I see what you mean. Back then, the internet was an exciting place with rules you had to learn to be accepted at all in certain communities. The internet was sm

I see what you mean. Back then, the internet was an exciting place with rules you had to learn to be accepted at all in certain communities. The internet was smaller then and required a certain level of technical knowledge to properly navigate it. This level acted as a filter against the most mundane most of the internet has become now. I remember sites like hell.com that were basically web experiments meets digital art installation. There used to be lots of trashy little pages and everything felt like the whole web was trying to find its identity. The feeling of meeting real people went away for me after my FidoNet days. You had to wait up to two days for a message from Canada to Germany to arrive. It was frustrating but it was great. Dial-up BBS' were all the rage before a regular geek could access it from home. Even FidoNet-Email-Gateways existed. So I guess every generation has its own frontier stories. For you, it was the internet, for me, it was dial-up BBS', for others it was disk swapping, building a simple computer from scratch or feeding paper strips to a warehouse-sized monstrosity. Still, it's pretty obvious that we as a whole of humanity are not prepared to converse civilly on a global scale.