In the past, it must have been 2003-2008, I was sharing self-drawn comics and ideas how to improve on them with fellow artists, actually meeting them in real life sometimes at conventions. I was also active in a gaming forum plainly for discussing the lore and surrounding theories.
These communities had a real sense of community and weren't social just in name. I knew every day at 5pm a lot of new posts and threads would be starting to appear, from my forum friends and arch enemies alike.
Nowadays, these places are dead as people have moved on to large platforms long ago. This already killed all feeling of community but at least I had some nice comment exchanges and the absolute amount of content increased.
Then it got even worse. I cannot read a single post that isn't surrounded by trolling, astroturfing, psyops, advertisements and affiliate links or bot responses. Good example: as a German, it is very hard to ever discuss the topic of nuclear fission phase-out in a constructive and respectful manner. Especially on reddit, the canned and templated responses are really suspicious.
But it doesn't matter anymore, if it is discussions or content. Communities will be flooded and killed by bots while content is flooded and killed by generated SEO garbage (a lot of threads on HN about this as well). Unless you're explicitly browsing some decent sites like Wikipedia the Internet is already FUBAR compared to pre-2010 or so.
The Bot-trocity is happening and making it worse with every evolution of ChatGPT and so on. We cannot trust images or text anymore. Everything is a dream and nothing is real.
All this discussion and a sibling thread made me realise that only us, the Millennials that have grown halfway before and after the Internet explosion, know better than anyone else what this place was for a few golden years, and what we lost. It's on us and only us to do something about it.