There's a piece you're missing in observing this phenomenon. It is difficult to motivate a group of individuals to "hate on" an individual, technology, or move

There's a piece you're missing in observing this phenomenon. It is difficult to motivate a group of individuals to "hate on" an individual, technology, or movement without a personal stake. As 4chan would say: "Not your personal army". The escalation process to this point is not quick. Instead, it is often cryptic, hidden, or complex to understand. When you see it laid bare, it can make a twisted sort of sense if you were there to see it build up; if you saw the initial back and forth vitriol between two parties. Once a tipping point is reached, the building tensions spills over into an adjacent community which then bandwagons. This is the point where parties start complaining about forum invasions, threats, and it spirals out of control. This is where it becomes visible outside the community. When you see the fighting from the outside, it is all noise and no signal. By this time all of the discussion that could be had between parties was already had. The time for legitimate arguments had been passed, and now it is only an emotional clash of personalities and communities. What you don't see are all the disagreements and intra-community conflict that never make it to that level and are resolved quietly. These greatly outnumber the knock-down, drag out fights, or at least they never escalate to media attention. I think what we're seeing now is not a fundamental shift in the state of online discourse, but rather the changing role social networks and "media outlets" that report on online controversy acting as a delayed amplifier which only fans flames and provides a place to appeal after all context is lost. Social media also enables bandwagoning and cuts across interests but tweets and hashtag oneliners cannot capture the nuance of the lead up to the current conflict.