My favorite example goes back to the days of Quake(World). It was a surprisingly bright and sunny place. You'd pop on to a few community run servers to say "hi". Maybe play a few rounds of whatever mod you were into.
When bad actors showed up, they were punted. If they came back they were literally gunned down (whoever had admin access would put them on a team by themselves and everyone would finish them off). As a result of having access to self-policing the number of bad actors were generally low in a healthy community.
As time wore on the goal became customer retention. I can remember publishers selling this as "curated team building" around the time the first X-Box came out. It all went downhill from there. You weren't a member of a community anymore, you were a license holder and a subscriber, and soon the very concept of community largely dissolved.
A likely "better" internet isn't a world of several thousand descending on a single comment thread. It's a hundred at most aimed at the goal of useful interaction. The internet as it stands doesn't need more pan-continental megalopolises, it needs neighborhoods of people seeking common interaction.