It was different in several ways, one was far fewer people enforcing norms or doing marketing in those forums, far less moderation and tone policing, and far more tolerance (even rejoicing) into getting into deep technical argumentation and "well, actually" debate. No "influencing" and mere marketable "content" creation either.

Not to mention for a good while, FOSS was a big nerd holy grail (informing many discussions and forums, away from corporate solutions shilling and careerism), and a big goal of every tech nerd (unlike after about 2010).

Also nerd culture was by nerds, for nerds, not dilluted and "championed" by every mainstream hipster.

Remember when even Comicon was something mostly nerds, the kind "normie" people used to point and laugh at, went, and sci-fi/superhero movies excited the same small demographic niche?

> far less moderation and tone policing

This feels like maybe even the majority of the problem.

In general corporate social media favors memetic content and disfavors "inconvenient" content. Inconvenient meaning things that cause non-trivial numbers of users to mash the thumbs down or "report content" button. The premise of that is supposed to be that people are reporting spam and trolling etc.

The problem naturally being that people will also use the platform's "make it go away" mechanism to penalize anyone who tells them things they don't want to hear. And then the sort of people who insist on telling the technical truth even when it's inconsistent with the political lie tend to get shadow banned into irrelevance, which leaves what in everyone's feed instead?