Here's a pretty good eulogy for the Usenet, from LWN in... 2005
Oh! Let's see what was popular in the Usenet!
alt.fan.*
aaron-carter
addams.family
adolf.hitler π€¨
austin-powers
bill-gates
bloodhound-gang
callista-flockhart
chocobo
courteney-cox
david-duchovny
dragonlance
dune
gillian-anderson
hello-kitty
jackques-chirac
jennifer-connely
jim-carrey
kevin-mitnick
lara-croft
lion-king.scar π
lucy-lawless
ninja-turtles
nutella
pam-anderson
power-rangers
pratchett
princess-diana
... wait what? STOP
Ok so this is basically 10 people generating 11k messages per month.
And a few of them are crossposts or spam, but most of them are legit.
Legit like, somebody opened a text editor, wrote original content, and posted it to the group.
A quick Google search indicates that apparently the Fred guy was active in the Usenet around 2005 and contributed to many flames. So maybe he made a few enemies? Or just one enemy with a lot of free time?
Remember, kids: don't get into useless arguments on the internet, you never know if the other person is a nutjob
@cfenollosa
I believe human attention works that way, specially as you get older and accustomed to some ways of interacting with your peers
There's a lot of crazy people there.
Not because of their political ideology, which I don't care about, but because they actively engage in conversations in their echo chamber and insult each other even though those they insult are the only ones who pay attention to them
I mean, what's the point??