I went from not watching TV consistently to pretty much stopping altogether on my own starting in 2009 when I got a computer. I went from watching every interesting cartoon on at the time, to only keeping up with, off the top of my head, Doctor Who and the Shonen Jump Big 3, Ninja Warrior, Attack of the Show, X-Play, Smallville, and Supernatural, as far as the shows I really cared about go. Most of my computer time was split between HALOLZ (stopped checking them so I’d have a backlog on purpose), the Yugioh Abridged forum (started losing interest over a year ago, but still check it weekly), Channel Awesome (varies, depending on if there’s new content interesting to me), ScrewAttack (never kept up with them consistently until their recent return to Youtube, so no change there). Suppose my favorite was YGOTAS’s forum, because I was apart of the forum’s casual conversation thread dilligently for many years.
At first I was pretty much like “so this is a thing now? oh, ok.”. I never stopped watching cartoons anyway, so there no reason for me to be shocked. It’s just the next new big thing to me. Considering it’s so good, the fan following is no shock either, and even less considering I’ve been to anime cons before and after it.
I’ve had a decrease in interest in everything I was following before pone for one reason or another, reasons which would’ve happened anyway. As such, with Pony being the freshest, and not yet finding a way to cripple my daily interest in it since sticking around, it’s currently my top topic to check on the net. I’ve picked up a few replacements for what I’ve dropped, but since I haven’t had a good replacement for school yet, I have more free time than I’d like, with Pony taking up more of it than any other hobbies.
If not FiM, I’d just be spending most of the days online with some other show. I don’t have enough direct interaction with fans to say it’s changed my daily life, not to say that it hasn’t at all. As of this season, I participate in a “Bronies React” that takes fan submissions, and co-head a Facebook page for Bros that also go to my local yearly anime con, but neither have even gotten me any direct feedback yet.