> can imagine just how anonymous the internet was then.

It wasn't that anonymous on SA though. Once you paid your :tenbux: then the site admins (incl. Lowtax) had your PII, assuming you used your own credit-card, ofc.

I don't recall Lowtax et al. ever doxxed any of their own forum patrons, at least not any in good-standing, but I assume fear from the possibility of being doxxed for being an asshat on the forums kept enough people in-line - not the fact it was $10 in 2001 (hmm, that's $27 in today's money, according to https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ - but that doesn't seem right to me)

Lowtax wasn't anonymous either... My friend looked up his number and address with whois and we called him, then went to his apartment parking lot and bought t-shirts out of the back of his car. Sometime circa 1999.

You have to press the calculate button. It reports it as around $16.

Derp! Wow, yes... Thank you.

You're correct, although I still get the parent poster's point.

You weren't anonymous on SA in the sense that law enforcement couldn't find out who you were, or whatever, unless you used a burner credit card and... never used your own wifi, or whatever.

But you were anonymous in the "Google search results" sense that nobody was expected to publicly share their real names or faces, and what you posted on SA and its ilk didn't necessarily follow you around for the rest of your life.

They did respond to plenty of warrants asking for information on users, including from the secret service