There always was at least a small contingent of people with this kind of discourse, but as a creeky old timer, i started seeing the change around 2014-2015, when everything seemed to scale up.

I feel a lot of it came from consolidation. In the before times, forums were small, topic-focused, usually separate websites, and the mods either owned the site, or could directly speak to the owner.(its own separate drama, but you could always hop onto another site.

You always had poop throwers and trolls, but each of the poop throwers usually had a specific type or trigger that would set off. The trolls were usually of the kenM variety, where they stirred poop and it was contained to a degree.

I think most importantly, because people were going to a place for a specific topic, it kept people somewhat civil. People with different tastes and opinions came together under a shared interest, and it helped with dialogue.

There were a LOT of downsides. One which doesn’t get addressed enough was that people weren’t as accepting of others being publicly identifiable as LGBTQ+, disabilities or being on the spectrum (those forum sections was often soft- coded as “anime”). And those biases were often baked into these groups. But honestly, today, it seems like the internet is even more segregated than before. While now, everyone is more or less forced onto one of the big socials, they no longer go to “the car forum” or “the tabletop forum”, its the “car forum of a rigid narrow band of political partisan and identity that you have to prove allegiance to or you cannot talk about sparkplugs”.

While I’m happy a lot of folks with differing paths in life can find community online, I wish there were more spaces for cross pollination of those beliefs. And because all these differing threads are under the control of sterile, monoculture corporations with little connection to these forums, admin policy reflects a detached, nuanced free reality where all furrys are porn, POC content is regulated into POC only threads, and grandma’s automatically get shoved in with the alt-right. (I’m in no way calling grannies alt-right, but a LOT of recommendation sites will try to channel them into innocuous looking alt treads, so please protect and inform your grannies)

For now, I'm enjoying Lemmy, but it feels like a distillation of all the issues mentioned. Not only is everything hyper granular , but you can essentially filter everything you don’t like off the island. While that may give a sort of peace of mind, it doesn’t address the issue that theres a bunch of jerks here, or expose those jerks to anti-jerk ways, so lemmy is becoming an even more amplified echo chamber than reddit, but now a user doesn’t even have to know that there’s a mirror-verse of the same threads saying the same things, only filtered through ingroup opinions.

As late as the 2000s. The internet didn't always have the content it does now. News agencies took a long time to adopt it. Publications scientific or otherwise weren't all published online. Content aggregators hadn't scraped and indexed it all. Random pseuds hadn't social media profiles to digest and spit out their takes on it. None of that existed which has led us to this point where internet arguments are two doofuses frantically dumping the results of that on each other.

Believe or not. Once upon a time not long ago people on the internet didn't know everything. And generally they didn't pretend to. Much less get into the modern day logical fallacy warfare while firing volleys of "sources" at each other.

I dunno the 80s?