The toxic pit in this case is the transformation that occurred "ecologically" to the way contributors and agents on the web interact with eachother. This was strongly affected by the major centers of gravity in the 2010s like google and facebook. Unfortunately, their stewardship was focused around leveraging centralization towards profit rather than towards making the web a better place for users. And so here we are today.

FTR, I think youtube is one (among a few) exceptions to this overall trend from google.