https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20201021/13230445554/content-moderation-case-study-handling-trolls-invading-community-1993.shtml

Summary: Before even the World Wide Web existed, Usenet was a popular gathering place for various niche communities to congregate. In many ways it was similar to what Reddit has become today, except that it was not controlled by any single company. Instead there were a number of newsgroups (like subreddits) and various news servers that could choose to carry whichever news groups they wanted.

Each news group was a specialized topic area, so there could be newsgroups for Bob Dylan’s music (rec.music.dylan) or computer languages (comp.lang.lisp). One newsgroup, started in 1990, was alt.tasteless which, as the name suggests, was a newsgroup for sharing offensive content. As its Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) noted: