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I am somebody who is very much intrigued by 00s vBulletin forums and 90s Usenet newsgroups. I know that the rationalist movement was pioneered by Robin Hanson with the Overcoming Blog and Yudkowsky's Sequences around 2006. Where did the proto-rationalists hang out prior to that?
I can't speak about the rationalist community, but growing up with Usenet was wild as were Dialup BBS's. It was the real frontier. You had people openly sharing Ted style manifestos (Bundy or Kaczynski, take your pick), protohacking guides (phreaking, wardriving, whatever) and early tradecraft guides like MIT's lockpicking guide and the Anarchist's Cookbook. There was other stuff too that is pretty much completely relegated to the darkweb nowdays like barely stealthed CSAM. No guardrails whatsoever.
To stumble across all of that as a teenager probably changed my life trajectory to a degree. Just in having an early understanding of what the human mind was capable of in both positive and negative ways.
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