In the pre-Internet days, even if a forum was general access, it was usually community based, such as BBS systems (literally bulletin boards, where anyone could

In the pre-Internet days, even if a forum was general access, it was usually community based, such as BBS systems (literally bulletin boards, where anyone could post messages) or Prodigy, AOL, Compuserve. These communities generally comprised subscribers whose identity was known to the admins, and therefore even in a forum anyone could read, access was limited to known individuals, and people had a sense of community there, if not confidentiality. Let's hearken back to the olden days of Usenet, when every single message was transported from machine-to-machine, in the clear, and it was an essential feature of NNTP and the Usenet groups themselves that everyone could read every message and process them any way they saw fit. Usenet was helpfully indexed by topic, and so most sane posts went out already pre-sorted into the place where you'd want to search for them, but if you were a privileged user with a local Usenet feed, you could literally loop around the filesystem searching any term you wanted, because all messages and forums were plain files sorted into plain directories. A famous consequence of this openness, for example, was a talk.bizarre denizen by the name of "Kibo". One of the possibly-true rumors about this larger-than-life figure was that he exhaustively "grepped" Usenet for his name [pseudonym] and thereby found out immediately whenever he was mentioned by another poster, and therefore able to join the conversation with his acerbic wit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_%22Kibo%22_Parry Myself being introduced to Usenet around 1990, and MUD/MUCK/MUSH around the same time, I feel that it did not take long to condition me to living life "in the clear" and at least subconsciously knowing that everything I wrote had zero essential privacy. This was orthogonal to my home life, where my parents heard everything I said and did, or my religion, where there is an omniscient deity, who is thankfully full of goodness and kindness. For anyone who's paranoid or got their knickers in a twist about surveillance culture in this modern world, I suggest that you study Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders [there's an American remake, but please forget that]. Wings of Desire is a character study and a meditation on the possibility that ubiquitous surveillance doesn't need to be nefarious or evil, but perhaps, just maybe, has some benign and even beneficial effects on a cohesive society which tends to act in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wings_of_Desire