORLD when it comes to doxing/swatting/general internet harassment either were openly trans at the time or turned out to be trans later in life. Ask me how I know...