Dialogue - that's funny. It seems to be a feature of anonymous, or quasi-anonymous, communication networks that any attempt at a serious discussion gets overloaded or sidetracked by trolls or would-be comedians. Izzy is not unique - he fits into a class of would-be experts who post long treatises someone else wrote and no one reads, and won't (or can't) carry on an intelligent (or even courteous) discussion about those posts.
I read on the web (so it must be true) that this month is the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, which took the internet out of the hands of academics and professionals and opened it up to the public (or at least to anyone with a cable-tv account). There was computer communication before that, but bulletin boards accessible by dial-up acoustic modems were easy to police. There were also email servers, soon accessorized with newsgroup servers - and that's about where and when the troublemakers, idiots and trolls broke in.
Newsgroups are a way of presenting a hybrid of bulletin boards and email in a topic-based hierarchy with techie-sounding names like comp.arch.386 (concerned with c0mputer architecture of the 80386 microprocessor), for example, or non-tech topics like rec.photo.misc (miscellaneous topics in recreational photography). An infamous newsgroup that I participate in is rec.skiing.alpine, which was composed of a couple of hundred regular posters until one of them started acting badly, which devolved into lost jobs, death threats, and eventually involved police and the courts. Even though most online accounts no longer offer direct newsgroup access, the fossilized skeleton of that group is visible through a google www application (naturally) here --
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rec.skiing.alpine