This will sound ludicrous, on the face of it, however, you have not truly lived until you have experienced WebTV flame wars in their fire-walled forums.
There were no rules and no moderators.
Brutal.
Merciless.
Borderline criminal, sometimes.
Anything and everything goes.
Back in the mid-90s, I had a WebTV.
I’m still standing.
[and by God, I won]
;D
And there were the ALT forums of Usenet.
No man’s land.
This place is downright domesticated, compared to them.
Back in the 90s, I went into Usenet a few times.
If I’m remembering as clearly as I think, I did.
There were some forums back then that I entered on the WWW like the White Water area...
Ran into Jim there one early morning. We had been participating on the Prodigy WW BB at that time...
Good ol' alt.conspiracy (in the early days). Good times! Godwin's law originated there, if memory serves.
And alt.vacation.lasvegas, and...
FREEREPUBLIC EXISTED BEFORE BLOGS... son.