Before the internet was so centralized, it was difficult to deplatform people. For example, you can't really ban anyone from IRC, or from Usenet, where I spent

Before the internet was so centralized, it was difficult to deplatform people. For example, you can't really ban anyone from IRC, or from Usenet, where I spent a large amount of my forum time until the early 2000s. We dealt with trolls and hateful people like we always did, we just ignored them. And that worked fine. I suppose the difference nowadays is the sheer volume of noise that can be generated just due to the number of people online, which makes shifting through the noise difficult enough that the noise can start to seem like consensus.