They kind of were. You can think of every new wave of organisational fashion as the new frontier days.
Think like this - first you had dial-in BBSes. Those had frontier days, peak and fall.
After BBSes came Usenet and IRC. Same trajectory. Both are almost dead.
After that we had PhpBB &al. Internet reimplementations of BBSes. Now you didn't go to alt.rec.anime, you went to somethingawful.com and posted stuff that made you cringe in the years after you graduated high school. Or you made webpages on geocities full of scrolling blinking text and slow-loading gifs.
Then we started getting stuff like 4chan, facebook, twitter, tumblr. Very different from one another, but all appeared at about the same time, so I'm counting them as a new frontier.
Currently I'm suspecting that Discord will have the same place in people's hearts that IRC had back in the day. It's practically a very media-rich IRC clone with features geared towards 10-20 year olds who play video games, i.e. the exact group who would pine about the "good old days" in about another 10-20 years.
Basically, whatever technology happens to be young at the time you're in high school is the "frontier of the internet" for you. It may just be a collection of BBS webforums or an entire form of communication like IRC.
Think like this - first you had dial-in BBSes. Those had frontier days, peak and fall.
After BBSes came Usenet and IRC. Same trajectory. Both are almost dead.
After that we had PhpBB &al. Internet reimplementations of BBSes. Now you didn't go to alt.rec.anime, you went to somethingawful.com and posted stuff that made you cringe in the years after you graduated high school. Or you made webpages on geocities full of scrolling blinking text and slow-loading gifs.
Then we started getting stuff like 4chan, facebook, twitter, tumblr. Very different from one another, but all appeared at about the same time, so I'm counting them as a new frontier.
Currently I'm suspecting that Discord will have the same place in people's hearts that IRC had back in the day. It's practically a very media-rich IRC clone with features geared towards 10-20 year olds who play video games, i.e. the exact group who would pine about the "good old days" in about another 10-20 years.
Basically, whatever technology happens to be young at the time you're in high school is the "frontier of the internet" for you. It may just be a collection of BBS webforums or an entire form of communication like IRC.