Mea culpa. I just read the heading and remembered the old times when they told us that Lycos finds everything.
The author only briefly mentions Usenet. That was great fun at the time though.
I have an internet guide from 1995 which describes Usenet and its varying focuses and levels of seriousness in great detail, including an extended section on trolling which concludes memorably by explaining that people that do this "probably have a very small penis (especially the girls)", which could just as easily have been written about Twitter yesterday.
Every time I read something about how social media is changing everything, I remember that it pre-dated the web by a decade...