I was a loner who had a lot more friends on irc than I ever would in high school. Yet things have changed. First of all, I've changed. I'm still a geek, I still spend far more time on irc than most people would consider healthy, but i'm not depressed anymore, and i'm not angry. Well, frankly i think i just grew out of it.
Most people do, eventually.
But more amazing is that, since then, i've become friends with some of those very people i used to hate. Sure, i still have majorly different interests from most of them, and i think a lot of them are closed-minded, but i've come to discover that most of them really aren't bad people. It's odd how some of them have done some horrible things, yet as individuals, they're actually very nice. Sure, there are definately some true scumbags there. But not as many as you would think.