I remember when the internet was primarily shock videos and Newgrounds flash animations, and really crappy expages raw HTML webpages with flaming GIF animations

I remember when the internet was primarily shock videos and Newgrounds flash animations, and really crappy expages raw HTML webpages with flaming GIF animations. That internet was horrible. It was filled with goatse, tubgirl, lemonparty, crush videos and much more. The internet today doesn't have that. But it is politicized. And just like mainstream media control of the politics has created a race to control platforms and communities. The internet has fracturous communities that break down into camps of people who are collectively gas-lighting one another. And in spaces where there is an established groupthink - anything that questions that groupthink is immediately a threat to the entire ecosystem of that space. And so the term "troll" has come to mean "anyone that doesn't agree with the groupthink." Yesterday someone suggested that I was a traitor to my country and would be hunted down because I fact checked a group hysteria. I've been called everything under the sun and have received all sorts of threats. But in that community I'm the one who is labeled a troll. (I've been criticized, and even temporarily banned from HN on the premise that I was a troll. In that case, I had been explaining and defending the Chinese case for their sovereignty over territory in the South China Sea. It was not bearable on this forum.)