Darniaq discusses Black September over at his blog. Black September being the month in 1994 when AOL gave its users full access to teh intarweb. He compares the reaction of us pre-94 grognards to music fans, horrified when the hoi polloi discover their favourite band. The comparison is, frankly, a touch tendentious.
If the analogy were apt, then I would agree with Darniaq. I remember, when reading Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in my teens, being revolted by the elitism of the summation: that by the time the common herd have discovered a position, the cognoscenti must move on.
But as one poster (Brask) suggested, the 1994 influx destroyed the character of the thing that was there.
The music analogy is easily dismissed: if I like a band, and they have a huge hit, it actually impacts very little upon me. Unless the nature of the band itself changes, all that alters is my view of myself as risque and edgy. The internet itself was (with apologies to Timothy Burke for my rampant qualifier use) essentially and fundamentally altered by AOHell, 1994.
It's not a musical-tastes-type thing. It's an immigrant thing. Many of us enjoy small, community-type sites. F13, for example, is a small and extremely offensive, argumentative village. People wander in, pick fights, and are thrown out again if they breach the incredibly lax standards of the village. These newcomers are outnumbered. The web felt like a small city. You didn't know most people, but you came across the same names, here and there, on occasion. Almost everyone knew the customs. Some people had lived there or on the BBS outskirts for a decade. There was etiquette and there were traditions.
When AOHell came to pass (in fact, they made the change in several tranches), the newcomers outnumbered the citizens. Like the Greeks in 1450's Constantinople we went from protected and privileged few to minority in a very small time. All the rules that made the exchange of information and ideas smooth and efficient (how to reply to emails, when not to cross-post, never to top-post, never to "me-too-body-copy" ) and so on were largely indefensible positions, the restatement of which went from something one gently did to the odd newcomer, to a request to call artillery on your own position, such was the response from the offended, largely anti-intellectual masses.
Hmm, that makes F13 Mystras. I am not sure that is very apt.
I know this is a declension narrative. I am aware that came after has huge advantages: I like being able to buy stuff from amazon and dabs; to book my holiday and quickly find car insurance. But if Greeks still visit the Hagia Sophia, almost six centuries on, and think how much more beautiful it all was before the barbarians came, then we're allowed 12 years of remembering the good old days, surely?