Generally, people weren’t dicks or trolls online quite as much at the time. The internet wasn’t for everyone in 2001. Most people got their news from TV. I had a family member call me to turn on the TV.
The lack of decency part was how quickly the anti-Arab sentiment came out of the woodwork. With a lot of people still sort of attuned to it from the first Iraq war, it was easy for a lot of people to fall back into that. Tons of racist cartoons and photoshoped images sent around, mostly by email. Lots of email forwards. To be fair, people were extremely pissed, and since it was not a nation-state doing this, it was hard to have someone to blame in the traditional sense.
But, in general, people were more shocked and terrified. Especially as the anthrax stuff happened a few weeks later, rampant speculation and conspiracy theories ramped up. All of that “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” started within days. A lot of “woah, I can’t believe it” stuff. It took a few days before things got back to normal.
I found a popular thread from the day of 9/11 here if you want to look at it: https://m.slashdot.org/story/20235
Most of it isn’t all that different from what you would see today but I should warn you that there are some “edgy humor” trolls using slurs that you’ll run into early on.
The Internet was awesome before 9/11/01
Now any idiot can use it.
The death of the Internet started in 2004, when Facebook launched, and fucking died in 2007 when the iPhone launched.
No idea, I only used the internet for messenger with people I knew irl
