@wjmaggos @amerika @blamellors @nam Kinda, sorta, not really.
Usenet and newsgroups are like NAS, only much larger, so the comparison is apt.
You can find people and interact with them, it’s just…different.
So far as creating a new account, it was much easier to filter the douches out, so there wasn’t a point in creating a new account just to be a troll.
Because everyone had to be somewhat computer literate to be on Usenet (or a BBS), users were competent in dealing with others.