I agree with most of what has been said already in this post and I've been in much the same situation for years now. I've coasted through high school while playing video games and wasting my time. Fortunately a lot of my wasted time was on text-based MUDs, so at least I worked on my keyboarding. I've even spent most of my college career doing only what's needed and spent most of my excess energy on MMOs and MTG. I've wished that I had better discipline, or habits, or something as I'd piss away hours reading reddit.

I believe now I have finally reached a point where my time on the internet has begun to shift to be more productive than wasted. It wasn't easy to get here and my reason for change is rather domain specific. I found something that was relevant to a skill I wanted to train, that I enjoyed doing, and that brought short term fulfilment with the promise of greater long-term fulfilment.

For me it was working on the Hubski Enhancement Suite. Javascript makes it so easy to hack something simple and Hubski is the only online community I've been involved with for longer than a few months, so it made sense. Seeing what I was capable of and something to aspire to (Reddit Enhancement Suite) gave me a clear path. Now I see all my friends spending their time (and hogging the network) playing MOBAs at school and I'm more pumped to check out the new Xamarin release.

My wife has had a similar journey with her art. She started by making fan art on deviantArt but she didn't like the community there. One of her friends was a furry and invited her to make an account on a furry art site. She found that the people she met there were more supportive of her as an artist and moved beyond simple fan art. Now she gets paid to make things like animated avatars and character reference sheets. She even has contacts in some of the animation studios in Vancouver.

Overall, I think kleinbl00 said it best. The internet is what you make of it.