that's really interesting to hear. so you're saying people got fatigued once "Web 2.0" was becoming a thing? (not that Web 2.0 started with social media, but I think it blew up in the early 2000s at least).
Well. We Bitnet Relay people got bored by the taste-, and faceless IRC crowd suddenly appearing. What a bunch of uncultivated newfags they were. The ultimate watering down of internet quality however were the AOL and Compuserve CDs popping up everywhere and connecting the plebs to the holy lines. These people even didn't uudecode alt.binaries.tasteless... /s
See how that works? ;-)
Oh, and AOL and Compuserve were better when they came on floppies.