> Now it’s just Reddit-style comment sections of people picking at each other.

More specifically: comments with an opinion and no justification are modded up. "PHP is garbage" or "Person X is a terrible person" used to be considered noise. Not because they were right or wrong, but because "PHP is a language that can't keep a consistent function names and argument poisitoning in it's own standard library" or "Person X is a terrible person because their engineering milestones are frequently delayed".

Dan or whoever will throw out "everyone one every site always thinks the site's going downhill" but it is, really.