My take is that a lack of opportunity / class stratification / societal mobility plays into this. It's essentially the same reason people play the lottery. When you're stuck in a seemingly intractable situation, you need the world to suddenly change around you. Maybe you win Powerball, or maybe you decide to just burn everything down out of desperation. Social media just amplifies those thoughts.

Don't you mean zero-sum? Cynicism often defaults to transactionalism and implying that people are motivated by nothing else and deconstructing any evidence to the contrary as if dopamine is never mutually released. Transactionalism is frequently and illogically zero-sum play that takes place within infinite games.

1: https://theonion.com/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation...

It was a very narrow window of history, if at all where this wasn’t true. Like I spent most of my teen years at people’s houses or backyard or parks and it was fuckin great. All my best memories were spent doing nothing with people I liked. Even my clubbing years while fun were relatively forgettable compared to the mischief of running around with my teen friends not spending money.

Smoking has gotten more expensive though, maybe we should subsidize cigarettes for young men.

Money is not and issue here. I was a middle class youth in a developing country, and internet was expensive. People who didn't have the means simply didn't go online. Contrast with the present, even lower income people have smartphone with free carrier provided Facebook. Radicalization is much easier now.

That's capitalism and its effects for you, sir.

Exactly as capitalism always intended. We are finally reaching the dream of the system, arent we happy all!?

They might pull in more money with sponsorships but they only got there because the algorithm put them at the top where the money is.

Don’t believe me? Look up the woman who shot up google HQ when they demonetized her channel.

It's a bit of false nostalgia but also it was the era of early adopters. Their concentrations in new spaces always make them better because their motivations are perpetually directed outward from where we are as a civilization. They frequently have to move on as the space they create for themselves becomes drowned out. HN has attempted to remain relatively secluded, and that has been effective up to a point.

The real dilemma there is that the early adopters who make things good need isolation while the "go with the flow" crowd needs a way to support early adopters without themselves getting in the way. Just from a basic computer science perspective, the early adopters need ways to create efficient back-pressure on later adopters so that early adopters can exist without permanently being chased and drowned out by later adopters.

The internet created something analogous to a 2D plain-world where nothing was out of reach for anyone. Without creating some 3D structure, some stratification so that people who get out of the plain can more directly communicate at longer distance, the noise is so inefficient that only those who don't value their time or those who profit off of the poor connectivity will participate.

Baking fresh cinnamon toast comes to mind. Some will accuse me of becoming distracted, but it used to be more common to speak on every open-access forum as if talking to another person in the room. We still do on different formats like IRC or less serious threads of less serious places, but it is diminished as internet culture emerged. Internet culture sometimes expects you to treat every conversation as a conversation with a forum full of angry combatants. A little bit of structure would re-humanize that culture by putting us back into our more human-sized enclaves where there is no need to gatekeep and no audience to perform to.