[neilv]

Regarding "old beliefs", a distinction I'd like to make...

My anecdotal impression is that early Internet overall was, on average, more enlightened and amiable than Internet today.

Our earlier experience: Nobody knows you're a dog, people are excited about the possibilities, people are open to meeting others around the world, people see others sharing just to share, people haven't been conditioned to intolerant extremism by a couple decades of propaganda, etc.

Today we'll meet intolerance and meanness in many places, and we might want to call that "old beliefs" in that they are outmoded, and want to think that the latest generation will be smarter and OK. But it's certainly not just older people being hostile. And some groups of older people (e.g., much of early Internet) already did it better in many ways, before society backslided. When kids are trying to repair society, they can find allies in older people too.

[neuroticnews25]

It's inherently hard to get along with people you don't share values with, and the culture war got extra vicious. But I wouldn't call the people throwing racial and sexual slurs more intolerant of the outgroup than the other side (the people deciding to get offended), if anything, they seem to have thicker skin when it comes to differences in worldview.

[dosisking]

Early Usenet was similar, there were no flamewars or anything like that.

[defrost]

MINIX having inherent design flaws was simply just a robustly expressed opinion ... it was nothing like the Meow Wars of '98.