The idea that the internet used to be less "hateful" 20 years ago has to be from people who weren't online 20 years ago, or people lying about their own behavior 20 years ago. There were no women or black people on the internet back then, because if you didn't pretend to be white and male, there was a constant stream of abuse.

Every subject you talked about resulted in a discussion about who and what you were, and why it disqualified you from being in the conversation. If it wasn't just a direct insult. Twitter is nicer than the internet back then, and when you see a racial slur or rape threat, that's the old internet leaking in.

I was a phone phreak and BBSer in the late 80s and early 90s, and it was just as bad, if not worse. The nostalgia about a place without hate is the same as nostalgia for the segregated neighborhood you grew up in. "Everybody got along." Everybody got along because you belonged to a HOA with racial covenants, and your grandparents burned out half the old residents. The propaganda about a better time in the past, now coming from the nonprofit sector, is a device to make their new speech and behavior codes sound conservative rather than revolutionary.

What they've taken from us is unmediated, unsurveilled speech. And they've united with the traditional forces of suppression in order to make sure that people can't speak directly to each other without being corrected, whether it's about their opinions about black people, or their opinions about the CIA, or their opinions about Pfizer, or their opinions about UnitedHealth. They're buttbuttinating the world.

Any other nostalgia for the old internet should be because it was smarter. But the fact that it's dumber is part of a process: the world has become more literate since the internet started. People who wouldn't normally write now write. They're also reading. The political fulmination of the current age is due to this, and is going to result in a better educated electorate in general. The reason they hate government is because they've become more informed about it, not less.

Nostalgia about your own corner of the internet? Sorry, Eternal September, Evaporative Cooling (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1777665). If you want to create a community that appeals to you, pay for it and gatekeep. If you want to keep a good community together, use classic democratic means (start with Robert's Rules and figure out where you want to go from there), have a dues paying membership, and gatekeep. The open internet is the enemy of corporations, moral police, and governments. They just want you to say good things about products, cultural or otherwise, all day and all night. They want you to produce for free and pay to consume. That's it.