>>82126153
when we're talking usenet we're talking late 80s-early 00s for the most part. most of the people on usenet and the internet in general back then were geeks. either you were going to your friendly university computer lab as a student and accessing usenet because in theory it was a useful resource for digging up info or meeting people from across the world, or you had your own computer and dialed in to a bbs that had a nntp gateway or a regional internet provider, or maybe even your friendly university's telco system + vax. anyway, there wasn't anyone truly "normal" on the internet back then, since being a nerd hadn't yet been normalized to the extent that it has been. there weren't very many extreme schizos, but there were definitely some, like one d***k s***t, tho compared to today's schizos he was quite benign. lots of high-functioning autists though
the big problems for usenet came during the 90s during the dotcom boom, when there was a flood of retards via aol's shiney new nntp gateway, and alt.binaries blew up. the retards made the signal:noise ratio go to shit (much of usenet was unmoderated), and turned usenet from a place to discuss things to the biggest warez and pr0n sharing mechanism that the world had ever seen, tho later it would be dwarfed by bittorrent
the time period you're talking about is an entirely different epoch, when myspace peaked and then died, and I'll agree that was more of a normie era, though you still had to have a fair amount of intelligence and curiosity to make your way around, and you still needed some fairly expensive gear and connectivity to get onboard. when internet access became democratized via smartphones and ubiquitous cheap connectivity, and control over what users saw was wrested from them by algos, everything well and truly went to shit, and here we are
