Perception (maybe you just have more information!), and having more to lose, personally, as you get older.

> having more to lose, personally, as you get older

Or, as an extension of that, having others tightly depending on your continued existence and well-being.

I think it's perception mostly.

In 2000 when some random guy asked a 13yo "hey wanna cyber" the answer was "lol ur a creep", today they'd call the police and there would be newspaper articles how Whatsapp is failing to protect our youth from online predators.

People just seemed to worry a lot less about the internet 20 years ago.

"Things" are objectively not more dangerous, in fact quite the opposite.

Overall things are much safer, but contact by scammers online (online scams in general) is much more a thing now than it was then. There was a turning point in the mid-late aughts for me where the level of trustworthiness of random anonymous online contacts took a dive.

This is my feeling as well. For some reason online community feels more "trustable" in the early 2000s. That is definitely NOT true today.

What's funny about this is at the time I most trusted my online friends people who weren't terminally online felt much more vocal about online predators and scammers. Now that everyone is terminally online they don't seem to be as worried.

Sounds like a sad story. I’m sorry to hear that