Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the ads and the bot farms. And the weaponisation for political ends. There are corners of the Internet where people meet on smaller forums to talk about subjects of mutual interest, and those remain functional and interesting, sometimes even polite.
It seems like paid communities might do a little better than the rest by filtering out bots and people who would rather not torch cash and get banned repeatedly each time they misbehave.
And people that are not in the "cool kids" group are economically disadvantaged because, even if their contributions are valued, they get on the offside with the powers that be?
When you have people with power over someone else, power to ban, power to economically injure, you end up, almost without fail, with sycophantic groupings.
People only praise those with the power, and anyone foolish enough to disagree, no matter how accurate, are punished.