The internet was better in the past and that had nothing to do with the types of people using it. It could have been used by alien circus clowns and it would ha

The internet was better in the past and that had nothing to do with the types of people using it. It could have been used by alien circus clowns and it would have been better. Why? Because it hadn't been weaponized yet. Nobody important realized in the 90s that there was going to be an upcoming war for attention span, for control of the narrative, for monitoring of the population, or for industrial/state-sponsored espionage. And it all was going to happen on the internet. So if you ran across a discussion on X, you could poke around, find some scholarly articles on X written by, well, scholars. Not by scholars who were paid off or were looking to become the next internet superstar. So no, people didn't magically agree on facts, but there wasn't this endless chasm of belief-reinforcing bullshit that there is today, either. You could just go look stuff up. There's another, larger discussion about whether it's good or bad, how to sew a silk purse from a sow's ear and the rest of it. But a difference in quantity can result in a difference in quality. Simply having more and more people come online and do things changed the nature of the net.