Re: "The internet may well be the root cause of today's problems…"
"There was a time about 1996 that distributed news groups were the melting pot of discussions on all topics - both moderated and unmoderated. It was a jungle - especially the ALT groups. You quickly learned about your own comfort zone."
I guess I'm more used to Usenet as being the file sharing channel of choice before Napster appeared along with all the evolutions of P2P sharing. For me, the discussions were all realtime on IRC using Efnet and Dalnet servers.