i'm absolutely not the first person to notice this but there's something to be said about the chaos of modern web trying to fit every single person into a melting pot of a few conglomerated social medias vs. the old days of endless minutely specific divisions of subforums
was it better? absolutely not, there was just as much people fighting over words on a screen back then. the entire world will hardly ever coexist peacefully, solving that is the billion dollar question.
but it sure helped keep things a little more insulated against major crises