I think this is missing a lot of recent behaviors that were not standard 30 years ago. Nowadays if you are on social media and you say the wrong thing you can get absolutely blasted by people.
I remember a sports journalist saying that after he criticized a player, his fan based spent a week trying to hack his social media account, spamming abuse in his DMs.
It was not standard either to call a persons employer to get them fired for saying something wrong.
I think the article is kind of overplaying its hand by extrapolating from a very limited metric to say that the internet was always bad.
> But the longer any conversation goes on, on virtually any platform, the more toxic it becomes
That's something of a restating of Godwin's Law.
Since Gab, Voat, Nextdoor and Usenet all came up similar, I'm going to call BS on this. The "Perspective AI" is probably what's at fault here, because there's a radical difference between these platforms.
I remember a sports journalist saying that after he criticized a player, his fan based spent a week trying to hack his social media account, spamming abuse in his DMs.
It was not standard either to call a persons employer to get them fired for saying something wrong.
I think the article is kind of overplaying its hand by extrapolating from a very limited metric to say that the internet was always bad.