FFXI was still early in the days of MMO's. The only decent games at or before FFXI was EQ1, Ultima Online, Asheron's Call, Lineage, etc.

The community was young and learning.

Now days in FFXIV, you have more veteran MMO players playing the game than new people who are new to MMO's. Very few of the people playing FFXIV have never played an MMO before. And very few people playing FFXIV never played ffxi (most did play ffxi that was the appeal of coming here in the first place).

Also back in 06 most people didn't even know you could do voice chat. People were playing on pentium 4's.