LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers. I'd call that an artifact of the number of weirdos, along with the pre-Eternal September Internet world in general. The text orientation also helped. There were also a lot of highly knowledgeable people: professors and the like.
Eternal September started in 1993, according to wikipedia. It was definitely in common usage by 1995. LiveJournal started in 1999.
I get what you were trying to say, but you used the wrong signpost. The web remained a relatively civil place until the mid-00s; there were trolls and astroturfers, but they were mostly contained. The real culture shift happened with social networks and mobile, in the late ‘00s, when even people who couldn’t operate a desktop started to be online 24/7.
I think most people would just use “the advent of social media” or simply “before/after social media”. It might be cliché, but looking at the dates, that’s when things changed. FB started getting traction outside schools in 2005, Twitter appeared in mid-2006, the iPhone landed in 2007, and by the end of the decade the participants and tone of online conversations had changed irreparably.
LJ had a much more pleasant culture in terms of interacting with strangers.
I agree, and even when strangers were nasty there were less of them. It was manageable. I mean, sure, sometimes there were trolls or whatever. But it wasn't like social media today where there can be absolute deluges of bad-faith interaction.
