[MoeDrippins]

Depending on what you mean exactly by "in the past", part of the issue is the people that had usenet available to them at a given point in time. Early on, it was the rare individual that could get access to it at all, and those that could were the geeky nerdy guys (I count myself among those, by the way, just not as smart), and the ones that even WANTED to if they could were the elite of that small group.

Too, there simply WAS no such thing as SPAM (as we know it now) then.

So what you see now is largely an artifact of the ubiquity of access.

IMO.