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I really doubt that people have overall become more contentious and disrespectful. It's just that, with social media and the Internet generally, it's so much mo

I really doubt that people have overall become more contentious and disrespectful. It's just that, with social media and the Internet generally, it's so much more visible. People ranting about this and that were always there, but you had to go out of your way to hear them. Back in the day, many Usenet groups were OK during summer, when only professionals were online, and suddenly became toxic in the fall, as students went online. And then, with the first public ISPs, they became toxic all year. That is, Eternal September. So we can choose where to hang out. If we want interesting discussions, we can frequent highly moderated sites, such as HN and professional subreddits. If we want toxicity, we can frequent the chans or whatever. Edit: I ought to have said that some "toxic" sites may be useful for finding stuff that's suppressed elsewhere. If for no other reason, to know what's happening.

arh68 7y ago
I agree. There used to be many bars/restaurants/clubs, and you wouldn't naturally bump into the clubs you disagree with. There even used to be a ton of phpBBs/vBulletins out there. Even different subreddits/imageboards mostly keep to themselves (sometimes a bit too much..), raids notwithstanding. But there's only one Facebook. I guess the network effects give monopolies such strong advantage, we tend to end up with maybe 1 or 2 of each kind of social network (Reddit is the exception, with N subreddits). It forces All Kinds together. If there were real competition, we wouldn't be so often confusing deplatforming with denying speech (IMO; the line gets blurry). I think HN has mostly dodged this issue for the most part through persistent moderation, niche userbase, & people usually assuming good faith.