4chan and most of what you described are much more recent than the period of Internet Jack is being nostalgic for. Obviously there were ton of assholes, trolls

4chan and most of what you described are much more recent than the period of Internet Jack is being nostalgic for. Obviously there were ton of assholes, trolls and bad people on Usenet and IRC before year 2000 and around that time, but everybody was more active so the "good ones" usually won and kept the community working. But it was an easier task because of raw numbers. Today...well, for more than a decade now, to do moderation at scale and emerge content you have to automate it, and Internet is now a giant business, so the incentives are totally different and so are the outcomes. There can be still a few happy islands where life is good as it was, and by number of users they are probably even bigger than ~2000 Internet, but they are now minority.