Originally, the Internet (including, but not limited to, the World Wide Web) was a place where nobody was interested in who you were as a person. It was and is geared towards structuring and disseminating knowledge.
In that sense, the entire somesphere is a tumor to the Internet.
That's a very tunnel vision view of the early web. You're ignoring BBS's, AOL, usenet, IRC, etc. which were all created with the explicit purpose of people connecting and talking to other people. You can go even further back to things like Community Memory and the Homebrew Computer Club--computing has firmly been embracing people connecting to other people since the early days.
Sure you could connect with people, but you wouldn’t connect with Firstname Lastname, you would connect with some nickname that you were associating with some cool stuff they had written about.
It was not inherently about people, it was about what those people managed to bring into virtual existence that was interesting, and it was that you wanted to connect with.
In that sense, the entire somesphere is a tumor to the Internet.