It was. There were blogs, news, forums, shops. I was buying CDs off Amazon and computers on the Apple Store in 2000. I met my wife on a PHPBB forum. I read hours upon hours of research on the Noldor language on someone’s blog. Jon Stokes and John Siracusa (and many others) were posting on Ars, including what was becoming the future of MacOS. Anandtech was already there, even if it had a lot of room to grow and improve.

I really don’t know where you got that impression.