Is the Internet Meaner or am I Just Older?

It was a simpler time. Before Facebook. Before the iPhone. Most desktop PCs still ran Windows 98, and people rarely sent me messages telling me how ugly I was.

I’m talking about the year 2001 when I played one of the sidekicks and occasional fill-in co-hosts on a cable TV network called TechTV. If you lived in San Francisco at the turn of the millennium, you might remember that the network started as ZDTV from Ziff-Davis, a well known tech publisher. Execs at the fledgling network covered the city with billboards advertising a cable TV station that most…