The Internet has never existed in a “pure” form. It has always been balkanised, with different groups of people mixing with themselves more or less oblivious to

The Internet has never existed in a “pure” form. It has always been balkanised, with different groups of people mixing with themselves more or less oblivious to the other groups around them. Information sharing in “the good old days” was often via Usenet, IRC, BBS or email. The networks that were important were the people you knew, and membership of an IRC channel was a privilege not a right. If you stepped out of line you would be warned and banned. Large groups were still easily moderated because the peak level of “firehose” traffic was still humanly consumable. There were career-affecting repercussions from misbehaving in, say, Scary Devil Monastery. You would lose access to your support base and have to fend for yourself. Information was mostly reliable, mostly because the level of expertise was high, the signal to noise ratio was high, and the chances were if you gave some advice there would be someone testing your claims and reporting back. The “denvercoder9” problem was always there of course. Stack Overflow and Quora have neither invented that problem nor solved it. Ultimately my rose-coloured nostalgia of the original Internet is that the level of expertise and interpersonal support was quite high, simply because non-academic access to the Internet was not easily available.