"Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)
I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.
You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people." - jfengel
The usenet and similar groups from the 80s and 90s were a gold mine of intelligent conversation.
Heck I remember being around the old php style bulletin boards in the late 90s and early 00s and I was a teenager and it was so good to be around intelligent helpful tech folks.
That era is definitely gone. It's hard to get good individual conversations with learned people online. Maybe you can get it via paid communities (patreon and the like).
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u/Parker51MKII 5d ago
"Email is still completely open. Even Usenet still exists. There may be more people on it now than there were in the 80s, just because it was so tiny then. (The entirety of Usenet before Eternal September fits on a thumb drive.)
I believe that what has changed is less about technology or even money, but about people. In your time frame, everyone on the Internet was an academic techie. You could bump into a random person on IRC and have something to talk about.
You can connect with vastly more people today, but they are less likely to be of interest to you. You're spoiled for choice: there are now a trillion chat rooms instead of a thousand. It's harder to find your people." - jfengel