Comment by Aurornis

I remember a thread a while ago where someone was claiming that Hacker News comments were much more civilized and on topic in the early days.

So someone pulled up Wayback Machine archives of random dates for HN pages. The comments were full of garbage, flame wars, confidently incorrect statements, off topic rants, and all the other things that people complain about today.

It was the same thing, maybe even slightly worse, just in a different era

I think the people who imagine that social media is worse today either didn’t participate in much online socialization years ago or have blocked out the bad parts from their memory.