I'm sorry, were you actually around during the era that "flamewar" was coined. Making people mad on the internet has been around forever. It's just that now we're stupid enough to associate our internet personas with our real life ones. If people could have showed up to your door in the 90s they would have. They certainly threatened to. Tracking down people on 4chan used to be a past time in the early 00s. Perhaps we weren't on the same early internet.