That's well after the great AOL flood happened. Which was mostly on Usenet and mailing lists.
If you weren't there of course it sounds just like a bunch of jerks being jerks, but really it was pretty horrible. Once AOL gave out Internet access to all of its users, the signal to noise ratio on Usenet and many mailing lists went to crap. Usenet never really recovered and became mostly a place for binary distributions of questionable legality, rather than discussions.
In the long run of course more people on the Internet made the web what it is today, and for a short while it heralded cheap, high performance home internet (which then stagnated at least in the US.)
Look, the whole AOL thing is old news and I pretty much never bring it up unprompted. But the author brought it up. And he misunderstood why the flood of AOL addresses on the Internet in the mid 90s was a bad thing. It wasn't just because aol.com was ubiquitous. It was that the aol.com email address usually signified an ignorance of Internet norms, technology, etc.
Pre-AOL, most people on the Internet were either there because they were at a college (student or faculty), or because they purposely sought out a provider which usually wasn't advertised or widely known.
Really AOL is to blame for giving their users access to this new place without telling them any of the etiquette of that place. It's like WalMart buying country club membership for all of its customers without letting them know they need to step up their normal attire.
