> It used to be that anybody could post anything on the Internet.

This was never the case. We had occasional law enforcement contact back in the 90s when I ran a gaming vBulletin board in high school. Your IP was trivially traced to a physical landline location and VPNs were in their infancy, and Facebook.com didn't get HTTPS by default until well into the 2000s (after https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firesheep).

Section 230 protects the ISPs and websites from liability, not the posters. It made it safer to host potentially actionable user-generated speech at scale, not harder.