The world has gotten a lot worse in the past decade+ which is fueling a lot of unhappiness which then spills over into internet culture. If we take that out of the equation the internet and gaming culture have gotten a lot better.
Usenet for example, which was a midpoint between BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) and the modern forums and social media, was a cesspool of bickering and bile, just a step up from Obi Wan's "wretched hive of scum and villainy". It was a much more freewheeling "live and let insult" culture than the modern internet, where for the most part people go out of their way to be nice to each other.
This was back when trash talking was big in basketball, and it was similar to that culture - everyone insulted everyone not in their inner circle and nobody got too upset about it - instead of getting upset we would just think up a better insult. I'm exaggerating, but not by much.
We've left the Wild West of the internet behind - even 4chan is a pale imitation of those days, except for the technological improvements that have led to the proliferation of images and videos. This is a much more civilized age.
I find the irony here startling - it's the old timers, those of us who have been called every name in the book, my own personal favorite being labeled a "Douchebag from Mars", who are jaded and treat the recent improvement in culture as a nice surprise, while the young people are shocked by the "terrible" nature of the internet and decry the anonymity that encourages it, not realizing that it was FAR worse back in the Wild West days.
These days 4chan is known for being "lawless", but back in the day the entire internet was lawless. We just had to do all of our bad behavior through text - there was no goatse.cx (though that emerged directly out of the culture of the time).
But really, we didn't take the internet nearly as SERIOUSLY then as people do now, who treat it as more important than their "real lives". For us, the internet was always separate from traditional reality, a place where we went to experiment and let loose - for many to explore their "dark side". This was also far before corporations had much presence on the internet and government spying was nearly nonexistent, so people had no pressure to "uphold their reputation".
The problem is that the internet has become so ubiquitous, so surveilled, where everybody knows everything about everyone that nobody can just relax. Nobody can relax when everyone is always watching. There is NO PRIVACY on the modern internet, something that very rarely is mentioned by so called "internet critics". Combined with the ever increasing importance of the internet this is a recipe for cultural disaster.
There was a lot more roleplaying back in the day, real roleplaying, not the modern version that merely describes a leveling/upgrade system, where people would take on an alternate persona. There was an entire genre of multiplayer game, the object-oriented MUD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOO devoted to actual roleplaying.
People frequently took on different personas on Usenet, on forums, and in games - a practice being actively destroyed by Facebook and Twitter. For all of their good practical points, Facebook and Twitter have made the internet really fucking boring.
There's a certain culture clash between old-timers who have a lot of appreciation for the Wild West days and internet newcomers who treat the internet as an extension of their meatbag lives, and who all too frequently don't understand what they've lost when all eyes began watching them, since everyone who has no memories of the 1980s or before has never lived in a non-surveillance state.
