My entire career on tech is thanks to my comments at the bottom of TechCrunch articles in the early 2010s (and I did hang out with the TechCrunch writers once I moved to SF). That was more a time where trolling in comment sections on blogs was more understood to be in good fun.

Comment culture died starting in 2016, as the internet as a whole became more polarized and making maliciously edgy is both commonplace and rewarded. Hacker News is an outlier in that aspect as it avoided that fate.

There are lots of smaller spaces that have vibrant cultures! There are subreddits that are worth paying attention to, and Facebook groups, and subject-specific PHPBB's.

What hasn't worked out is the no-holds-barred mega-spaces.

2016 is around the time when troll farms and nation states really kicked into high gear their disinformation and FUD campaigns with the express goal of deconstructing unity and common value systems.

It seemed to have worked quite well.