Before smogon was smogon and showdown was where people went, there were IRC bots. These bots were damn near exactly what you have on showdown except it was pure text and no flashy visuals. The only flashy thing about it was the ability to change the color of the battle font. These battles happened in a single IRC channel, and everyone's battles occured at the same time. The only way you could tell yours from someone else's was the aforementioned selection of font colors. Meaning you could watch every single battle that was taking place at once. The creators of smogon had a channel called #rs. It was likely something different before the Ruby/Sapphire era, but that's when I began the competitive scene. Due to the actual battling channel having no chat privileges, the smogon crew inhabited #rs to talk strategy and other things. From memory I believe the main battling channel had #rs tagged as a topic so new people would know where to join. There was no website, no standard movesets and whatnot posted anywhere really. What happened is people would talk to other people in #rs and/or see what others were doing during battles, and copy what worked.
Early on in the RS era, I had successfully made a team that baton passed boosts to Exploud, which worked because the main phazer, Skarmory, only had access to roar and not whirlwind. The follow week I noticed some widely regarded "elite" battlers, as well as randoms that saw what was happening, attempting to use Exploud. I spoke with a few people about what natures I used, what I had trouble killing, what happened when I can't pass to it, and so on and so forth. In return, I'd ask people in the channel what they found successful as well.
Point is, if there was no website that told you how to best utilize whatever pokemon you wanted to use, word of mouth would take over and shit would be overused anyway.
