I feels ya buddy. I just said to someone yesterday that it's kind of a Law Of The Internet that it got ruined basically a short time after the subjective "you" onboarded, and the longer you're here, the more grumpy you get about it. This is true of me and anyone I know who thinks of this place as a figurative home.

There are endless high-profile examples, such as the time that Stephen Fry, having just recently achieved some major follower milestone (million I think), got very upset about being called out on some faux pas or other - in retrospect, a minor offense and a failed attempt at cancellation, if it was even an attempt - and decided to leave the internet, with this long almost-crying essay about the internet he had gotten onto, which made it sound like some sort of Victorian fairy glade where the air was laden with cocaine and he got to make out with Oscar Wilde, vs the stinky plebian unsubtle and bestial place it had become. It was an overreaction worthy of Chris De Burgh, and one he obviously didn't follow through on in the long run. But even as I was loling at the tone of his rejection letter, I also recognized an emotional stream of my own in it.

I have a somewhat different view of AOL than you. I was firmly middle class, neither monied elite nor genuine nerd, but my family could afford to buy me a C64 and as a young adult I bought myself a 386, strictly for the fun of it. I also started out on BBSes and was a sysop on both 8-bit and 32-bit systems, but I did have an uncle who logged me into the local U's mainframe as a kid, and I found my way to the early, command line internet before the WWW was born, though I mostly just hung out on irc, I was no leet hackz0r.

But once the winsock era ramped up and that "invasion" of AOL kiddies happened, I have to say, I had a very good few years in alt.music.ween as well as some groups centred on my local community. a.m.ween had quite a few great contributors from AOL, actually, so for that group, it was a net benefit. The band also pioneered direct interaction by participating in the group, at one point doing an all-request livestream (this is maybe 2000 I'm talking about, very early, and it was awesome) which newsgroup members voted on. Deaner, the guitarist, was especially active in internet fan engagement, and would phone in from on tour using AOL as an easy onramp. Nothing salesy or memey, he'd just do your typical "tour diary" letters like any band of the time might have done for a fan club, which we more or less were.

Perhaps places with too wide a net, such as rec.pets.cats, took the brunt of it in ways that niche bands or interests didn't have to. I recall a great war between them and alt.tasteless, many casualties.

I was also put in a room once, this would be in the late 90s, to see if I could in any way help a woman who had complained some time previously to local media about porn on early usenet, and it ended with a newsgroup created by trolls called alt.sex.herlastname; mostly I had to reassure her, after looking at the content of the group, that there was no troll army keeping tabs on her movements, it was a totally dead group that someone probably created in a moment of f-you energy and never looked at again, but the internet never forgets.

Not that I could have done more than that anyways, other than maybe send emails to every usenet admin I could find begging them to blacklist the group. But that incident, which I could definitely dig up some receipts about but I don't want to revive that part of her life for her, there are some undeniable resonances with Gamergate, are there not? The truth is, this place is exactly the same place it always was, just bigger and more dangerous, and that was inevitable when people came.

That being said, I would say that there was definitely a pre-capitalist Internet, which had a certain culture and - say it with me - netiquette. I don't know, and could not begin to speculate, where the line is between the pre-capitalist internet and now. If I was going to put forward a candidate for when Capitalism "arrived" here, I think one good candidate would be, whatever day it was that Joshua Quittner handed over mcdonalds.com to the McDonalds corporation.