20+ years isn't exactly "recently" in internet time.

And while early 2000s might be pushing it, in the 1990s, it was most certainly normal for people to put their home phone numbers in Usenet signatures. The internet was initially just this small subculture thing for nerds, generally not on the radar of anyone not wishing you well. Your employer wasn't there. Your parents weren't there. Your stalker wasn't there. Your insurer and your bank and your local PD weren't there.

And I hate to say this, but the privacy dystopia we now live in is largely of our own doing. We had a bunch of really naive ideas about how information wants to be free. It made for a couple of wonderful years, but then allowed bad actors to abuse every single bit of it. And the bad actors weren't exactly external: the companies were founded and staffed by techies who now lament the status quo.

yeah by 2000ish I really didn't see egregious opsec violations at all as a rule. the world described by the linked article doesn't really match my experiences.

if you were tech-savvy enough to blog, you were tech-savvy enough to have some clue about that stuff.

also, people weren't like, "liveblogging." they didn't have personal internet devices in their pockets. typical personal noncommercial blogging was people talking about stuff they did days or weeks ago. and even early platforms like Livejournal had visibility filters on posts; people kept the personal stuff friends-only

that was just my personal experience. i guess the author had a different one