As an obvious example, we had far better and well-mannered discussions and debates on covid matters here than anywhere else I experienced.
Whereas I thought it had become an echo-chamber and left the forum as a result. (People may say this was no bad thing.) The conversations about Covid if one happened to agree with lockdowns- or, in my case, at least understood that my island’s closed border gave me a quality of life not available elsewhere- were not particularly friendly.
Anyway.
Forums (fora?) have always been more nuanced, as it’s a long form of communication. You’ll get your vitriolic arguments and your flame-wars, yes, but generally people will take the time to type out coherent arguments even if one thinks the other person is spouting nonsense. We saw similar with early forms of social media, the likes of LiveJournal and Wordpress. Of course forums are often actively moderated which helps. Forums without moderators can be more “interesting”- just look at the car crash that is KiwiFarms.
Twitter and Facebook are all about the clicks. And the quickest way to click bait someone is to make them angry, and give them more stuff to make them angry about. Twitter used to be fairly sensible- robust, but you could have a conversation- but I left it in about 2017 as I felt it had just become a toxic cesspool. Clearly Elon Musk wasn’t going to improve that. Instagram used to be a really good photoblog site but now it’s the same as TikTok, serving up an endless diet of dashcam rage and teenage girls dancing in their pants.
The internet is general has changed from being what you want to look at to what big corporations want you to look it. Its still possible to do the former but getting more difficult as time goes on.
The social media giants don’t particularly care what you look at, so long as you’re looking at it on their platform. Which is why none of them seem willing or able to clamp down on hate speech, false information, or even the sharing of images of child sexual abuse. Twitter in particular don’t seem to mind if you’re looking at child sexual abuse as long as you’re looking at it on Twitter.