Despite all the nostalgia for the "utopian" early days of the internet, things could get pretty nasty.
Case in point: the Meow Wars of 1996-98, a mass shitposting "flame war" on Usenet, the biggest online forum of the era, in which the Beavis and Butthead newsgroup effectively managed to cripple the entire website through a coordinated trolling campaign.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meow_Wars?wprov=sfti1#