Obviously, the internet has always been a toxic place, (the phrase “flame war” has been around for decades,) but it seems to have gotten so much worse over the last few years.

Ehhh. I don’t know. I think that there are ways in which it’s gotten better and ways in which it’s gotten worse over time.

I never really used any of the big social media sites that rely on automated recommendations to any degree. I understand that a major factor was that they measured user engagement, and what we found is that users are considerably more-engaged with content that enraged them than pretty much anything else. They tended to recommend material in that vein. I think that this discovery (as well as the ability to easily measure views on traditional-media sites) also encouraged ragebait to be posted.

That probably is a step back.

The Internet is a lot more diverse of a place than it once was. Back around, say, the 1990s, it was mostly university people, engineering types, stuff like that. A lot of countries had very few people online. You had fewer points of disagreement in a number of areas. But bring people with a wider variety of views into the situation, and you have more room for conflict, I think. I think that to some degree, that’s just intrinsic to having a more-diverse Internet, throwing all of humanity (or at least everyone that can more-or-less speak a language, which for English, is a lot of people) just means that people from different walks of life and social norms suddenly encounter each other, and, well, ideas clash.

I feel like there is a real sense in which very negative worldviews are more-prominent, maybe partly because of media — and not just social media, but traditional media — favoring more-alarmist articles and titles. Doomerism, like. That’s not so much directly toxic, but I think that people who feel stressed-out tend to be less-pleasant.

And the Internet permitted for forums and media chambers that are very much aligned with specific individual groups; it’s easier to live in echo chambers. The long tail — the Internet is so large and permits for so many niche environments that people don’t have to be exposed to broader views in society if they don’t want to. I think that that tends to let people demonize other people more-readily, if they don’t interact with them.

On the other hand:

Trolling (in the sense of trying to post provocative comments that would incite a flamewar) used to be very common on forums I’d used, like Slashdot. I don’t see much of that on the Threadiverse.

Usenet permitted crossposting articles to multiple Usenet groups. Clients tended to default to respond to all of these. This resulted in people trying to crosspost articles between groups that had users with conflicting views (e.g. comp.os.ms-windows.advocacy and comp.sys.mac.advocacy) to induce conflict. That’s not how current Lemmy handles crossposting — instead, replies go to one community. (PieFed does merge discussions into a single page, though.)

Widespread community moderation, which showed up on Reddit (and the Threadiverse, as it followed in its footsteps) has also improved things a fair bit. Usenet had efforts at tacked-on moderation that weren’t incredibly effective.