My name is Will DeFries, and this is the Sunday Scariest Podcast, your cure for the Sunday Blues.

My first AOL instant messenger screen name was Young Willis.

I'm not entirely sure why I chose it or why I didn't change it until my senior year of high school,

but that's why I decided I wanted to be online. The earlier spent on AIM were fairly innocent.

I was casually messaging with friends, hanging on every word my crushes would send back to me,

and trying to hack into other friends accounts so we could change their away status to something inappropriate.

And in those days, everything was fairly straightforward. While it was definitely a form of social media,

it wasn't really Instagram or Twitter. You didn't spend countless hours a week looking at photos

from people you didn't know. You were simply being social with the people that sat at your table

in the cafeteria during school lunch. I'm not sure why I did it in the first place,

probably just boyhood curiosity. But I remember tinkering with the chat rooms offered by AOL,

and they were something. Much like how Reddit can be completely anonymous these days,

AOL instant messenger chat rooms were peak anonymity. Spicegirl425,

girl spelled with a U obviously, may send you a private message.

Rollerblader Boy99, boy spelled with an I obviously, made it the same.

And as you trudged through these anonymous personalities,

only a select few would actually be added to your friend's list. It was, as I see it,

the first ever iteration of having an internet friend. Today it's much different.

The anonymity has been pulled out from under us like a tablecloth at a magic show,

and our photos are attached to pretty much everything we post, you know, unless you're on Reddit.

But whether you're scrolling Twitter or Instagram, you have those people. The people you've never

met before. The people who have had enough funny tweets come across your timeline that you finally

...