Did flat fee unlimited access ruin the net?

The internet was never better than in 1995 when AOL was 3 bucks an hour. Upper-middle class whites and asians used it almost exclusively.

Now it's overrun by shit and niggers. That monthly fee kept the riffraff out and made people use their online time wisely instead of wasting it.

Now every chat room is full of people who don't talk, staying logged in with bots. Every forum is full of spammers making 100 posts a day.

Funny, because AOL is what coined the term the September that never ended. Before that it was primarily academics with unlimited access. I remember being one of those September freshmen back in '89.

^* African Americans

>>2
I remember being one of those September freshmen back in '89.
You've been on the 'net this long? Tell me more! Did you used to dial up to those old fashioned BBSes? Did you lurk on USENET, and if so, what newsgroups did you peruse? Twenty years later, how do you feel things are now? Better? Worse?

>>4
Yeah, I used a couple BBSs. There was a space battle strategy game that I used to play, you'd get a certain number of moves per day, it was a bit like the Risk board game. They also had some primitive messaging and file downloads.

Mostly the internet was usenet and listservs back then. There were a number of archie servers that acted as the search engine for ftp sites, but it was hard to find stuff. I mostly hung out on alt.2600 and alt.sysadmin.recovery, occasionally a couple of the comp.* groups.

Some things are better these days, for instance it's much easier to find specific information. There's always been idiots, though the proportion seems higher these days, and the whole tl;dr sort of mentality kind of bothers me.

In 1989, I got my internet from the Uni toilet stall walls.  We had an actual computer local network but I had no computer with me at the city I went to for school.  Anyway, we even had nicknames on the toilet stall walls.  I started taping up cartoons and even a little porn pic when someone requested porn.  One building had a lavatory that was like /b/, because it was where fags would find each other and do each other in the stalls.

>>5
That was interesting. Thanks for sharing. I'm one of those "late bloomers" so I never really got a chance to go on real BBSs and experience USENET during its heyday, I would have been too young to even know what to do. But nevertheless, I am interested in the historical aspect of the 'net. I browse textfiles.com sometimes and all those old files from the BBSs are like a whole 'nother world.

>>7
Another aspect that I didn't mention is the old-school trolling, some of it was truly impressive, subtly laying the bait and then slowly reeling them in. Really good trolls could keep threads going for weeks, and it was generally well crafted debate with just a hint of insulting comments, but as it progressed you would be arguing about some of the craziest shit, it was glorious.

There was no internet in my country in 1989.

>>9
Canada?