Usenet was prevalent in those days for those who had internet, which probably meant a lot of academic institutes (and then those of us who had 2400 baud modems)

Usenet was prevalent in those days for those who had internet, which probably meant a lot of academic institutes (and then those of us who had 2400 baud modems). So it would make sense that like-minded people would subscribe to those news feeds. I'm not a social media expert, but with mastadon, blue sky, discord, even reddit (although perhaps the latter is now on a downward spiral; slashdot used to be one such too) with their specialised servers/forums etc, maybe there are still high signal-to-noise forums (HN is probably one such)