Freezone: ePals
Freezone.com was a website meant for kids founded in the mid-‘90s in Seattle, with a charismatic zine-aesthetic prevalent on the web at the time and kid-targeted information articles about music and movies, quizzes, HTML learning guides and an advice column. It allowed kids to participate directly on the site, live, with bulletin boards, chat rooms, and ePals connector. Unlike other parts of the web, Freezone was actively monitored by adults, this news article implying that these monitoring services cost the company up to $100,000 a year. But kids asking other kids to be their internet girlfriends or boyfriends were fair game in the ePals page, as you’ll see in the chaos below.
Update: I have updated this page to take away the text copied from the archived page above, because I believe it might have been setting off some very specific spam filters. I mean, it’s pretty spammy, if you take a look for yourself. But I think it’s also being misconstrued as something super-dark. I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me, and I feel a bit naive.