Anyone with a computer and a phone line could host a BBS, and it was entertaining to call all the BBS's within the local dialing area. Enterprising individuals created the FIDOnet , where computers would save mail, then call a central location in the middle of the night to send and retrieve e-mail. The system worked surprisingly well, and people were able to communicate quite effectively even their e-mail was updated just once a day. The idea for a program that took its commands from an e-mail instead of the keyboard allowed automated handling of the administrative overhead involved in subscribing and unsubscribing users. A typical program such as listserv or Majordomo could handle echoing the same message to thousands of people.
Mailing lists are still popular, and the main listserv site hosts quite a bit of traffic.
General-interest groups became flooded with inane posts. One stunt that made the national media occurred when the regular posters of alt. It was a lot of fun, and I still check out rec.arts.movies.current-films to see if the consensus on a movie is favorable. You can still troll for flames, too. The post generated 36 messages over 11 days before the thread died out.