It just feels like weaponized Usenet from the mid-'90s, or almost every popular online forum since then. Multiplayer game communities even. They're like tinderboxes for negativity. Very small numbers of bad faith actors (griefers, trolls, scammers, spammers, or just plain assholes) can trivially derail entire communities. Even without people trying to screw everything up, plain old human nature, and the nature of electronic communications, can make it happen as well. It just takes a little longer.
Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.
Put another way, each flame begets one or more flames, whereas each good comment might get responses but maybe it stands on its own. Over time the signal to noise ratio of any forum tends to degrade to nothing as the forum becomes more popular because of this. Moderation, scoring systems, etc. can ameliorate this but in general the less specialized the forum, the worse it is. It's like entropy in that it only goes in one direction, it's just a matter of time and how much you can push back on it. Bad comments beget more bad comments, but good comments don't necessarily beget more good comments. And at some point, the ratio of bad comments to good comments drives away any potential good commenters and the event horizon is crossed and the forum dies. Or it lives on as a cesspool for whatever.
The difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs comp.os.linux (or whatever) in 1995 is that it's not specialists screaming at each other about which distro or programming language or OSS license is best (or worst). It's a much wider net of far less informed or rational people, encouraged to argue about infinitely dumber and less knowable or debatable stuff. It's like scammy clickbait, but for arguments rather than clicks. The other difference between Facebook and Twitter in 2020 vs online communities of the past is that Facebook and Twitter make money off of it. All this BS fuels "engagement" and keeps larger volumes of people posting and therefore revealing themselves to trackers and creating a stream of ad views for the platform owners. At some point I do think the toxicity of the platforms will start costing them users, but that doesn't seem to be happening anytime soon.