Virtually all the ccurrent modes of online abuse were present in at least some form on Usenet and dialup networks by the late 1980s / early 1990s.
Content piracy to a much lesser degree as bitrates were so slow and expensive (though texts were fair game), but stalking, harassment, propaganda, bigotry, fraud, spam, etc., yes.
Keyword search of worldwide public content and metadata was not readily available, so the ability to stalk and harass both people and topics was vastly reduced compared to now.
(FidoNet existed, but it was not easy to perform a full-content search of it, compared to eg. mail-archive.com now.)
Kibo only grepped the newsgroups he subscribed to, and didn’t have a full UseNet pipe running all groups through grep (unless I misremember the history there).
The problem isn’t full-text search of a forum you’ve already signed up for.
Legend has it that if you include "Kibo" in your post to any of Usenet's more than 5,000 discussion groups, the all-seeing Kibo will respond to you.... [James "Kibo"] Parry spends about two hours per day as Kibo - tending a filter that collects any mention of "kibo" in any newsgroup.
