I'm an old BBS user and the generation that saw the world turn to the commercializing Internet in real time. From a message forum perspective, what kept intell

I'm an old BBS user and the generation that saw the world turn to the commercializing Internet in real time. From a message forum perspective, what kept intelligent discussion and thoughtfulness/patient writing going was simply that there was a higher barrier to entry (knowledge) and fewer people. It was also not easy to use the phone to write a message, much less do much of anything online. You had to use a PC with a modem, at a minimum. And FIDOnet etc required a BBS that had a batch job to go off and sync messages. Today it takes three seconds to post a short message that millions will read. You see celebrities do this all the time, saying something regretful because it was on a whim. But Reddit is full of low quality, quick replies that self-referentially try to re inforce or repeat meme joke. Or mic-drop dismiss someone else's perspective. Almost no Reddit forum isn't full of what feels like spam, but isn't - it's people expressing their dumb one-liner feelings thinking it's funny. And apparently it's hilarious because it gets upvoted leading most threads to be completely unusable for information or challenging ideas. Then there are the 'hot takes' with incredible speculation and confident views that aren't challenged intelligently but could do. I do miss older times HN is the closest thing to them, but suffers from a lot of anonymity. I recognize perhaps 3-4 users in all the time I've been here.